Comment 22 for bug 628087

I understand Mark's solution of adding the MAC address (or something) on as a suffix to the machine name to prevent name collisions, but I think that it would add yet more clutter to the machine name. As it stands now, a long username with "-desktop" is already too much text when using the command line (e.g. "reallylongusername@reallylongusername-desktop:~$"); for screen with low screen real estate or for long path names the default command line naming is a bit much.

I agree with Ward that the old behavior of auto populating the machine name was a good idea (though I'm not sure, as Vish points out, that the username-desktop convention is the right one). I don't think machine name is that complicated to most people and, while I'm perfectly willing to google the procedure Evan proposed, few, I'd bet, would be willing to do that (or would even know to do it).