It's good, but it would prolly look nicer without the useless banner on the left.

i definitely agree, integration with kdm user selection would be great. enhancing kdesu is good idea but you have to keep in mind that most people use kdesu just to slam in root password and don't need fancy user selection and bloaty eyecandy, so any enhancement to kdesu should be optional. personaly i like the idea but would prefer some less obtrusive way to select users. say - classic kdesu dialog with password plus edit field for typing in username manually, with history/autocompletion. plus, optionaly, button which would pop up selection box with all possible names or toggle iconview. what do you think ?

This patch will make kdesu easier to use for beginners, but consider that in almost all cases the user wants to run the desired program as super user. Maybe preselection of the root user will help that. Another tip is, to keep the ability of manually editing/inserting the users name. This will avoid to switch to the mouse when one is used to work with the keyboard. Since you have designed a nice side graphic there is no need to remove it, but please don't let it get too huge, it looks oversized then. Another suggestion of mine for those who like eye candy ist the integration of the kdm login user graphics for user selection. This might bloat the code though. Please keep on doing what you planned.

One thing I'd like to request, as long is you're rewriting kdesu, is that you investigate including optional sudo support. Reading the bugzilla, it seems that the kdesu maintainers are either uninterested in providing this, or are interested but don't have the time/resources. I'd really like to be able to totally lock root logins and only use sudo, but currently I can't do that in KDE (Gnome, or at least Ubuntu, has successfully done this, so you might look at their stuff for how to go about it). If you can't get to this though, don't worry about it. It'd just be a nice feature, and probably an even better argument for replacing the old kdesu. Cheers.

I say keep the damn picture on the left. If it works AND it looks snazzy then that's great.

You have my vote. You should however think about adding an editfield to edit the command line or enter just a new one. We never use kdesu without a command line so having a way to edit it on the fly shouldn't be such a bad idea. Eventually an history of the last kdesu'ed action would get us closer from perfection... ;-) As for the image on the left, just make it switchable so the ones who don't like this feature can just switch it off. I think it's totally useless but it's also one of the things that makes this new kdesu so attractive.

Very good idea. Witch desktop theme you're using?

What is the "Ignore" button supposed to do? I don't think the picture on the left side fulfills any real purpose, the application name is shown in the title bar, so better remove it. Great idea anyway!

Not all users always have a group. These users would be invisible/unselectable with your screen. There should be a way of just typing the username in. Having to click around can be very annoying when you have a lot of users. The standard unix way of denoting users is user:group rather than user/group. Should there be a way of greying things out if the user isn't in wheel? Other than that, interesting.

To be coherent with the rest of KDE, I think the button order should be Run - Cancel, instead of Cancel - Run. Apart from it, I like the idea.

You should add possibility to choose the program to start as user. So one could do alt+f2, kdesu (or whatever you want to call it), choose program and user and run it..

user/group is not Unix like Syntax. user:group would be better. And I think the display of the users should be shown after clicking on an 'Expand' or 'Advanced' button and not by default.

I like your concept - in fact this is what I really would like to see in the next KDE release. The only suggestion - this should be made a separate app, not a patch/replacement for kdesu. When a script or application calls "kdesu foo", it expects that foo will be run as root (w/o asking which user to run as), but your app will ask "Run as who?". Keep up the good work - I can't wait to see this great app!