I absolutely appreciate the spirit of the suggestion- Making things more
clear to the user is usually a good idea, but this suggestion doesn't
help users as much as it seems to.
While I agree that it does make things a bit clearer, it only does so to
a certain sub-section of users-
Those users who know to look for things that start up in that
folder, but *don't* know to look in services.
I'm not sure that this class of users is very large. I suspect that most
users would either not know where to look, and thus use the "Remove
Freenet from Startup" shortcut that's been discussed, or they'd look at
services First, and then after not-finding it, check the startup folder
in the Start menu.
Further- Freenet is the type of application I install on multiple
servers. These machines don't necessarily EVER get logged into, and I
suspect this is somewhat common behavior. Since Freenet does slow the
machine down, running on an auxiliary machine is a nice feature, but the
start-menu version damages this behavior.
Further, on multi-user machine, an installed service runs during all of
the user's sessions. This means much greater uptime for the node, which
means better performance for each of the users on it.
Finally, Freenet *does* take a bit of time to startup.. It's a lot more
user-friendly to have this time as early as possible.
When the machine is booting, I don't care if it takes an extra few
seconds to start up; I'm not using it yet.
But once the GUI appears, I expect things to be snappy, I don't want to
then wait while Freenet starts. Starting it earlier in the chain is a
net-win.
-CPD
Matthew Toseland wrote:
> Zero3 is very keen that we should run from the start menu from the installing
> user, rather than installing a service. This has a number of advantages:
> - It will be possible to kill Freenet from Task Manager. Not being able to
> kill Freenet from Task Manager likely alienates a lot of users IMHO.
> - We would not need to provide a script to disable autostart: advanced users
> would just move it away from the start menu, and non-advanced users would
> just uninstall it (as they do now).
> - Fewer permissions problems, no dedicated Freenet user.
> - WHEN we have a tray icon, we can start it at the same time.
>
> There are however some disadvantages:
> - Marginally less uptime if there is a login screen and the user doesn't log
> in immediately. This may be disproportionately significant however in terms
> of performance in some cases: IF the user starts using Freenet immediately
> after logging in, the extra few seconds would have been rather helpful.
> - The user actually needs to log in. We can't just tell them to keep their
> computers on 24x7 to run Freenet if it doesn't start until they log in. This
> could perhaps be significant.
> - Less uptime when other users are using the computer.
>
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