Oh, well... I think it's just a matter of time. Linux has just got the attention of the Workstation world... When? Yesterday? Or so... ;) Before that, it was by geeks for geeks.
About a global menu is a god thing, thanks for the idea, but Num Lock???
(why not make the kernel look in bios to see if Num Lock is default
on???)
Men, there's stuff I would never understand on Linux/Gnome/Xfree. Numlock is one of these. Back to the years of dos 3.0 I liked numlock off, because I was a young kid which was far more interested in simcity than anything else, but ignoring numlock state and making the change of this behavior SO damn difficult is, well, just stupid.
And the same (but the other way around...) can be said about Windows, for example. Why I don't have a decent command line interpreter. Why the installation media doesn't come with a _decent_ text editor, or a compiler, or a toolkit, or Python, or whatever.
The problem here is that the main audience of Linux has started to change. Or at least to get wider. And things need time to get done.
Apart from that, not always is _that_ easy to look for some setting in the BIOS... it's not that "standard". Maybe other OSs have a thousand of patches and "what-if" to deal with every BIOS out there. And every BIOS manufacturer is willing to give to the development team of those OSs all the help they need, under a non-disclosure agreement, of course, and that's something that GNU/Linux doesn't have.
So, it's a good idea to look at the bugs filed in Gnome and KDE. And if there is nothing related to "make Numlock on by default", lets file a new bug. And have all the students or whoever is complaining about it vote for that bug.
But above all, we need a little patience. I think GNU/Linux has made a tremendous step toward usability and "user-friendliness". Of course there's more to be made... but I think that's something GNU/Linux and the developers involved can be blamed about.
Just my 0.2 cents. And please, sorry for my English, just in case... ;)
-- Mariano.
