Misleading non-ASCII username error messages
(This screenshot is from a backport of the patch from !30 (merged) to 3.38 but the point stands.)
Imagine my name is João or Макси́м, and I am setting up my new account in Initial Setup. I try to choose the username joão
, and am told:
The username should only consist of lower case letters from a-z, digits, and the following characters: - _
in translation:
O nome de usuário deve consistir apenas em letras minúsculas de a-z, dígitos e os seguintes caracteres: - _
Or if I try максим
, I am told:
The username must start with a lower case letter from a-z.
In fact this message is (reasonably, but wrongly) translated into Russian as:
Имя пользователя должно начинаться со строчной буквы от а до я.
(а
and я
are the first and last letters of the Cyrillic alphabet.)
I am a monolingual Englishman but I imagine that if my first language were Portuguese, I would consider ã
to be a lower-case letter; and if my first language were Russian, I would consider м
to be a lower-case letter.
In Endless OS, we used to do the following:
- Add the literal username
user
as the last option in the list of usernames generated from the full name - Remove the ability to choose a username – just use the first of the generated options
We reverted this patch but I kind of regret it, even though I like being able to choose wjt
as my username.
You could point to the Russian translation simply being inaccurate but I wonder, can we do better here? If the message were accurately translated, would it be comprehensible to normal humans? Can we just not prompt for a username?
The unimplemented, modernized mockups at https://gitlab.gnome.org/Teams/Design/os-mockups/-/blob/master/initial-setup/initial-setup.png still have essentially the same flow for this page.