YaST/Development/New Control Center

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Revision as of 12:36, 22 November 2007

Idea

In several bugreports and usability tests we see that for many users it is hard to find out what YaST module to use to solve their problem or to do the right configuration. The current control center is very crowded and not intuitive for a non-geek user.

To get out of these problems we started a group to think about other possibilities to show the YaST modules to the user. Please feel free to comment on these and discuss your ideas (even radical new ideas are highly welcomed) on our mailing lists.

First ideas

Only two pages

In order to display any module on two pages, some modules need to go. As funny as this sounds it is possible anyhow. For example, currently we have 4 modules dealing with repositories - these can be unified in one. Furthermore, any network related modules can be merged to one network module. Most users currently even look for firewall in the network tab and not in security. So why not moving this there as well. Grouping every thing up intelligently would save a lot modules without loosing functionality. Of course this means a lot of changes to the modules itself.

See some mock ups of our first idea that we (Thomas and Daniel) had. See as well the history as we changed it.

The miscellaneous section is just a collection of modules that we did not find a different/correct place for *smile*. This is just brainstorming anyhow.

Next step in the evolution

A column with related modules allows to find modules with similar functionality:

With some clean-up and nicer colors: