I wanted to disable the user list that shows on the GDM3 greeter. You know, where you can point and click on a username and then enter the password. I don't find this very secure, since knowing the username is half the battle for someone breaking into your computer. And Jesus F-ing Christ was it hard to disable! Hey, Gnome devs, please dear God, start working on some better system settings tools. Stuff like this should be easier. I mean, I can put up with this whole one desktop environment to rule them all (PCs, tablets, and phones) mentality that seems to be infecting the industry right now. I'd even say that things like Unity and Gnome 3 are growing on me the more I use them. But even Microsoft still gives me a bunch of Control Panel applets with the Windows 8 Consumer Preview. There are almost no important settings which can be modified in Gnome 3 or Unity by using a point and click method. If I can do it by editing a file or running a command on a server, then great. But at the end of the day, I'd like to simply point and click on my desktop system.
Sorry for the rant. Back to the problem at hand...
At first I had tried things like adding a line to /etc/gdm3/greeter.gconf-defaults to disable the user list, as is documented all over the Internet to do so. This did not work.
I finally found my solution on the Linux Mint forum. The command I had to run was sudo gconftool-2 --direct --config-source
xml:readwrite:/etc/gconf/gconf.xml.mandatory --type Boolean --set
/apps/gdm/simple-greeter/disable_user_list True.
In my case it doesn't work I think because of a bug:
ReplyDeletehttp://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=685105
I just don't like the lack of customization available in Gnome 3. I mean, I shouldn't need to install a "tweak tool" just to adjust basic system settings, such as font sizes. Well, I think Debian installs the tweak tool by default, but still.
ReplyDeleteI'm actually running KDE 4.10.3 at the moment. I wanted to try it again, as someone who moved away from it after it went into the 4.x version. It's not as bad as I remember it, but I will probably end up on XFCE.
I also know several people who are using MATE, since it is basically a fork of Gnome 2.
Hopefully soon all the UI developers in the world will get over this stupid unified interface for all platforms crap. My phone is my phone, my tablet is my tablet, and my desktop computer is my desktop computer. I don't need them to all look and behave in the same way.