Integrate Lock screen and Login screen functionality

[bastafidli]

Binary package hint: fast-user-switch-applet

With the new FUSA applet design, there is still one feature, which can be improved and that is the scenario what happens when user selects lock screen. Currently the screen goes blank and when mouse moves the user is presented with modal dialog with 4 buttons: Leave message, Switch User, Cancel, Unlock. This works just fine for the currently logged in user (User 1, just type password and hit Enter), but when a different user comes (User 2), the experience can be improved.

The User 2 has to decide which button to click, has to find and click Switch User button, then wait for the login screen is displayed, there he has to type or select user name and type password. If instead of the blank screen when user locks the screen the system displays the login screen, the User 2 doesn't have to be familiar with two different screens (Login & Lock), only with one (Login).

I would imagine the experience to work like this:
1. User 1 selects Lock screen from the FUSA menu
2. System displays the login screen.

a) If the system is configured to display user list (e.g. Human List theme), the User 1 will be selected and the password field will be displayed. If User 1 comes, he can just type the password and unlock the screen (the same user experience as before and the same user experience as if he is logged in or as if he accidentally clicked Switch User button). If User 2 comes, he can just click on his name in the list and type his password. In my opinion this is much better experience for User 2 since he is already familiar with picking name and typing password and saves him extra decision which one of the 4 buttons to click and waiting for switch to the login screen.

b) If the system is configured to do not display user list (e.g. Human theme), the system would show the password field for User 1 and if User 1 comes, he can just type the password and unlock the screen (the same user experience as before). The system should display that it is asking for password for User 1 (I think this is not done currently). If User 2 comes, he would see that the system is asking for password for User 1, he can just hit Esc to get back to the user name prompt and type his name. This is much better experience for User 2 because he doesn't have to decide between the 4 buttons and just hit the Esc button.

3. One caveat to this is that the Leave message functionality is not available on the Login screen and it would have to be integrated here. Of course this would be very nice functionality anyway, if one user can leave message for another user who is not even logged in and the message would be displayed next time that user logs in.

The FUSA package may not be the best place for this request, but since I do not know the propert package and the action is initialized from the new FUSA package, I am entering it here.

Thank you.

[Ted Gould (ted)]

We 100% agree. There are some issues in X right now that make it so that we can't do this smoothly for all users. But, we're hoping they get fixed in the next release.

[Gorka Navarrete (emrys)]

This is a great idea and it can improve the user experience quite a lot.

It is really not possible in the Karmic time frame?

[AM (macchi)]

The flow around login, logout, screenlock, userswitch, power off etc is very confusing for less-experienced users.
The flow has to be unified and simplified and also integrated with poweroff, suspend, and hibernate. Furthermore automatic logout is necessary when running multi-user and systems for professional applications.

With the present implementation users have to keep track of a lot of buttons, many different screens, and several states and conditions.
In Karmic this scenario got much worse since the login screen changed to a completely new format and some states lead to a completely white screen. (type Esc on the password field and you get a completely white screen)

We really would like to see a solution for these problems in order to be able to deploy Ubuntu on a small to medium business enterprise IT-environment.

[Phillip Susi (psusi)]

This package has been removed from Ubuntu. Closing all related bugs.