Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 90153
Control panel and configuration options confusingly spread out
Last modified: 2007-04-18 12:53:27 EDT
From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/3.1; Linux) Description of problem: This is really a general UI design wish which affects all control panels and configuration tools, but I will put it here. Right now, configuration options are confusingly spread out in different menus and sections, divided into "tools", control panels, configuration options, etc. From the point of view of the average user, however, they do not care about the distinction between a "tool" and a "control panel". I would like to suggest that all configuration options and tools at the very least be centralized into a single menu, or at least accessible from one place. What adds to the confusion is the multiple different ways of configuring the same device. Red Hat allows you to look at, for example, the hard drive partitions but you cannot then launch a hard drive partition tool from there. Or you can configure the mouse driver but not configure the other mouse options --- that's a separate tool. I realize some of this comes from the fact that some configuration options are part of GNOME or KDE, but this doesn't explain why the configuration tools are spread out between different far-separated menus. Both Windows and the Mac provide a single control panel or "system preferences" launching pad from which other configuration options can be selected and/or configured. It seems to me that if we want Linux to succeed with ordinary users, we need to try at least to some extent to consolidate the control panel/configuration options. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always
There's a long term plan to work on this, but it's a multi-year iterative process, not a single task that could ever be fully closed as a bugzilla bug. So I'm going to close this bug, but yes the problem is known.