On Wed, Dec 06, 2017 at 05:13:56PM +0100, 'Tom Zander' via qubes-users wrote: > On Wednesday, 6 December 2017 16:08:28 CET Unman wrote: > > "useful, but wasnt any good" - do you mean buggy or poorly designed? > > What 2 features should be implemented/fixed? > > > > I confess I rarely use the Manager, so don't have a feel for what's wrong > > with it. > > To be clear, the main reason the old one is removed seems to be that it > would have had to be reimplemented due to the architecture changes in 4.0 >
Tom, this is simply not true. If you look at issue #2132 you will see that it was a deliberate design principle. It has nothing to do with the architecture changes and everything to do with simplifying the UX. I have to say that most of the users I have helped to work with Qubes (most unfamiliar to Linux and certainly unused to the command line), simply DO NOT USE the manager. The set up is such that with a custom menu they simply don't want (or need) to know about the implementation, and the Manager would be confusing. Of course some people like to have this sort of stuff, just as some people like to have conky configured with process lists etc, but it shouldn't be a necessary part of running Qubes. Nor should the Qubes UX be led by those people. > This is relevant to know because that means nobody actively thought > "It is not good enough, lets remove it". > The removal then, in my own opinion, means we have an opportunity to do > better. > > > To support the point of view of "useful but wasn't any good", let me explain > what I think such a tool should behave like. > > The first issue with the old tool, and also with some of the new tools, are > that you already have to know how things work in order to be able to use it. > For instance the terminology 'appvm', 'templatevm' etc are completely not > explained anywhere. You have to go to a website to learn what the mean. > > A clear success story of Qubes is its networking, abstracting the netVm is > done to add security without having any significant impact on usability. > Practically speaking, normal users can ignore the whole networking setup as > it "just works". > > This is the level of support that we want. And most tools are nowhere near > that just yet. > > Some examples of things that in 3.2 as well as in 4.0 are clearly in need of > a lot of love are; > > * Which VMs are in which state. If you start something and the netvm/ > firewall VM are auto-started, this is not at all clear to the user. If > something fails, it gets even worse. > > * Network communication between Qubes. Routing via the firewallVM. > > * Port forwarding. FirewallVM again. Neither of these are core tasks in Qubes, and I would expect that someone who wants to implement this should be capable of setting it up, and understand the risks in doing so. It's possible that this could be implemented into a separate network GUI but I see little advantage in including it in the manager. Frankly, it has enormous scope for subverting the benefits of Qubes and I see great danger in making it too easily available. > > * Media-management. Hard drives etc. It just barely works today. Not my experience. There are occasional issues, but generally this seems to work well. BUT basic users generally want little more than to load data from USBs/phones and to backup to disk, and for them the new (and old) tools seem to work fine. > > * Graphical configuration of multiple qubes. Even in 3.2 not being able to > open more than one config dialog at a time was silly. > > > This is just a short list based on my experiments over the last month or so. > I'm sure others can add wishlist items. > -- > Tom Zander > Blog: https://zander.github.io > Vlog: https://vimeo.com/channels/tomscryptochannel -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "qubes-users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/qubes-users/20171206182854.uacy4kvvtqubmbkk%40thirdeyesecurity.org. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
