jjp2145-oldtimer wrote: ⤴Sun Mar 14, 2021 10:14 pm
That being said, why would you do such a thing? Just click where it says password and add a password when you create an account.
I believe that is absolutely the wrong question. What matters is that this is supposed to be one of the main user-friendly distros (and for the most part, it is) and yet a common admin utility like the tool to add a new user is set up so that the user of the tool can simply forget that they didn't enter a password for a new account, because they were not prompted to do so. How could there even be a legitimate reason for the tool to not have the password field right there when creating a new user account? It makes no sense. A tool like this needs to be built to guide any level of user into correctly creating a safe user account with a legitimate password.
Oh, and when you add the user? You don't even end up with the new user highlighted. So there is literally nothing to remind you to actually go in and set a password, until you click on the new user's name in the list and see that it says "No password set". And all those fields on the right side of the pane? They're buttons, but they don't look like buttons, so there's no way to know that until you hover the mouse cursor over them and notice that they get highlighted a bit. The mouse cursor doesn't even change to indicate that they are clickable, there's just the highlighting. There's no immediate visual indication that anything on the right side of the pane is even editable at all.
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- users_no_password_field.png (12.2 KiB) Viewed 1399 times
No password prompt before creating.
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After creating, new user not highlighted/selected.
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Now you finally see "No password set". But how many inexperienced users would actually notice?
The preference pane that does this same function in macOS makes you actively confirm that you
DON'T want to use a password for a new user account if you leave the password field empty, precisely because that is a security risk. I'm not sure if the latest versions of macOS will even still allow you to have a user account with no password, I'm still on Mojave. And every other user-add type of GUI tool in any operating system that I've ever seen in my entire life (there have been many) has always asked for a password for the new user. Always. So for this utility in Mint to fail to ask for the password before the new account is created is absolutely bizarre. I don't understand how either the Mint team or the community finds this tool acceptable. Does everyone using Mint just only have one user account on their machine?
jjp2145-oldtimer wrote: ⤴Sun Mar 14, 2021 10:14 pm
How many of your dozen accounts actually need to be in the sudo group? What do your dozen accounts need to be able to do? I don't think the average desktop distro is designed with a system administrator in mind.
That "dozen accounts" was just an example to emphasize how cumbersome the process is in this version of the utility. In macOS, again, if you want to add a new user, you choose Standard or Administrator, just as you do in this utility, then enter the full name, username and _
password_, verify the password, and you're done.
There is no messing about after that with adding the new user to the "correct" groups so that they won't have problems with audio, video or other things. What kind of new Linux user would even understand why such things would be necessary? Very few.
In short, I fully expected the Users and Groups application to create a new user with the exact same method that the main system installer used to create my initial user. Any other type of behavior makes very little sense. I did not expect to have to manually copy the collection of group selections from my main user to the new user, and I certainly did not expect to have to go through extra steps to make sure the new account actually had a password attached.
jjp2145-oldtimer wrote: ⤴Sun Mar 14, 2021 10:14 pm
I don't know why you have two Users and Groups and I don't know why Users and Groups is set up like it is.
That's probably down to the fact that I have Cinnamon, MATE, and Xfce all installed on the same system, installed through the official "mint-meta" packages. It doesn't actually cause any real problems, but it does cause a number of "duplicate" applications to show up that don't properly isolate themselves to only be seen in the other desktop environment. Like two nearly identical "Archive Manager" apps that are very hard to tell apart. And two file managers that want to pretend their name is "Files".
The problem is not so much that there are two of them, the real problem is that the "Cinnamon" version is the one that doesn't seem as smart or as fully featured as the other one. I presume the other might be the default GNOME application that the Cinnamon version was forked from at some point. But neither has an "About" dialog, so it's hard to know for sure.
The Cinnamon version unfortunately is the one that is missing the option to choose to encrypt the new user's home folder. And the other version actually does a bit better job trying to prompt you after the initial step to enter a password. But you can still cancel out of that, leaving the password blank, and it doesn't complain. But it will show the account as "disabled", and make you enter a password to enable it.
So the non-Cinnamon version of the app seems a little better designed, but that isn't the version most Cinnamon users will see in their menu. I find the state of the Cinnamon version of this tool to be... very unfortunate, and sure as heck not user-friendly for any kind of new Linux user.