Valent Turkovic wrote:
Hi,
here are some of my ideas in which I see that Fedora can improve
general user and desktop experience and usability. I would like you to
see my comment and suggestion in the manner I made them - I don't mean
to be a critic but only an objective observer that loves usind Fedora
at home and also at work and would like to see more people do so - and
I belive that with some of ideas I have here more people would use
Fedora and be more productive.
* NTFS support during installation
there should be NTFS support built in to anaconda so that ntfs
partitions are automatically recognized and added to /etc/fstab - and
that users are given an option to make them read-only or to be mounted
in read-write mode.
* Beagle and Deskbar installed by default
these applications make all the difference for an desktop user between
an "OK" user experience and "wonderful" user experience. Work flow
using these two applications is radically improved and this is what
should be showcased as a "Modern linux desktop".
- also I would add a beagle firefox plugin which also makes all the
difference when you need some resource you saw online but didn't
bookmark it or put it on del.ico.us
- these apps don't waste resources, and the memory footprint is really
not that much, especially if put in context that you really have to
look hard these days for a system that has less or equal to 256MB of
memory. I tested beagle on 3 laptop systems with fedora 6 / 7 and one
desktop with also fedora 6 / 7 and I didn't have a single issue. So
for me not to have in installed in Fedora 7 was a big disappointment.
* Tomboy installed by default
- I have all the same arguments here as I do for Beagle and Deskbar
* Firefox to have it's original icon in gnome panel
the icon fedora uses makes me search for firefox icon all the time. I
guess that I'm not the only one. Firefox has one of the most
recognisable icons I have ever seen and simply don't see why fedora
uses non-firefox icon. It just confuses users.
* Desktop shortcut for joining Fedora IRC (aka "Get Live Help")
Fedora is about freedom+communication, right? Why not make this
statement more that just a nice slogan. If you installed saabyon linux
you could experienced for yourself what this really means. I as a new
user to gentoo (sabayon is based on gentoo) was really blown away with
this feature. It is really, really simple to implement and gives a
real meaning to a communication friendly linux distro.
In sabayon link to their IRC chat has a simple name "Get Live Help"
and it work fabulous! I didn't have any Portage experience so I poped
in IRC chat room and was on my way after I got quick help. Whis kind
of help was precious to me and would love to see it in fedora as one
of it's main features and not just as a slogan.
screenshot: http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=382063978&size=l
* Desktop folder with examples of what "this linux thing" can do :)
This is especially important for a live cd versions. Ubuntu has this
"feature" on each of their live cd's as a folder on desktop. In these
folder you can see and test for yourself some filetypes and apps that
work woth them. So for example you open examples folder and see how
some spreadsheets work in "this linux thing" by simply clicking on the
spreadsheat that they placed in there and also for some text
documents, images and the most important thing - there is an video
clip. And it is a really nice video about the meaning of Ubuntu
project. I saw some great videos on redhat magazine page and it is a
shame that these aren't part of Fedora 7 live cd's. I hope you see the
great value in video presentation and include some great videos on
Fedora 8 live CD.
ubuntu examples:
http://johnny.chadda.se/wp-content/uploads/2006/06/Ubuntu_Examples.png
and another:
http://knowledge76.com/images/thumb/800px-Dapper_examples.png
* a working Burning app for Fedora Gnome desktop
Put any new user in front of fresh Fedora 7 desktop and ask them to
burn some files to CD or DVD - any watch them as they wiggle
unpleasantly as they can't find any burning app under gnome desktop.
Puting a link for nautils burner under "Places / CD - DVD Recoder"
doesn't help. If you choose atleast not to include Brassero as the
default burning app under gnome then at least thre should be a link
for "CD Recoder" placed somewhere under "Applications" menu and not
"Places" menu.
I have some other ideas, suggestions and improvements I would love to
see but these are the main ones. I hope you see all of my suggestions
to Fedora desktop in the manner they were written - as my intention
was to be as objective as possible and not to be a critic. I love
Fedora and it is definitely by my opinion the best distro for Desktop
users (yes, even better than Ubuntu).
Valent.
Valent,
I agree with you. As far as desktop users, the out-of-the-box Linux
experience has to be Wow! with little demos of Wow! The installer
Anaconda has to be flawless. It still had some hiccups in F7 which I
think was related to libata. Another thing in Disk Druid that I would
like to see is the ability to install on a degraded RAID-1 array where I
declare RAID-1 but then the second mirror is missing. I install this
way all the time on systems and then when I add the second hard drive
later and place it into the array, it just syncs. Want to go back to
just a single drive - no problem. Just fault the device and remove it.
No complicated remounting filesystems or anything - very smooth. This
way you're always on an md device. I would like to see this actually
become the default.
From my perspective dealing mostly with servers, I would like to see
libata get back support for all the previous controllers that were
lost. Like HighPoint. We got killed with F7 when we put in on a few
boxes with HighPoint controllers and the kernel would not even boot.
Much scrambling then ensued. All-in-all just make everything that's in
F7 work well so that the initial experience for new-to-Fedora folks is
really great.
my 2c,
Gerry
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