Pascal Bleser napsal(a):
Rajko M. wrote: | On Thursday 10 April 2008 09:28:56 pm Bryen wrote: |> On Thu, 2008-04-10 at 20:19 -0500, Federico Mena Quintero wrote: | [...] (replying to Federico, Bryen and Rajko ;))
|>> What if instead we made that screen in the installer be something like: |>> What do you want your desktop to look like? |>> +------------+ +------------+ +------------+ |>> |GNOME screen| | KDE3 screen| | KDE4 screen| |>> | shot | | shot | | shot | |>> +------------+ +------------+ +------------+ |>> [Abort] [Continue] |>> |>> Those should be real screenshots of our stock blank desktop for each |>> desktop environment. Users will then be able to make a more informed |>> decision. | [...] |> I like Federico's idea, although I don't think it will be completely |> sufficient in giving a newbie user the best choice. So, to add to |> his proposal... | I like idea too. Taking that there is graphical time zone selection | this would be improvement in right direction.
Hmh.. not sure. I think it is a very good idea and as Rajko wrote, given we have a graphical TZ selector, we can have screenshots here as well.
I'm sure you know I've already done that during Hack Week last year :) http://en.opensuse.org/YaST/Installation/Desktop_Selection_Add-On Those descriptions have to be politically correct but, of course, it should provide a pieces of information that also a newbie user is able to understand. The current solution (openSUSE 11.0 Alpha3/+) presents a list of *Systems* not *Desktops* as we can't call minimal system a desktop environment. All descriptions are taken from patterns which are hidden under those-system selections.
But: * ncurses installer: We still have the issue for the ncurses installer, although it is much less of a problem there as it is used a lot less frequently (do we have any idea how many people use the ncurses installer ?) Either experts or people who don't have a supported GPU... in both situations, a simple list in whatever order will do, and possibly even with a preselection of the "text pattern".
Ncurses is better for remote installation, Katarina might have more information on numbers.
* tiny screenshots I don't know how large the pictures may be, but I'm afraid they're going to be really small, as I suppose it must fit inside 800x600. I doubt that'll help users make a decision as it'll be so small... they won't be able to see anything. Instead of a screenshot of the whole display, how about a zoomed one that shows a bit of konqueror/nautilus with a few icons and such (e.g. something like [1]) ? The best solution would probably be the possibility of clicking on scaled down screenshots to zoom them in a full-screen viewer window, but that sounds like a YaST/YCP nightmare (does it ?). [1]http://konquefox.free.fr/images/screenshot_style_kde_big.png
Screenshot browser could be a solution :) ;) see above. What about tooltips with system/desktop screenshots displayed OnMouseOver="ShowScreenshot('GNOME')" them? Just kidding ;) The problem with 'just one screenshot' for every system/desktop selection is that a tiny/medium screenshot doesn't say anything and can be reconfigured later quite heavily. What attracts users eyes are mostly colors.
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| Telling how much space each installation requires would be good anyway. | It can help people to see that difference is not that huge.
Absolutely.
Absolutely tricky :) I can't image a simple predicting method that wouldn't require running a solver for every single listed system as the size depends on that (And on selected installation repositories (Hint: Add-Ons used during installation, OSS, NON-OSS, Media). Have a nice day Lukas