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This is just a bug, not a design flaw, but it is symptomatic of a deep design flaw in Unix-derived systems: I have no idea how to fix the problem, and I’m unlikely to find the solution without help. All software has bugs, but if the system had been designed for usability from the ground up, I’d have a decent shot at being able to fix it myself. In a folder with a name like “Settings” there would be a file with a name like “Session Details” that I could put in the Trash before logging out and logging in again. And if that didn’t work, I could go to the Trash and restore the file to its previous location, and try something else. But in Ubuntu and other Linux-based systems, system folders and files have incomprehensible names like “.gconf” and “mkinitrd”, making learn-it-yourself maintenance unnecessarily difficult. That wouldn’t matter if Ubuntu never had any bugs, or if computer repair people offered their services immediately and for free, but neither of those are true.
Smart guy. He's quite right. It's a tremendously deep issue, though. In commercial enterprises, new development projects have code names, which then mature and undergo transformation by the marketing folks into something a mass-market consumer can swallow. With Free Software, everything remains a code name! Grr. I imagine commercial software houses also have a higher proportion of "finishing touches" people to "under the hood" people (or at least more coordination between the two camps) than the Open Source community.
So here's my open question - how do you implement a similar mechanism for mass-market packaging of mature software packages (built and maintained by enthusiasts) without the control structure of an enterprise? And without mutiny in the ranks of the developers.
Perhaps some sort of "abstraction layer" between the development community and the user community could be defined.
