GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 679745
Automatic Login is confusing
Last modified: 2021-06-09 16:28:51 UTC
I honestly had no idea what this option did until I tested it. It's particularly unclear if there is only one user account. The feature basically asks the system to disregard another user account setting - that is, to require a password. That's never going to be easy to understand. I don't think this is a good feature. It's confusing and the value is minimal at best. Let's simply offer to secure the account with a password (or some other mechanism) or not, and not complicate it any further.
There's a related feature request here: bug 633015
So, would you argue for always going through the login screen ? Or never ? Or only stop on the login screen if there's more than one user ?
My question is answered in https://live.gnome.org/Design/SystemSettings/UserAccounts#Update_Proposal
This bug still stands, and is described in the design page linked by Matthias above.
To clarify: the "Automatic Login" option should be replaced with a "Password Login" switch. All user accounts should have a password; the switch will determine whether the password is required to access the account. More details can be found on the design page linked to above.
Created attachment 329690 [details] [review] user-accounts: use Password Login instead of Automatic Login password_login == !automatic_login https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/SystemSettings/UserAccounts https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=767065
As I mentioned in https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=767065#c36 Instead of this patch, I could: 1. keep the autologin* prefixes and just reverse the logic operators; 2. patch accountsservice before; Let me know if you find 1 or 2 to be better than the patch.
Review of attachment 329690 [details] [review]: Probably better to handle this in bug 767065.
Review of attachment 329690 [details] [review]: I see that this patch was removed from bug 767065. Please remove the reference to it in the commit message. Code looks fine to me, though the commit message is seriously glib.
Coming back to this, I wonder if a "screen lock" setting would be better than the "password login" setting that I described above. In this approach, every user would always have a password which would be set from the user accounts settings. The "screen lock" switch would live in the privacy settings. When switched off, the user wouldn't be asked for a password. Additionally, waking up the device would go straight to the session, without the screen shield being displayed. This would have the advantage of separating the user account properties from the privacy settings. The "screen lock" setting would more effectively address the case where the user wants quick, frictionless access to their session, and isn't concerned about privacy.
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