[arch-general] Good press at distrowatch.com

[David C. Rankin]

On 12/17/2009 01:35 PM, Dieter Plaetinck wrote:
> it's not about userfriendliness, which is a very subjective topic.
> it's about time duration, which is scientifically measurable.
>
> I'm pretty sure a scripted automatic installation goes faster then
> one where you need to point and click to make it do things.

No, No, No..

	Dieter, you are looking at it all wrong. You are approaching it like an engineer or scientist sees things. The rest of the world judges installs by whether they have a cute animated character to look at while the install takes place and whether they receive any prompts they don't understand.

	So, that's exactly what Arch needs to do. Come up with a cute 6-frame .gif and redirect all install errors to /dev/null and then watch the ratings rise :p

Seriously, I like the Arch installer just fine, but I can tell you that the Ubuntu/SuSE install rating most likely come from the fact that the gui installers they employ are easy on the eye and they have put a lot of effort into automating the difficult parts of the install procedure that most new users don't understand --> the partitioning.

I can tell you from personal experience in the past 3 weeks from having installed Arch on 2 boxes and having installed suse on 2 boxes, that there has been a good bit of work put into the automatic suggestion of partitioning schemes by suse. Arch's install is fine if you know what you are doing, but for someone coming over from M$, even though it is just 7 little steps, if you need the install to do most of the work for you -- well, it doesn't.

That I think is the big difference to the distrowatches of the world. Can they have one of their writers sit down and install the OS without having to sit there scratching their head and ultimately asking for help.

If I had two suggestions for the arch installer, it would be theses:

   (1) Automate the proposed partitioning scheme for the most common new user setups.

     (a) Dual-boot: check for windows and if exists, preserve win, propose shrinking for free space if no unused space and configure grub to chainload windows.

     (b) Existing linux install (with or without win partition): if no unpartitioned space, propose preserving home and formatting / and any other partitions for new arch install, elif freespace >20G propose maintaining existing install and installing arch into free space, elif <20G do the first option preserving /home, etc..

   (2) For package selection pose a preliminary package selection question before the actual package selection to see if the user wants the detailed base package selection or standard base packages. If standard selection, install the full base running some type of hardware query for selection of hardware dependent packages. For the detailed, just leave the arch install as is.

Those 2 areas are the areas where I see the biggest differences between the current arch install and what the other distrowatch favorites do and logically they are also the two areas that give new users the most frustration.

I agree with Dieter, that the install should be measured by speed and automation -- but long ago I realized that there a whole lot of other people out there that just don't think like me :p

-- 
David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E.
Rankin Law Firm, PLLC
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