Vote for new Ubuntu Feature---Let's try it again --- and without getting all religious about it

[Peter Garrett]

On Thu, 11 Jan 2007 19:05:35 -0500
"Matthew Clarke" <mj3clark at gmail.com> wrote:

> Being new to linux in general, I'm not versed enough in the security
> details to know what is appropriate, but I do know that a polished GUI
> OS (that is trying to compete with other sophisticated GUI OS's)
> should have user-friendly intuitive tools to assist people that have
> gone about something the wrong way.  It is little details like this
> that can make an OS shine with new users and turn them into converts.

As I pointed out in another post, Mac OS-X handles this in exactly the
same manner as Ubuntu. As far as I know, there has not been an outcry
among Mac users about this,  and the general opinion seems to be that
OS-X is both "polished" and "sophisticated" ;)

The difference appears to be that the makers of
OS-X assume that users will not try to edit files for which they have no
write access. In fact, on that OS, many of these files are "hidden" by the
GUI and are only found by diving into a terminal.

Ubuntu does not hide these files ( and personally I would hope that Ubuntu
will  not hide them in future, as it just makes it harder for other people
to help when a tweak to such files is needed ).

As a *generalisation*, anything outside the user's $HOME directory is
likely to require sudo / root privileges to alter. In my opinion that is
as it should be. There has been quite a lot of discussion in this thread
as to why allowing an application to raise its privileges is not a good
idea, and since the system is not psychic, it cannot know your intentions
when you open such a file. Offering to give privileges each time a
non-writable file is opened would be ... unwise.

Peter