On Wednesday 19 December 2007 12:35, Stefan Hundhammer wrote:
Any URLs?
I'll find them again.
No luck: I threw away the paper printouts from older reviews that I had
collected. And searching Google for the relevant keywords returns a zillion
irrelevant results, but no useful ones.
Having a good installer becoming old news since a couple of years, all you'll
ever read about the installation is something along the lines of
http://www.madpenguin.org/cms/?m=show&id=6899
"Linux has gained so much ground over the past few years in regard to
installation that it's mind blowing. It really is. What once was immature and
cumbersome almost all the way across the board has been fine tuned to the
point where it's a non-issue for those trying to decide if they are ready to
try Linux for the first time. That seems to be a common question and/or
concern of most new users I've spoken to over the years... they always want
to know if I think they can install it by themselves or maybe they're just
concerned they won't understand the new terminology. No matter what the
worry, Novell/SUSE is on top of their game in this area. Gone are the days we
need to have intimate knowledge of the hardware that our software will be
installed onto. The major distros have led the way in this respect and it's
duly noted. Novell/SUSE isn't the only one of course, but they've helped pave
the road, there's no doubt."
http://www.dvd-guides.com/content/view/221/104/
"The installer is the one we know from the past SUSE versions. It offers
excellent hardware detection and easy wizards to setup any aspect of the
installation you will imagine. Beginners may find it too complicated at
start, especially when you compare it with the very simple installers others
distros offer, but there are instructions and help for about everything."
If there are any more comments about installation, it is because some piece of
hardware was not properly detected, but it's never about the installation
process or any gory details of it any more.
The days of detailed reviews of the installation process or any configuration
modules are gone. People take that for granted. On one side, this is
flattering for us (following the old Unix concept that "no news is good
news"), on the other hand this does not give us any new feedback.
We could dig back to reviews of older versions (8.x, 7.x), but I have doubts
if that would be considered relevant in this forum, so I won't spend any more
time on that.
So all that remains for me is to reiterate that there have been a number of
reviews in the past (printed in c't magazine or online reviews) that
explicitly mentioned that it's a good thing to have the online help visible
by default.
CU
--
Stefan Hundhammer