On Fri, Jul 26, 2024 at 7:55 AM Richard Brown <rbrown@suse.de> wrote:
On 2024-07-26 11:00, josef Reidinger wrote:
For example I mention on my talk on OSC that it would be nice to have for newbies default desktop selected in TW and Leap, to avoid unnecessary confusion for people coming from windows or mac world. So who should I contact for such decision?
Firstly, I'd like to say that I trust Dominique's Early Adopters team to steward Tumbleweed better than any other alternative.
I think deciding a default desktop for Tumbleweed or Leap is highly problematic:
- Both are general purpose distributions that could be Desktops, or Servers, or anything else - Both offer multiple desktops with vibrant volunteer communities actively supporting them
I wholly agree that those above points can make Tumbleweed or Leap more intimidating to new users. But I think elevating a single Desktop role to a default at the expense of the rest of the community (contributors & users) who use those distributions for other things, actually hurts more than it helps.
I think it's better for Tumbleweed and Leap to lead into the flexibility and excessive choice they offer. I also think this is better aligned with the realities of the Installers available for those distributions also. YaST historically has been very limited in it's ability to hide/remove options from users, which is precisely something that _needs_ to be done if the goal is to "avoid unnecessary confusion for people coming from windows or mac world" Agama currently seems to make that even worse, with it being necessary for someone to pick from a collection of different "Products/Distributions" first. My request to make it possible to streamline Agama's workflow has not been replied to in over a year: https://github.com/openSUSE/agama/issues/601
Meanwhile this Project now does have offerings like Aeon (using it's own installer) which offer a more focused, single Desktop, single purpose approach which I think is a far better approach for people coming from the Windows or Mac World.
For what it's worth, I suspect we would have done this sooner if we had live installers like both Fedora and Ubuntu have. Both have independently shown that there's much more success by simplifying the installation experience with curated experiences rather than trying to teach people what components to select to get a good one. YaST is a very complex interface for installation, and as the necessary skills for administering a computer has reduced over time (which is not necessarily a bad thing!), YaST appears more and more like a barrier of entry than the guiding process it was intended to be.
I think that's a better way of addressing the problem rather than ruining what makes Tumbleweed awesome.
I think the installation and onboarding experience for Tumbleweed (and Leap too, for that matter) is pretty bad, actually. There's not much to "ruin" there. It's not Arch Linux, but it's definitely not easy for someone to figure out. Aeon's installation process is a massive step in the right direction. -- 真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth!