Hello Knut and Erik,

On Aug 20, 2011, at 9:01 AM, Erik Richard Sørensen wrote:

> Hei Knut
> 
> Knut S. Vikør wrote:
>> I am holding out installing Lion as long as possible, because of
>> non-upgraded applications. Also, I am still master of my own Mac both
>> at home and at work. But the IT department at our campus are
>> threatening to install "administered systems" on office Macs, like
>> they have on Windows side, where we employees will not have admin
>> privileges and will only have access to our separate user accounts
>> (and our local Macs will be run from a central server, like Win.
>> Apparently this is possible). Any changes that requires admin
>> privileges can only be done by the IT staff. I have warned all colleagues to resist this, and will try to hold
>> off (happily they do not yet have enough staff to make this happen),
>> but have earlier at least believed that as Plan B, I could still do
>> quite a lot within my user account: Add any application that did not
>> ask for admin password, upgrade them, add fonts to the User Account
>> fonts folder, add keyboard layouts to the Library folder (which
>> includes all so much more than pref files), and so on. However, if
>> it is true that all of this is now centralized to the roots Library
>> and outside the user account, then I would not be able to do any of
>> these things, you will need access to the root Library / have an
>> admin account to add any font or application, including using Mac
>> App Store (which only communicates with the Root Applications folder).
>> Is this really so? One more reason to lock the doors to the IT
>> department, if that is the case.
> 
> Yes, so I do understand this new ridiculous way of building the main system parts. - And what worse is, - you won't even be able to add a font into your own user folder if you should happen to use a fonts manager app like Fontexplorer X, Fontexplorer Pro or Fusion, since the font library itself is placed in the main user library, which will need admin privelleges.

As explained before, the user's Library folder does exist under Lion, although it is by default invisible. You can make it visible by different ways that people described earlier, and manipulate files/folders in it. So of course, you can install fonts, or other things, in it, to be used only by you.

And you can install your applications in your user account folder, in ~/Applications folder that you will create. But it is true that many applications require the admin password for the installation.

Anyway, personal computers are made for *personal* use; IMHO, all these "users" systems were introduced just because personal computers needed the robustness of workstations, but in practice, they are without usefulness, and rather ridiculous...

Best regard,

Nobumi Iyanaga
Tokyo,
Japan