Stefan Hundhammer wrote:
On Wednesday 06 February 2008 20:51, Aaron Kulkis wrote:
They need to be presented to the new user at first boot up. Well, no. Not only no, but "hell no!". ;-) Put the crack pipe down.
Try to discuss like a grown-up person. Thank you.
So when do you propose to inform people who are NEW to SuSE (especially those who have just switched from Windows).... 5 months after installation????
This may be annoying for you, the experienced user, but it's not about YOU..it's about the INEXPERIENCED USER who is *lost*... doesn't know what the "man" command is, has never heard of "info" either, and seriously needs something BLATANTLY IN HIS FACE to show him where to go to find answers.
Any you want to show him all that in one pop-up during installation? That's an ambitious objective. I certainly like our manuals, but they are not a substitute for some willingness to learn.
Not a popup. Something USEFUL, like having SuSE Help Center running by default (until the user chooses to no longer have it running by default), as a reminder that REAL help (as opposed to windows-style "Bold text: click the bold text button to make text bold" non-help).
Did your car come with a manual trying to teach you how to drive?
I can go anyplace and find a driver's education school. I can also find numerous places to find out how to use not only windows, but even how to use a particular PROGRAM in Windows -- ridiculous, but true. There are *NO* "learn to use Linux" classes in most places, unless one is willing to spend several hundred dollars or more for a systems admin course to get certification to show a potential employer. The typical Linux newbie does NOT want to spend $500 to learn how to use an OS.
To the newbie, that's not annoying, it's FRIENDLY.
No, it's not. I've been working on that installation stuff for years. I've come across all kinds of users. We did all kinds of tests with newbies, even with computer illiterates, and of course also with what we consider "average" users.
When you are new to an OS, the first obstacle you have to come across is to get it installed so you can start experimenting. This is why the installation experience is so important. The more complicated we make this for the user, the more potential for trouble we create. So we try to make it simple, to figure out stuff automatically whenever we can, to make useful suggestions, not to ask questions the user cannot really answer. Yet at the same time, we always try to keep the door open for more advanced users - we provide "expert" and "details" buttons and dialogs wherever possible. So that installation workflow is really a very delicate balance.
This is not to say the installation is already perfect, much less perfect for everyone. It's a permanently ongoing effort to improve it. (OTOH those who know what it was like in the pre-6.3 days know that Linux installations have come a long way.)
Yes, we would also prefer everybody to have the printed manuals. And to read them, preferably BEFORE the installation. But for economic necessities this
Which is why I advocate the Boxed editions, which have been nixed in favor of this download thing. Now you have a problem... the newbie users DOES NOT HAVE ANY PRINTED MANUALS... and doesn't have the slightest clue how to find the sort of information normally contained in them.
no longer seems to be possible. That's bad. But even worse would be to not have a consumer and/or community distro at all any more (and I know some people around here who put in a lot of their heart blood to prevent just that). So the compromise was to make the printed manuals thinner and save on production cost. Yet, the content is still there - just no longer completely in printed form.
Is a PDF an adequate substitute for a printed manual? Well, certainly not for me. And as this discussion shows, also not for many others.
Again, if the new user doesn't know that the PDF is there, what good is it? It needs to be pointed out to the user that the PDF exists.
Would it improve the situation to tell the user where those PDFs are?
Would it hurt?
Would that really make so many more users read them?
You can't force users to do anything.
And if so, when would they read them?
I can guarantee that if they don't know where the PDF's are then they will never read them. And if the they don't even know they exist, they won't even look for them (not that the new user particularly knows HOW to look for them in the first place. You and I know how to use locate and grep and find..but by definition, newbies don't.)
Imagine the situation. You just got new software installed. It's new, you are eager to try it out. You heard so much about it, now you want to see it for real. You install it. You log in. You try to make sense of everything - everything is new to you.
And there's a NICE FRIENDLY MANUAL ON THE DESKTOP IN CASE YOU HAVE ANY QUESTIONS.....
Is that the situation where you open a PDF reader to read the manuals?
