Henning Follmann [2019-12-27T16:17:04-05] wrote:
> Somehow my parents are still messing up their computer.
> So is there a way to lock down firefox user interface? I want only
> bookmarks visible and editable (add). But no accidental drags or
> clicks to change the user interface. Is that possible?
I don't know. With Firefox I would start by studying if the internal
configuration options in about:config page can be edited with external
tool. Such tool could set some values to the desired value when user's
session starts.
> Any advice on how to lock the Desktop Environment?
I have maintained a school computer system which had some computers with
generic user account for all users. In those computers I wanted to
restore specific default settings every time the computer is booted (or
rather, when the user desktop session starts). As the root user I made a
tar package of certain normal user's configuration files and wrote a
script in /etc/X11/Xsessions.d directory. The script would unpack the
tar file and do some other things to get the default settings.
The generic problem is that the files that keep program's configuration
are not always part of program's public configuration interface. The
file names can change, the file format can change etc. Perhaps a good
advice is that configuration should be edited only through documented
configuration interface. Sometimes configuration is in a documented text
file format. Sometimes there is a command-line tool to change
configuration (git config, notmuch config, ${program}ctl etc.).
Sometimes nothing is documented and user should only open the main
application.
You can probably restore some configuration quite easily but if you
build too complex and fragile system it will cause more maintenance work
than the original problem of restoring settings manually from time to
time.
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