On Tue, Dec 31, 2013 at 1:58 PM, Lars E. Pettersson wrote:

Yes, regular users do spend time reading mail from root (after they have found out how /etc/aliases work), and they do look at /var/log/messages. Of course there are users that never have done either, but I would bet a majority has (this based on people I know and have met since I started with Linux mid 1990).

That would be a lousy bet really. You can be aligning yourself with more technical users. Regular uses probably have never heard of /etc/aliases at all and certainly don't read root mail at all.

How do you propose that we should make it simple for an ordinary user to get information from and about the system?

Depends on the information and the use cases. If you are a server user, you pick the MTA you want and you have to configure it anyway. For desktop users, there are several methods to get the information they typically care about ex: desktop notification that disk is failing and it is feasible to extend them to cover more things.

Rahul