Comment 283 for bug 332945

Stanislaw Pitucha: Yes, I have seen non tech-savvy users working with their computers. For five years, I worked in Internet cafés. And this year, we've started user testing of Ubuntu at Canonical. So I'm quite confident in saying that most people ignore the notification area altogether. (Ironically enough, this may be an issue for the new messaging menu, even though it's technically not in the notification area: those we've asked about it so far simply hadn't noticed it.) Like you, I have also seen that alert boxes suck, but they suck less than the alternative.

hurga: Bug reports are terrible for discussions like this one, for four reasons: (1) they're text-only; (2) bug trackers in general are (and Launchpad especially is) extremely biased towards highly technical people; (3) the list of subscribers to any given bug report is extremely biased towards those who think the current behavior (whatever it happens to be) is wrong; and (4) that concentration of opinion acts as an echo chamber, so that people work themselves into a lather and end up calling for spankings. Much of the same applies to the Ubuntu Forums, just not quite as strongly: for example, 88% of respondents to an Ubuntu Forums poll in January thought that Ubuntu should have a keyboard combo by default that would crash all your applications. Now, I am *not* saying that the bug tracker or the forums aren't useful; merely that the distribution of opinions expressed in them shouldn't drive human interface design for Ubuntu.

mac_v: As I explained in the very text you quoted, we are not "creating such security holes": that problem already exists, regardless of Update Manager. As for your food analogy, you are confusing perfect with better. We switched to Notify OSD, with the necessary Update Manager changes, even though it wasn't perfect, because it was already better than the alternative. You make a good point about critical non-security updates (e.g. fixes to graphic driver crashes) vs. security updates, and that's something I'll discuss with other Ubuntu developers as part of the AppCenter work. Perhaps we could have "critical" and "major" tiers of updates, instead of "security" and "non-security".