Probably not...but if it's already OPENED UP TO THE INTRODUCTORY DOCUMENT, then the user is being taught such resources are there on the system, available at any time.
Or don't you rather start clicking to see with your own eyes what's happening?
I can only speak for myself, but whenever I am in that kind of situation, I am barely patient enough to read a one-page "quick start" guide. I experiment.
And you and I both are far more technically proficient, AND CONFIDENT, than the typical user on a system they've never used before.
- License agreement at installation start. Yuck. But the lawyers demand it. Because the law does.
Not quite. There is no law saying "you must present a license agreement". But there are lawyers who convince you that you might lose a lawsuit if you don't.
But if you don't, then it can lead to legal hot water rather quickly.
Anyway, this point is moot - we simply have to do it.
Exactly.
I certainly do NOT want to waste *MY* time going through the software selections (which usually takes me about 2 hours) only to find out AFTER the installation that there are detectable errors on the installation media.
So you don't check MD5SUMs when you burned a downloaded ISO?
Just because my .iso file is flawless doesn't mean that the DVD produced from it is flawless too. I've had PRESSED CD's and DVD's with errors on them. You think I'm going to gonna automatically trust a burned CD or DVD to be perfect? There's dust and all kinds of things that can ruin what APPEARS to be a good CD or DVD..but the only way to know for sure is to do an MD5SUM or some other sort of comprehensive check on it.
- Time zone selection. Interesting for users who happen to
install in Thai language on their way to Vladivostok, but just annoying for all those people whose location we can easily deduce from the language they selected. German, Czech, Swedish - time zone unique (unless they are on that
train to Vladivostok, too). English is harder, agreed. Some other languages, too. But for most languages there is little question.
So when I was doing an English language installation while in Iraq, I'm just screwed, eh.
You didn't read thoroughly. For English, of course we'd always have to ask. But not for those many languages where the result is clear. And it's not as if you couldn't change it if the automatic didn't guess right; it's only one mouse click away in the installation proposal dialog.
Personally, after the langauge is selected, I would set up the time zone based on the language for SOME languages (the ones where the native speakers tend to be limited to one time zone) and then proceed to the time-zone selection to VERIFY that it's the correct time zone. If it's correct, then just click "next"
Time zone selection takes minimal amount of time, and yes, it SHOULD be done at the beginning. Any other time is even less appropriate.
English-language users are in a tremendous number of time zones - 6 or 7 in North America alone.
See above.
- YaST control center. Yes, it's been a while, but we were made to force-press that thing upon the poor user at the end of the installation, too. It was broken for a long time, yet nobody complained. Must be quite some crowd out there using that thing. ;-)
I've noticed problems since 10.0. And instead of fixing it, you guys seem more interested in changing the appearance.
Instead of fixing a buggy presentation of a program at an entirely inappropriate time?
And it's not about changing the appearance what we are about to do. Read the Wiki pages. It's about making it _usable_ again after it has lost its usefulness with the appearance of more and more modules over all the years.
Misplaced priority, if you ask me.
Rather, misinformed discussion partner. ;-)
- SuSE greeter. Do we still have it? Well, I guess so - when you don't recycle an existing home directory. It also used to have no window title bar etc. so you really had to hunt that icon down to get rid of it. Gah, gimme a break.
/home should be on a separate partition by default, (and by default NOT re-formatted) so that /home is recycled
IIRC that's how it has been for the last couple of releases. But then, I am not 100% sure since I rarely change my partitioning when I reinstall - I simply select mount points.
- KDE tip windows on startup on every program. WTF?! When I open a "konsole" (the KDE xterm) I don't want to be bothered with that stuff. I want to issue some commands, and probably not just for fun. Get that thing out of my face.
Then click "do not show me again" or whatever it is, and stop whining. That's what I did, and you can, too.
You missed the point. This is another example of surprising the user with something completely unrelated and throwing him out of his path. Too many pop-ups are a way of reducing the user's overall attention to those that are really important.
But I'm not advocating KDE style popups every time a new app is started.
CU
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