On Fri, 26 Jul 2024 13:54:36 +0200 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 do not say that the team do bad work neither that someone else will do better job. I am just saying that if Tumbleweed is driven by SUSE, then I do not see it much as community distro from my POV.
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.
Well, question is what is expense? I just say that if there is agreement on one option, it can be default and user can change it with single click. Current state is that everyone needs that click even if they do not care much about what DE it will use or don't know it yet.
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"
Well, I do not want to hide/remove anything. I just would like to have simple next->next->next workflow with reasonable defaults and user will modify what they are interested in.
Agama currently seems to make that even worse, with it being necessary for someone to pick from a collection of different "Products/Distributions" first.
Well, it is not necessary. If you create live ISO with single product, then user do not need to select it. It is just ability to provide "something" that allows users to download opensuse iso and decide which product they want to install.
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
Well, main goal of agama and we do not hide it, is to provide SLE16 installer. And any feature that is missing in installer cause complains, so we are currently more focused on adding stuff that customers wants than hiding features that agama can do. And if you see the latest agama on conference, you can see that it basically just say what user need to provide to make installation happen and rest is there if user want to change things, as we still want to offer as much freedom of choices as possible.
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.
Well, problem with this approach is that it just brings the user decision one level up. I often face it on opensuse booths on conferences that people want to try openSUSE and we try to explain difference between TW and Leap..and then there is also MicroOS and Leap Micro...and then Aeon and Kalpa and I do not want to imagine if lxqt, xfce4 or sway wants also their desktop.... But I have to admit that bigger Fedora also did this way with Silverblue, Kinoite, Sway Atomic or Budgie atomic, but even to some fedora people I talk to do not know about all of them. I am just having feeling that in fedora all those spins and labs isos is more like second or third class citizens beside 5 main editions. BTW this amount of opensuse distros result in idea of Agama installer that can install multiple distributions.
I think that's a better way of addressing the problem rather than ruining what makes Tumbleweed awesome.