[Libreoffice-bugs] [Bug 137265] New: Selectable User Profiles

[bugzilla-daemon at bugs.documentfoundation.org]

https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=137265

            Bug ID: 137265
           Summary: Selectable User Profiles
           Product: LibreOffice
           Version: unspecified
          Hardware: All
                OS: All
            Status: UNCONFIRMED
          Severity: normal
          Priority: medium
         Component: LibreOffice
          Assignee: libreoffice-bugs at lists.freedesktop.org
          Reporter: erkdemon at gmail.com

LibreOffice has an "Options: User Data" page where the user can fill in their
personal details (name, address, company, position), and have them saved into
documents (or into any exported PDFs) by default.

Unfortunately, it only supports one user! 

This doesn't reflect people's complicated modern lives. If you use a machine
for work, and have all documents automatically flagged as being official
company documents, and a family member uses LO on the machine for homework or a
poster, then their documents will again be flagged as official company
documents. 

If someone else wants to use your copy of LO, you have to remember to go into
the user page and manually blank everything out, and when they've finished, go
back and put everything back in place. 

Even if you're the only person who uses the machine, nowadays lots of people
have different online personas and roles (paid work, volunteering, hobbies,
family), and with the CVID-19 pandemic, we now have (millions?) of people
finding themselves unexpectedly working from home, and maybe half those people
achieving this using their own personal electronic devices. We need a simple
way to allow someone to distinguish whether they are using LO to edit a
document in the role of ObamaPOTUS, or TrekFan99, or ProudDad1961.

We need LO to be able to cope with multiple profiles, and to be able to show
some sort of obvious user-interface button or dropdown box that displays at a
glance which profile an instance of an LO program is currently working in (to
avoid awful, potentially job-losing mistakes), and to allow us to quickly click
on that UI element to switch to a different user. 

[*] Once LO has multiple profiles, some users may find profiles a useful way to
switch between blocks of default settings for other purposes. If they are
multilingual, they may have one profile with default English dictionaries and
another for German defaults. 

[*] For home workers, it /might/ also be useful to include the option of having
(very basic) password protection for some profiles (e.g. work profile). But not
if it delays the implementation of the other features. 

[*] Different themes and customisation settings per user profile could give a
valuable visual "cue" to indicate a window's current user. Someone may prefer
to work on "Work" documents with a muted "dark" colour-scheme, but edit
"family" documents for their kids using larger default fonts and a more
brightly coloured pastel user-interface.  

[*] It would also be useful for LO to remember separate "Recent Documents"
lists for each profile, so if I open Writer and switch it to "Work" mode, I
only see the list of documents recently saved using the "Work" user profile. 

Some other programs already have multi-user support: for instance the Firefox
"About:Profiles" page lets me launch different browser windows for different
purposes (Work, Project Research and  and Leisure), and have them open at the
same time, each with different settings, colour schemes and browser histories. 


I think implementing multi-user support might be a nice COVID-related gesture,
to let TDF tell people who are now having to work from home that other people
understand their new problems, and are working to try to make things a little
better for them.

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