On Tuesday, November 02, 2010 11:19:18 am Duncan Mac-Vicar P. wrote:
Following up with the discussions that took place in the openSUSE conference, I would like to kick off a discussion that has as an objective to come up with a step-by-step plan on how to
- Make it ridiculously easy for the users to find & install the ridiculously good software
This has various possible technical solutions. But the output has to be:
- a "place" where the user can click and see the available cool software (ie: Chromium" not ie: libhenne-devel) with screenshots, ratings, comments
- The user should not care about repositories and their combination requisites, or strange signature dialogs
- Other pieces in the distro need to be integrated, or at least it would be nice to, for example we ship KPackageKit which is a lovely app if you show a bunch of apps separated by groups, but gets completely unusable if you show 2135 packages with strange names in one category in a simple list-view. Other pieces don't, like zypper, YaST2 which are mean to be used as package managers.
- Whatever new opportunities we are able to get done in the process. For example, Frank's project bretzel has components that fit int he backoffice, aiming for a one click publishing of software from the developer's side (using adrian's _service's) which fits ridiculously great in our build service story.
Cheers
Right now we have technically perfect tools for package installation. These tools support almost all options libzypp provides. That's okay as long as the target audience are administrators and technically experienced users who exactly know what they want to archive and know how package management works. If we want to introduce a tool that aims usability we should ignore technical arguments while the initial discussion. There are no dependencies and no dependency conflicts, there are no patches, packages and so on. There is just a user how wants to write a letter or play a new game. The user might even not know the application's name he/she wants to install. But there was a statement at the openSUSE Conference that openSUSE is the distribution for technical users and admins. If we also want to take newbies into account let's copy apple's solution, paint it green and put an openSUSE sticker on it. :-) Thomas -- Thomas Goettlicher SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nuernberg) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-softwaremgmt+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse-softwaremgmt+help@opensuse.org