The highly anticipated mechanism which is used to bar Gnome users
from performing certain actions is on the way, and its name is Lockdown.
In a worldwide premiere we present you the very first tentative design :)
I was obviously joking with “worldwide premiere” but I was pretty
serious about the highly anticipated. While Lockdown seems to be a
product that targets in corporate environments, at the same time could
be an excellent parent control tool, that can protect your kids from
illegal actions or preserve them to access undesirable material.
There is no meaning to use a real case scenario because all of you
understand the risks that a share computer even inside your home
carries. Tech goodies are easy to get nowadays and many people have a
spare laptop somewhere in the their house that every member of the
family can use. In Gnome what we usually do is to creating different
accounts for different users.
By creating a new user account we have two options, Admin or Standard
User. Setting parent control tools on a Standard Account is something
that requires the knowledge to do it, but most importantly requires the
knowledge to think that we can do it.
What if in Gnome there was a third option.. A “Child Account” ? This
would immediate make us to think, “hmm I have a kid, so I should pick
that one” and right away an invisible mechanism would be activated and
taking care all these actions to verify that our kid will stay safe from
unwanted operations. That is pretty much what Lockdown is about, cool
huh ?
Of course Lockdown can serve many more scenarios by pre-configuring certain aspects of the Desktop
- single purpose kiosk (eg. museum or library information point)
- internet access point
- classroom
- enterprise workstation
- children computer
There will be a dconf profile for each account type and accounts
could be overridden by the user. Polkit will be the toolkit responsible
for granting access to applications and other options of every account
type except the admin.
Rūdolfs Mazurs the designer of Lockdown together with
Ryan Lortie and
AllanDay says:
“
If there is no appropriate account type or admin wants to review
existing one, selecting More… will open the profile editor (so far the
perceived editor is the pessulus next incarnation). The problem here is
that pessulus is inherently a specific configuration editor, but
the account type would suggest that this is a universal configuration
tool. Maybe calling it Lockdown profiles… instead of More… would lessen
the confusion.”
This App might not be so fancy and anticipated as the also upcoming Gnome Software Center but it is really useful, isn’t it?
