On Wed, May 18, 2016 at 8:13 PM Joel Roth <joelz@???> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Having handled many of the issues relating to init system
> to the point of being able to release Devuan jessie beta,
> I wonder if Devuan community is ready to support action on
> other scourges of the linux on personal computer ecosystem.
>
> I am thinking specifically of three key mapping bugaboos:
>
> 1) CAPSLOCK key under console and X, should be mapped to Control
>

Capslock and control may be on dumb places on most modern keyboards, but
above almost everything else, computers should do what the user expects.
The key has caps lock printed on it, it should be a caps lock key unless
the user takes action of their own accord to change that.


>
> 2) Terminate X via Ctrl-Alt-Backspace
>

>    Seems like an easy, useful, historic way to kill a malfunctioning X.

>

Strongly agree here. This was a useful function, and the decision to
disable this by default was shortsighted. There were security arguments for
disabling it - but for the most part, those arguments were about edge cases
like kiosks and shared workstations.


>
> 3) Disable Print key
>

>    All my uses have been unintentional. Does anyone use it deliberately

>

I personally have it set to launch a screenshot tool and have found that to
be a common configuration in a lot of desktop environments.

>
> My other wishlist items are:
>
> 4) No display manager by default
>

>    I think the community shouldn't coocoon naive users from
>    the console. The passing familiarity with the terminal
>    that comes with Learning to type username, password, startx
>    and Ctrl-Alt-Backspace (to terminate X) will help the user
>    if and when they ever have trouble with X.

>

I think this is a battle that has been already lost, and for good reason.
If someone's installing on a desktop, they want to use it as a desktop
system. That means a GUI and a graphical login, even if the purpose of that
GUI is just to arrange more terminal windows onto their screen. We have a
better chance of easing people into using command line interfaces than we
do of forcing them into them these days, because that environment is
totally foreign to most people.

That's not to say we should ignore the console, but these days there's a
huge association between the console and Things Going Horribly Wrong, and
we're well past the point of changing that attitude.

In a server environment that's a different story - there's an expectation
that if you are using Linux as a server platform, you know what you are
doing, don't need GUIs, and are going to manage the system via ssh anyway.


On the subject of people that get thrown into the console for the first
time when something breaks, there's a lot of room to improve here. What I'd
like to see is something reasonably consistent with the curses installer
that provides a limited degree of handholding. Rather than throw people
into this automatically, it should be advertised in the default MOTD, and
it should have fallback to a simple set of prompts in case someone's using
a broken terminal. The audiences for this are both complete newcomers, who
know absolutely nothing beyond what little the /etc/issue and /etc/motd are
telling them, as well as the experienced sysadmin who finds themselves on a
system where basic facilities like networking are down, and needs to
restore those easily.

- Network configuration wizard to temporarily set up Internet access,
including bringing up a connection to a WPA2 wireless network, or
autoconfiguring a network interface via DHCP.
- Disk mounting wizard to easily and temporarily mount thumb drives.
- Diagnostic wizard to view hardware details, diagnostics, and logs and to
copy to a mounted thumb drive to look at from another, more functioning
system
- Access to a friendly package manager that automatically discovers
packages on a mounted thumb drive. (this is for users that end up in this
position because of needing packages to make the network work)
- Tools to troubleshoot the display manager.
- Backrup & Restore utilities
- Easy access to tutorials and documentation.on the local system, and
internet.
- Easy access to appropriate new-user IRC channels.
- A split screen environment, where documentation can be easily browsed on
half the screen, and a terminal is available on the other half.