There are two objections against using only two checkbuttons: At first the user doesn't know what is shown if none is checked. Secondly multiverse is quite hard to discover since there is no visual hint in the user interface that enabling both checkbuttons has got a synergy effect.
I also think that we should focus on gnome-app-install only. Adding a "licence filter" to synaptic would affect the whole workflow. So I don't think that it is worth the effort. Furthermore synapitc is (should be) used by advanced users only. So they hopefully know what to do, if they don't want to see proprietary apps. Additionally the third party apps don't appear in synaptic at all. The current gnome-app-install design makes use of a combobox instead of the checkbuttons. The "show" combobox gives the user an information about which applications are currently shown. Furthermore I think that we only have got three different user bases: the ones who really depend on the support, the freedom lovers and at least the perhaps biggest group of users who only care about functionality and not about licence stuff. So the following options are provided by the combobox: Show only main applications Show only OpenSource applications Show all available applications As you can see, this way we could even avoid the term commercial/proprietary at all. At the moment there is still a "Show only third party applications" and "Show only non-free applications" option. But I would like to skip both of them to make the user interface cleaner. Finally I added some small emblems to the application description, so that the user can identify the nature of the package easily. -- proprietary != commercial https://launchpad.net/bugs/44925 -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
