On 10/25/23 02:07, Ludwig Nussel wrote:
Ancor Gonzalez Sosa wrote:
[...]
That's a first implementation that shows we have WAY too many patterns that are WAY too arbitrarily organized.
If we want to use patterns as the main concept to allow software customization... What can we do? Organize the patterns better? Introduce some kind of flag to distinguish the patterns that make sense to offer during installation? Fix something in the way we categorize the patterns?
We feel this is not an UI problem, but an structural one.
Absolutely. Another visualization¹: https://paste.opensuse.org/pastes/00782284b9b9
IOW it's a mess. IMO 90% of patterns should just be dropped without replacement right away. Only keep the ones that define core operating system building blocks. Without apps and without using recommends. The visible attribute should be set only on leaf edges. So we end up with rather quick and small default installations rather than the Linux app showcase we have right now.
I'm going to disagree, at one point with Enlightenment I tried the approach of just shipping the desktop environment in the pattern with no other apps. The feedback I got very quickly was that our users want an install that works with everything they need out of the box even if it means having some apps they don't use. So I added a basic set of applications back to the pattern. I 've also spoken with other desktop maintainers who have seen similar, With a much smaller group of openSUSE users just wanting a minimal system. Those users have always been happy once pointed to the "Custom" role to choose what they actually want themselves. For this to work there needs to be some level of granularity in especially the Gnome and KDE patterns where you can't just zypper in gnome. I was giving a packaging workshop the other day and being able to start by saying just install the OBS Tools pattern was a big help similarly I always install autotools with patterns because otherwise I miss packages and get annoyed. At the end of the day patterns and having everything work out of the box are one of the key things that make openSUSE easy and welcoming to new users, which is why I started using openSUSE some 12 years back. Can we make it better probably, but can we also make it much worse then what we have now for most users? very easily.
The random collections of apps could be replaced by a tag system if someone bothers to implement it. Based on that the welcome wizard could then offer the user to optionally install e.g. a browser, office suite etc.
Pretty much all the patterns I find useful at the moment are a "Curated" set of apps rather then a "Random" set of apps and I don't think you could implement that curation with a tag system. At the same time i'm guessing there are probably some patterns that could be better curated and maybe even a few that no one finds useful so why don't we fix those rather then throwing everything out and starting again with an inferior system. -- Simon Lees (Simotek) http://simotek.net Emergency Update Team keybase.io/simotek SUSE Linux Adelaide Australia, UTC+10:30 GPG Fingerprint: 5B87 DB9D 88DC F606 E489 CEC5 0922 C246 02F0 014B