No screen shield in login screen in F20

[Marcel Oliver]

Matthew Miller writes:
 > On Mon, Jan 13, 2014 at 01:52:40AM -0500, Bastien Nocera wrote:
 > > > The shield is something I have always considered to be pointless and
 > > > confusing to new users. I teach Linux at a local college and when we use
 > > > Fedora, I always have to explain the shield. For some reasons the shield is
 > > > confusing to them.
 > > You're not explaining it well then, because a lot of your students will
 > > already have seen similar screens on their mobile phones or tablets.
 > 
 > That's the theory, but if new users aren't getting it intuitively -- and
 > there is repeated, even if anecdotal, evidence that that's the case -- then
 > blaming them doesn't help *us*. Something clearly needs to change in the
 > design.

Some more anecdotal evindence: my wife, a nontechnical user accustomed
to using Windows at work, got rather desperate about the screen
shield, rebooting the machine whenever it appeared and accusing me of
breaking her computer...

Sure, it was a quick thing to sort out, but I fail to get the point of
it.

As for the comparison with mobile phones: my Android device has a
function that superficially looks like it, but it acts as an expanded
notification list with direct navigation to the application which
triggered the notification, so it has a function which is immediately
logical and useful.  For the Gnome equivalent, the usefulness (if any)
is not obvious from direct inspection.

Finally, the mouse movement necessary to remove the shield on the
login screen seems a bit unnatural for a mouse/trackpad motion, to me
it feels like a touchscreen type of thing.

 > > > For me its just utterly pointless. I have yet to get an explanation as to
 > > > why its there. It just adds another step in logging in to my machine.
 > > I suggest you look at the discussions on fedora-devel list about this
 > > same topic.
 > 
 > That will yield basically the same results -- people who were confused, or
 > saw other people confused, or don't see the point, occasionally answered by
 > statements that nothing will change.
 > 
 > So that doesn't seem to be very constructive. I think that's really
 > unfortunate -- this is clearly one of those points of user interface pain
 > that it would be to our benefit to address.

This all is a really minor point, of course, hardly worth attention,
if there was not the persistent issue of user interface changes
implemented seemingly in pursuit of a grand artistic mission, but with
very little thought of how the thing is actually going to be used by
the broader public.

--Marcel