Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier wrote:
On Thu, Apr 24, 2008 at 12:01 PM, Sid Boyce
wrote: There will always be "The problem" for the "new user", the new user who doesn't know or hasn't got herself familiar with what a GNOME or a KDE is. I don't see how we fix that, other than eliminating choice, something that the many reviewers recommend constantly - new users are supposed to be pretty stupid, easily confused, horrified at the amount of disk space and memory called for and frightened away from Linux in general and openSUSE in particular.
I don't know how true that really is, though -- my girlfriend's 9 year old installed openSUSE on an old laptop of mine the other day with no assistance aside from picking a username and password (he could have done that as well, but she insisted on setting up the admin password, for good reasons...). And that was from the 10.3 DVD -- and we've made some serious installer improvements just since then.
I know the youngsters don't seem to care what it is, they can instinctively deal with any of this stuff. There are two guys, both dropped out of college, one owns his own software/hardware business built on Linux and has contributed code to the kernel, the other is head of IT support for a large multi-national company. These guys picked up Linux and ran with it. The IT support Director guy got his college out of a catch 22 situation when their NT servers went down and there didn't seem to be a way back, he brought his Linux box from home and got them going again. After that they branded him a hacker, never to be trusted. It's typically some of the 20-something year old Windows users who approach Linux as though it is some kind of Windows clone and find everything strange and difficult rather than discarding the mindset. The owner of a Florida Flight School when we first met asked me after a few minutes, what business I was in, I said computers and he replied that he thought so. His wife told me that one student he interviewed was asked the same question and after the reply, he showed him a pad with computers written on it. He reckons it's a mindset that betrays us and makes doctors and computer people in that order the hardest people to train to fly aeroplanes. Guys have for years coped with Linux installs when the process was much more difficult and I come across people of all ages, even senior citizens who install and run Linux successfully, so there is no need to assume the worst.
Of course, we will have single-desktop installable live CDs that have only one choice. Should we be directing users towards those rather than the DVD? That's probably a discussion for a different list.
I can't see a "BEST" way and doubt there is one that will meet everyone's idea of what best is.
True, but we can pick a way that is most intuitive to most users. My belief is that when you offer a user a set of choices that are not incompatible, they should be able to select more than one choice at that stage. I think it's a bit counterintuitive and slightly frustrating when doing the install if you are only allowed to choose one at that time.
There are still some who will find that our most intuitive layout is counterintuitive.
Of course, I tend to run through the installation routine much more often than I think most of our audience will -- so maybe I have stronger feelings about it than the average user would because, even if it is frustrating, it's only going to be frustrating *once*. :-)
Best,
Zonker
The most frustrating thing in the whole stack is PC hardware and it's lack of diagnostics, software installation is the easy part. I swapped out a 32-bit motherboard and all its bits, replacing it with 64-bit which ran for a few months before that too started to power itself off. As the only bit I had to hand to help in fault finding was a power supply, it turned out that the 600W PS was at fault as the box was OK on a 450W PS and a few days ago I was able to build a 32-bit box with what I had thought was a bad motherboard/CPU and 11.0 Beta1 DVD just installed without problems and zypper dup to the latest factory. I install quite a few distros in VirtualBox and KVM and I find them all perfectly usable even for novices, though when I install for complete novices, with one exception being an old laptop for a young girl student where I installed SimplyMEPIS, they are all openSUSE and in daily use for a variety of uses, including surfing the web, skype, email, wordprocessing, spreadsheets, burning CD/DVD's, playing CD's and DVD's, digital camera work and more. They even recognise and do their own automatic updates when the icon shows there are updates pending. I think we are in really good shape. Regards Sid. -- Sid Boyce ... Hamradio License G3VBV, Licensed Private Pilot Emeritus IBM/Amdahl Mainframes and Sun/Fujitsu Servers Tech Support Specialist, Cricket Coach Microsoft Windows Free Zone - Linux used for all Computing Tasks --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-factory+help@opensuse.org