Features/ControlCenter

= Fedora Control Center =

Summary
Fedora should put all configuration programs in one program (in GNOME gnome-control-center, in KDE kcontrol/systemsettings).

Owner

 * JakubRusinek

Current status

 * Targeted release:
 * Last updated:
 * Percentage of completion: 1%

Detailed description
Keeping everything in one place makes configuration easier and makes time of setting search shorter.

My idea is to create control center for all applets, like SUSE folks did it, by making YaST . YaST's gui is not quite bad, but also not quite good. There are usability issues and/or GNOME HIG-compatibility issues, but the idea is important.

Making center for all administrative applets is very good - doesn't it make the GUI (eg. menu in desktop environments) cluttered by all the applets, but also makes easier to expose them, showing bigger icons and some descriptions.

Some work is done - gnome-control-center contains System group, but there's not way to run it with this group selected, or with hidden groups selector and hidden other groups.

Current situation
Fedora does provide system-* utilities, which are very lite, they're not confusing user... But they're become buggier and buggier from release to release. Esp. system-config-network - wants to save config everytime I click Quit, Deactivate or Activate.

Work done by others
YaST, which is open source since openSUSE 10.1 release or earlier is developed by many people. Thanks to them, it has now Qt interface, ncurses interface, and the newest: GTK interface.

Fedora provides only GTK-based GUI tools. Thats very bad. We shouldn't favorize one GUI toolkit/desktop environment. I know it's impossible to make all the same quality, but some work must be done also for others (here: other desktop environments).

Existing control centers availibility for Fedora
YaST can be download from SVN, but it relies on SuSEconfig scripts and other SUSE-only solutions.

Benefit to Fedora
More usability to users.

Scope

 * Modifying gnome-control-center and kcontrol/systemsettings
 * Modifying .desktop files of configuration tools tools
 * Modifying menus

Test plan

 * Write some patches for g-c-c and probably kcontrol/systemsettings
 * Modify .desktop files
 * Clear the system → preferences and system → administration menu and add "control center" instead of both of them

User experience
Users which have everything in one place are satisfied because they must not search for settings.

Dependencies

 * Writing patches
 * Modifying .desktop files
 * Clearing menus

Contingency plan
Nothing to do.