On Mon, 2005-01-24 at 18:40 -0500, William Hooper wrote: > Jeff Vian said: > [snip] > > Of course, but you have to know where to find those manuals. Those of > > us who have used Linux for a long time have them as ready reference. New > > users don't have a clue. > > > > If I install MS Winblows, do I also have an online reference manual? Not > > that I know of, and thus a lot of new Linux users are not familiar with > > finding answers there. They don't even have a hint about the massive > > amounts of help that are actually available. > > There's not a link to a mailing list on microsoft.com, but people seem to > find the Fedora list OK. > I suspect that a very small percentage of the fedora users actually find the list. It seems that the great majority of users here are experienced users and very few are new users. > [snip] > > For a new user they are worse than arcane. If I was installing Linux > > for the first time I probably would expect it to be as easy as Winblows. It > > is not, and never has been. > > Refresh my memory, how many ways does the Windows installer have to > partition a disk? One. What is it's purpose? To create the system > partition and that is all. IIRC it has no options to create and format > anything that isn't a system partition. it is brain dead enough that it refuses to format a new partition if it can see an existing formatted partition (system or data, and regardless of size). You are required to do the format in that case before you start the install. > So by your own reasoning, we need > to remove DD complete and just put a dialog that asks where to put / and > put everything there. That's it. > That is EXACTLY what _was_ done by putting in the autopartition option. and the opposite is what I feel would be better. BTW William, Much earlier in this thread you asked me a question about DD and its partitioning related to what it did for me. I recently did a new install and checked carefully the results. 1. DD chose the order to place the partitions. That was NOT the order they were defined in. I created / as the second partition, but DD chose to make it hda5 on its own. It displayed the order in the gui bar dynamically as they were defined (in its own order, but with sizes as specified) 2. DD did create the partitions in the order it chose to list and display (not in the order defined.) 3. In order to have / be a primary partition I had to explicitly tell it to do that and it then repositioned it from hda5 to hda2. This type of (at least somewhat uncontrollable) AI is what I see as a problem. Even Partition Magic on Windows respects the order in which partitions are defined and positions them accordingly. DD does not. Regardless of the efficiency (or lack of) that may be apparent in a specific layout, I do not like a tool that says "my way is the only way". It removes choice from those of us who value freedom and the right to make our own mistakes. > > This whole thread really has been based on the personal experiences of a > > few, but the topic and discussion has been focused on things the > > experienced users know and newbies have no clue about. > > The solution to that is education, not including every possible option and > the kitchen sink in every menu, every time. > In that respect, I agree. I have many friends who have tried Linux and quit. Their reason? There were too many choices and they got confused. There needs to be enough balance so the experienced users can get everything they want, and the timid are not overwhelmed. <rant> I guess what I am trying to say is the installer seems to be becoming more for the inexperienced and the experienced are being pushed out of making the choice at the beginning. Their options seem to be becoming an after thought and the experts choices are losing ground during the initial install and often must be handled as as add-ons once the install is completed. Why not 2 major paths in the installer? one for the Expert and one for the new user. It has been said that if a button is there someone will push it. That is true. That freedom of choice is what allows us to learn. If we do something wrong we need to be able to learn what we did wrong and how to do it right or to not do it again. Your comment about education is exactly the way to go. Instead of protecting someone from what may be harmful to their hardware if they choose wrong, the user who chooses to do so needs to be allowed to experiment and learn. We all have curiosity and should be allowed to use it instead of having the environment dumbed down so we can't try something new. That attitude of protecting the user instead of allowing investigation and demanding responsibility is also the main problem with our schools today (but that is a different topic) </rant> > -- > William Hooper >
