On 10/17/23 01:14, Ancor Gonzalez Sosa wrote:
We need to talk. ;-)
As you may know, the YaST Team is developing an alternative installer called Agama (formerly D-Installer). https://github.com/openSUSE/agama
We want the workflow in Agama to be simpler than with YaST. Even without any selection of packages to install.
But quite some people expressed their desire of being able to customize the software selection while installing the operating system itself.
Since we don't want to bring back complex and specific concepts like the installation roles, we decided to expose the current list of patterns so the users can decide which ones to install... knowing that would expose some organizational problems we have with patterns.
Take a look at https://yast.opensuse.org/assets/images/patterns-demo.gif
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.
On one hand I completely agree with you, the current list is too big to present to a lot of users by default we probably want around as many options as we have current system roles. At the same time personally I always pick "Custom" in yast and pick what I want. For legacy reasons there are some patterns that are split up simply based on what would or wouldn't fit on a DVD. There are others that are split between what is acceptable in SUSE products and those that are in openSUSE. Some of these we might be able to make better others are much harder or not possible. We also occasionally get users who say they'd like a Gnome install but without office etc and the work around there has always been do a custom install. So really what i'm leaning towards is in an ideal world we should have a new flag and we probably should just pick one pattern for each of the major desktops and another for "Server / GUI Less" setups. Sitting alongside that add a "Custom / Advanced" checkbox that adds everything that currently has the visible flag so that users who want can still do a detailed setup. In the mean time i'm happy to help doing some tidy up (I did alot last time for SLE-15). As a starting point there maybe some patterns we currently show that should be hidden because generally they should be installed as part of another pattern some of the _opt ones come to mind. But i'll have to double check this. I'm happy to help you work on this further. It will also solve some problems I see for openSUSE's ALP. Cheers -- 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