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Rajko M. wrote:
| On Thursday 10 April 2008 09:28:56 pm Bryen wrote:
|> On Thu, 2008-04-10 at 20:19 -0500, Federico Mena Quintero wrote:
| [...]
(replying to Federico, Bryen and Rajko ;))
|>> 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.
| [...]
|> 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...
| I like idea too. Taking that there is graphical time zone selection
| this would be improvement in right direction.
Hmh.. not sure. I think it is a very good idea and as Rajko wrote, given
we have a graphical TZ selector, we can have screenshots here as well.
But:
* ncurses installer:
We still have the issue for the ncurses installer, although it is much
less of a problem there as it is used a lot less frequently (do we have
any idea how many people use the ncurses installer ?)
Either experts or people who don't have a supported GPU... in both
situations, a simple list in whatever order will do, and possibly even
with a preselection of the "text pattern".
* tiny screenshots
I don't know how large the pictures may be, but I'm afraid they're going
to be really small, as I suppose it must fit inside 800x600. I doubt
that'll help users make a decision as it'll be so small... they won't be
able to see anything. Instead of a screenshot of the whole display, how
about a zoomed one that shows a bit of konqueror/nautilus with a few
icons and such (e.g. something like [1]) ?
The best solution would probably be the possibility of clicking on
scaled down screenshots to zoom them in a full-screen viewer window, but
that sounds like a YaST/YCP nightmare (does it ?).
[1]http://konquefox.free.fr/images/screenshot_style_kde_big.png
* lost the idea of "most stable"
Federico argued there's no DE that's more stable than the others.
Not sure. Again, is KDE4 really going to be ready for stable "production
use" and newbie-safeness on 11.0 ? If we're going for screenshots, I
guess that >50% will pick KDE4 ;) Isn't 30-50% of those 50% going to
have major issues with stability of their DE then ?
* still no default selection
Taking Bryen's idea and going a bit further... how about pre-selecting
GNOME and KDE4 ? And maybe add a small label like "You may select more
than one desktop environment, and select which one to use at login."
~From an ergonomical POV, I think that having a pre-selection is a lot
better. You know, the "just click through if you don't have a clue" thing.
| [...]
[...]
|> there should be some warning (popup window?) that says you must choose
|> something, even if it is the Text-only installation.
|
| I would not mention text mode as that can be choice for some that will be
| scared off, or laugh on us, what kind of Linux we provide :-)
No, really, we must have text mode there. And they won't "laugh on us"
if they select it, as they made an explicit choice for that option.
Also, it is labelled as "text mode" and hence, it won't be a surprise if
they end up without a DE if they pick that option.
| Maybe to default to all of them, if none is checked, with warning how
much
| space is required.
Yes, indeed, have GNOME and KDE4 preselected, GNOME+KDE4+KDE3 being
overkill IMO -- at least, only one of the KDE versions should be
pre-selected, but with the user having the option of selecting all of them.
OTOH, we still lost the direction of "most stable" if we take that route.
|> 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.
|
| Telling how much space each installation requires would be good anyway.
| It can help people to see that difference is not that huge.
Absolutely.
cheers
- --
~ -o) Pascal Bleser