On Tue, 2009-04-28 at 16:48 +0100, Naheem Zaffar wrote: > Forcing a choice at install time to uninformed users is plain bad > usability. Allowing those that are informed to change the defaults is > the right way. Naheem nailed this one. The problem with forcing a choice is that, for a certain group of people, the choice is nonsense: they have no idea what they are being asked to choose, or what they should choose. Of course they can pick at random and probably be happy with whatever they pick, but there's still two costs in that case: we have to ask everyone "are you running KDE or GNOME?" rather than assuming they're on GNOME unless they say they're on KDE, and more importantly, being forced to make a choice you don't understand makes you frustrated. The more such choices we have in our flow, the more frustrated we're making people. Of course, the choice also has value to other people. So - as these things so often do - the question boils down to: who do we care about more? People who don't know what the choice means, or people who do know, and want it? And again as is so often the case, the only way to answer that question is if we really have a clear and solid definition of what we're trying to be, for whom. Which we don't, really. This is why this has turned into a directionless debate, as Adam Jackson pointed out: the question is essentially impossible to answer in our current situation. There is no way it can be clearly agreed which course of action would be better. I think the only useful thing to come out is that a screen which just lets you pick your desktop is probably a good idea. All the other major distributions with a genuinely multi-desktop installer do this. I'd say we should implement it and make GNOME the default simply because that's our current situation and, when unsure, one should always make the least possible amount of change to achieve the immediate goal. (My entirely un-serious suggestion is that the screen feature a dog called Gordon, a cat called Kristen, and a snake called Xavier. You can probably see what happens from there.) To address the suggestion that the selection screen feature a short explanation of the choices - try actually *writing* that explanation, and fitting it into two lines, in a way that makes both the GNOME and KDE people happy. Actually, unless you love to be frustrated, don't. I've done this. It wasn't a fun week. -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org http://www.happyassassin.net -- fedora-devel-list mailing list fedora-devel-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-devel-list
