Developers: Give us sane and sensible default system and application settings

If ever this article has struck a sympathetic note, it certainly did with me. Working with KDE4 and openSUSE and the defaults at installation has cemented in my perspectives exactly what this writer is saying: the developer defaults are too often impractical and unusable in a serious workspace. They often dumb the software down, or if they don't, they include such "rambling effects" that the software becomes cumbersome and almost impossible to use effectively in daily work.

The author has shown precisely what I found with Dolphin and what I had to do in order to make it useful. I am the first to say that for my own personal use, Dolphin is superb....>>>>>BUT..........and it is a very, very BIG .......>>>>>BUT........the default settings at installation are bl.....(awful)....ooops.....sorry, I nearly used the great Australian adjective......Well, let's just say that the default settings are not sufficient to allow normal work to proceed.

So......my humble plea......Would developers please, PLEASE, use default settings that are the same that users are familiar with, and also which permit sensible and adequate usage of the software. Include the whizbang effects and variations by all means, but let the USERS decide which of them are appropriate.

Back in 2006, the local network of public libraries hired me as a system administrator to migrate everything to Linux. A good part of the job was finding sensible desktop configurations, since folks came either from a Windows XP or even from a Windows 98 background. That's where I started my "Slick Desktop" project, together with ex-Libranet developer Daniel de Kok. The project was *almost* fit for production use at the time, and I ended up using a highly modified CentOS 5.x desktop on all machines (which is actually still in use).

The "Slick Project" in itself is now finished, and I'm using it for nearly all my clients (except those who need some RHEL certification). Here it is:

http://www.microlinux.fr/slackware/

MLED (Microlinux Enterprise Desktop) is an Xfce-on-steroids desktop that JustWorks(tm), out of the box. By "just works", I mean of course you still have to do your homework as an admin. But on the user side, everything is preconfigured so users can immediately be productive. Open Office doesn't complete words, Firefox prints in the right format, multimedia applications are compiled against every possible codec under the sun, etc. Plus, it's a one-app-per-task approach, even with rewritten menus which are Joe-Sixpack-friendly.

Give it a spin if you like. Here's a step-by-step HOWTO.

http://www.microlinux.fr/slackware/MLED-14.0-32bit/README.tx...

Ridcully: I had exactly the opposite reaction. Commercial software, generally, isn't any better and developers change things around on a whim as well. (Think: Windows 8) The fact is that there is no magic set of default settings that everybody, or indeed a majority, will like. Most people I know customize to their taste, whether it's Windows, OS X or Linux.

As far as preconfiguring for end users or clients, again, one size doesn't fit all. What works for one client doesn't for another. You have to understand the business model and business needs.

For me the article came off as a whine-fest. Terrible developers didn't contact the author and do things to his taste.

Good point Caitlyn......my frustration came from actually hitting Dolphin and finding it useless for daily file managing work. No window for pasting in directory structure, menu bar, etc. etc. All you got was a screen of icons and no instructions as to what the heck you could do with it. It took literally hours of mucking around to finally work out how the darn thing could be configured so you actually COULD use it as a file manager with split screens, tree structures at the side, etc. etc.

Whine fest ? Perhaps, but for me, the article made some salient points. And yes, agree totally...people customise, but too often this lies at the foot of another problem.....where's the manual to tell you how to customise ?!?! Hence my article on LXer some time back telling you how to customise openSUSE.

And as always, on this aspect I agree with you 1000% - what appeals to one person is rejected utterly by another. The blank plasma desktop of KDE4 looks revolting to me and I instantly switch it to the folder view and return to the traditional menu style. But that's my "old fogey character" coming out. :-)