Mailinglist Archive: opensuse-factory (904 mails)

[Sid Boyce <sboyce@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 24, 2008 at 12:01 PM, Sid Boyce <sboyce@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 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

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