GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 609431
"(as superuser)" appended to titles of windows owned by root is not essential
Last modified: 2020-11-06 20:06:28 UTC
Bug first reported in launchpad > https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/metacity/+bug/519035 In Lucid, the string " (as superuser)" is appended to titles of windows owned by root. I understand that this may be a useful feature for technical users, but it is tech-speak and not useful for the average user. The only argument I can think of for adding this string is the following: 1. Users sometimes accidentally harm their system/data when they interact with windows running as root. 2. Adding "(as superuser)" to window titles will make users aware when windows are running as root. 3. Users understand the consequences of running a window as root and will modify their behavior to take extra care. --- 4. Users will not accidentally harm their system/data. I think premise 2 is false because users often do not read title bars and "superuser" is tech-speak (as is "root" or "administrator" or any similar string). I also think premise 3 is false because the class of users that will make catastrophic errors by interacting with windows as root is not a class of users that understands the consequences... This string should be removed because it is tech-speak and ineffectual.
See also this Metacity blog post: http://blogs.gnome.org/metacity/2010/02/08/as-superuser-considered-harmful/
I don't think that this solution can be helpful. I think metacity just should implement root notification in less intrusive way like painting window red. And to suppress it just add a command line argument.
For your information, after a discussion with cjwatson and seb128, we decided (at least temporally) to disable the feature for now in lucid. As Thomas pointed in the Metacity blog post, the situation is not quite good for traditional user (non technical one) and also the difference between metacity having this and compiz not having it make the situation unclear (even if it should be trivial to implement the same in compiz). (I basically distro-patch revert of http://git.gnome.org/browse/metacity/commit/?id=ab6aa5463ffdd5cfaf729eb1f5407be749ba1090 without the typo fixes ;)) Even if https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=605137 is good for making some kind of black list/white list, it doesn't covered the underlying problem. I'll be happy to work on that and speak about it in guadec (maybe another way, to warn the user and make it more obvious?).
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