Dear brothers and sisters in YaST, (some of you already discovered the wiki page on $subject, so here is a full explanation on what is this all about) One of discussion topics on our recent workshop was whether we should handle graphical UI differently from the text-mode. However, we found out that we don't know an exact answer to the question who are the users of the text-mode UI, why do they decide to use it, and if we decide to drop it, can we find any equivalent? In order to find some answers to at least some of the above questions, I decided to carry out a small, informal in-house survey among Czech openSUSE developers. The group was rather small and well, yes, developers are not exactly the representative sample of society, but they are human beings (most of them ;-) ), they are openSUSE users, and their opinion counts as well The detailed questionare can be found here: http://en.opensuse.org/YaST_Workshop_Prague_2007_Day_1/YaST_ncurses_survey#Y... Some of the q's were multiple-choice with one open-ended "Something else, please specify..." item, the others were entirely open-ended. What does this small survey reveal? * Text-mode users do not miss eye-candy, but - surprise, surprise ;-) they _do_ miss functionality, they miss more comfortable and intuitive navigation in UI. * They use text-mode because - It is usable even without X - It provides the same functionality as GUI - It is better choice for using over the network - It is faster and has lower memory requirements - and many more, see here: http://en.opensuse.org/YaST_Workshop_Prague_2007_Day_1/YaST_ncurses_survey#W... The entire summary of this topic can be found on this page: http://en.opensuse.org/YaST_Workshop_Prague_2007_Day_1/Handle_graphical_and_... which is a joint work of Jirka Suchomel, Lukas Ocilka and me. And there are 3 possible conclusions of our workshop discussion and this survey: * We should cater for needs of different types of users. We can make one UI an eye-candy for those users that want it, while keeping the other one simplistic, because its users want it to stay so. * While improving look&feel, we should keep in mind that users do need and do appreciate functional equivalency of all UIs * Having ncurses may limit us in certain aspects (no yellow-violet-pinkish eye-candy, no icons in every single table cell, low resolution and mouseless user,...), but there are other areas in which it gives us even more freedom instead of restricting us (we're independent of functional X server, certain web-browser, fast network connection, and we still can have well-usable and functionally equivalent UI). B. -- \\\\\ Katarina Machalkova \\\\\\\__o YaST developer __\\\\\\\'/_ & hedgehog painter