Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-factory (904 mails)

[Bryen <suseROCKS@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 2008-04-10 at 20:19 -0500, Federico Mena Quintero wrote:
> On Thu, 2008-04-10 at 23:46 +0200, Pascal Bleser wrote:
>
> > I'm just absolutely certain of one thing: it's stupid to have political
> > aspects (as it happened the previous time this question was raised, at
> > least IMHO) being the reason to decide for one or the other. It must be
> > considered from an honest point of view for the good of the end-users
> > installing openSUSE.
>
> For the installer, your distinction between "newbie users" and "people
> already experienced with Linux" is the correct one, I think.
>
> To make things easier, I think we can discard "experienced users" easily
> by acknowledging that *they* already have a preference, and while no
> ordering of the GNOME/KDE3/KDE4 options will make everyone happy, *they*
> (the experienced users) will know which option to pick.
>
> Now let's move to the more interesting problem of "newbie users".
>
> Linux newbies have no clue what "KDE4", "KDE3", or "GNOME" mean.
> As Benji Weber explained in detail in a recent blog post, the installer
> doesn't help them to make a choice:  all it has is those arcane names,
> and a politically correct description which goes something like
>
>       GNOME:
>       A friendly desktop environment that uses gfilemanager,
>       gwebbrowser, and goffice-suite.
>
>       KDE:
>       A friendly desktop environment that uses kfilemananger,
>       kwebbrowser, and koffice-suite.
>
> This provides *zero* information to newbie users about the choice they
> are going to make.
>
> What if instead we made that screen in the installer be something like:
>
>     What do you want your desktop to look like?
>
>     +------------+    +------------+    +------------+
>     |            |    |            |    |            |
>     |GNOME screen|    | KDE3 screen|    | KDE4 screen|
>     |      shot  |    |      shot  |    |      shot  |
>     +------------+    +------------+    +------------+
>
>                              [Abort]  [Continue]
>
> Those should be real screenshots of our stock blank desktop for each
> desktop environment.  Users will then be able to make a more informed
> decision.
>
> [Feel free to reorder those screenshots in any way you please.  It is
> impossible to discuss which desktop environment is more functional /
> stable / featureful / usable / etc. since they are all so large and
> similar.]
>
> This would be interesting to all the desktop teams, because then *they*
> have the responsibility of making their default version of the desktop
> be as pretty as possible for the benefit of new users' impressions.
>
>   Federico

I like Federico's idea, although I don't think it will be completely
sufficient in giving a newbie user the best choice.  So, to add to his
proposal...

Pascal and I were discussing an idea earlier in IRC.  One of the
problems for a newbie is they don't know 1) which is the best choice and
2) that they actually CAN install more than one DE.  For me, even though
I am a GNOME user, I always install KDE as well and occasionally take a
peek in KDE.  I do think that many users will have some level of
curiousity and want to check out the various options.

So, with that in mind, I propose that under each of the graphics (or if
we don't use graphics and stick with the current list format), we allow
users to check multiple DE's.  We do have this option currently.
However, adding multiple DE's later in software installation is not
straightforward.

We should have checkboxes here.  And we should leave the checkboxes
blank so as to not imply a default DE.  In addition, if left blank,
there should be some warning (popup window?) that says you must choose
something, even if it is the Text-only installation.  

This takes away from forcing a newbie to decide, and gives them the
opportunity to explore further later on.  These days, many people have
enough hard drive space to add both.

Bryen

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