Ridiculous settings screen showdown
by havoc
Here’s a new one from today:
"Please individually acknowledge each bug in our code"
And also a classic:
where's the settings for the settings for the settings?
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The Google one may be ridiculous, but I didn’t know it existed. Thanks! I have three google accounts and It’s a pain to deal with sometimes. I usually keep incognito windows open for them.
nvidia-settings is open source. Patches are welcome.
I apologize if you designed this screen or know whoever did. But face it, having settings for a settings dialog is just funny. Imagine someone who goes through their settings dialogs deciding which of them should have tooltips!
See? THAT is canonical retort to “it’s open source, submit a patch”!
Bravo!
Actually, I fail to see what is your problem with the google one.
The service still has some limitations and they want you to acknowledge them which is fine. Futhermore, it’s not a commonly used feature. It’s by far more simple than gconf.
Stop thinking users are retards, thanks.
How does “users are retards” come into it? Neither of these are showing “advanced” settings (despite what Google claims).
The nvidia dialog is showing _useless_ settings. I don’t think you need to be a genius to configure whether your settings dialogs have tooltips. You do, however, need to have some serious time on your hands. Most of the _other_ stuff in the nvidia settings dialog is pretty technical and advanced, in fact. This may be the easiest-to-understand page.
The google screen is giving you a choice between one bug (you can’t log in to both your personal and work email) and another list of bugs (which are listed with checkboxes). These bugs are all completely Google’s fault. But they want to minimize their support load or complaints or something, and think people won’t read (probably true), so they add checkboxes to try to make people read (which probably won’t work).
It’s making the user suffer for something that’s just a big, longstanding f-up bug in Google’s services. This page should be apologetic. Instead it’s “I acknowledge that Google is buggy and won’t dare to whine about it because I had to check boxes.” Hostile to all users. Nothing to do with user expertise.
In fact the Google setting is _not_ advanced. If your company uses Google Apps, you can be 100% uninterested in computers and not know GMail from your hiney, but you’re going to have to deal with this bug. Either get berated by this settings page for clicking “fix your site please” or use some awful workaround like running two browsers.
In short, you get a choice of bugs – plus a lecture – when they ought to just fix their bugs. Or at least sound apologetic about it.
If they just fixed it, that would be better for _all_ users of any technical level.
Sorry, actually, I was just really pissed off when I wrote this comment. My bad for the harsh final comment.
Still, I persist to think that the Google one is not that bothering.
Well, the point is that Google services were designed without consideration for use with multiple accounts.
Thus, Google has now to cope with technical limitations.
Despite that, they still offer a somewhat limited feature to people who need it and make sure that they acknowledge limitations.
So, yes, it’s buggy but I prefer that to no feature at all.
Preferring manageable buggy features before no features does all advanced user (my not so advanced gf would not agree), but tbh the sounding of that page is not “we know about this problems and we are working on it”, more like “you hit this? tough luck and do not come to us to complain since you checked this box”.