On Thu, Mar 08, 2007 at 09:02:45AM -0400, Ben Armstrong wrote: > You know, after all this talk about roles, I'm having doubts as to > whether it's really important or not. Looking at my own family's use > of Debian we've lived quite well without them. What in fact happens is > not a clear transition from one role to the next. Instead, as the kids > have grown up we've gradually tweaked each person's account to suit > their changing tastes. obviously, this is a preference issue. And we're all just throwing around ideas which is good. I, upon reflection, like the idea of continuing to build the wiki with different configurations and making it easy for people to pick and choose different configs from there. Instead of doing things for users, show them how to do things for themselves (like my gcompris session). > > I think it would be best to set aside the "roles" idea for now and > instead focus on a single desktop arrangement that is highly usable by > everyone from preschoolers up through adults as a reasonable "starting > point" for making customizations to suit the tastes/needs of people of > all ages. That is, aim for the "lowest common denominator". I think you're right. > > We have talked about using a highly constrained "kidproof" desktop > (e.g. making gcompris your "shell") for the very young and recorded > some ideas about that on http://wiki.debian.org/DebianJrSpecialSession > which I think is an excellent idea. But that's pretty specialized. absolutely, but I think it also represents a good way to do things -- that is, proide the tools for parents to set things up easily for their kids, as they like it. For example, the link above (even though I wrote it) doesn't really work for me as all my kids are already too old for it (sob!). I am working on a set-up for my 5 yr old right now (hopefully I'll get it done in time) that uses rox-filer as the desktop with desktop launchers for different things she likes to do. She doesn't get menus, just big buttons on her desktop. i'll post it up when I get it together. > > I think our default desktop should be simple, functional for those who > are a little older (maybe age 4 or so) but not styled in such a way > that older kids can't get at what they want, and not embarrassingly > "preschool" themed. yes. A
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