Fedora Core formalism

[Bill Campbell]

On Tue, Mar 13, 2007, Matthew Carpenter wrote:
>On Tuesday 13 March 2007 12:58, Leon Goldstein wrote:
>> Well, for one thing the Gnome printer setup tool is nicely done.
>
>Interesting.  That's one of the reasons I first fell in Love with KDE... they 
>too the commotion of ill-fated attempts at printer config tools, each distro 
>using their own home-baked method, and brought the functionality into KDE as 
>just another settings entry.

One of the major things KDE and GNOME do is fiddle ownership and
permissions of various devices so that the logged in user at the desktop
can address things like scanners without having to either open the devices
to the world or require the user to understand how the system works.  This
is one of the operations that contributes to long startup times with KDE.

While this is probably critical if one is going to have wide acceptance of
Linux on the desktop, it effectively turns a multi-user machine into a
single-user box for the logged in user.

On the other hand, there are probably other ways to accomplish this type of
access as OS X allows multiple desktop logins with their ``Fast User
Switching'' feature which permits multiple logins, although only one can
have the desktop at a time.  I haven't looked under the hood on OS X to see
how they manage to allow access to devices for different users.

Bill
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