[vbox-dev] [PATCH] VDE native support for VirtualBox v0.1

[Klaus Espenlaub]

Hi Alexey,

Alexey Eremenko wrote:
> Actually I would like to see it in GUI...
> Having one more entry does not make the GUI _that_ heavy. This is
> because the new VDE entry is not intrusive to the casual user
> workflow.

I disagree. Having entries which 98% of the user base will never use and 
probably even more will never understand is bad UI design. If we'd 
squeeze everything into the GUI "just because it's not _that_ heavy" 
we'd end up being as unusable as the qemu GUI wrappers.

We have lots of other features which are VBoxManage only (e.g. the 
medium modes), as they'd just make the GUI harder to understand for the 
vast majority of our users. Having everything in the GUI mainly 
increases the possibilities of misconfiguring something by our average 
user, which (somewhat to my surprise) has quite limited understanding of 
how a PC works or how networks are configured properly.

> If you want to make network choices more clear, you can can change
> text "Attached to: NAT" to "Attached to: NAT (default)".

Indicating that something is default doesn't really help the user 
understand what it does.

> As for the GUI in general, the new storage design is a bit too complex
> (compared to what we had in 3.0.x), so this is the place to start
> cleaning up the GUI, plus make GUI accessible.

Repeating the criticism doesn't help us in any way. It doesn't give us 
any more manpower.

> See:
> Feature-request: New Storage GUI: VM/Storage Settings, Wish #5811
> Feature-request: New Storage GUI: The CD-ROM menu in VM, Wish #5813

Klaus