On 2012/07/09 15:59 (GMT-0700) Adam Williamson composed:
Chris Lumens wrote:
(1) In our experience, most people will decide they are advanced (they genuinely think they are advanced, or don't want to feel like they're missing something, etc.) so there's little point to dividing the interface like this.
(2) Maintaining two interfaces is a nightmare.
(3) The time for making major design decisions was the first half of 2011, when we started talking about this.
Note that Mandriva used to have this kind of 'simple/advanced' design in its installer and progressively dropped all the 'advanced' dialogs, for precisely the reasons Chris suggests.
Most OS installers have been big disappointments to me, particularly including Anaconda and Mandriva/Mageia's, which I've used more than any others save one. I've yet to sample the new F18 Anaconda, but from what I've read here, I expect to like it even less. Why? Read on...
YaST2: SLES, SLED & openSUSE's single interface used for both installation package selection/personalization and post-installation package selection/personalization; most powerful installer I've ever seen, and requiring of less than 0.5G RAM (I did one with 384G recently) and of 0 swap to do a full-featured GUI installation. Yet to get a simple installation with only one DE and no personalization, or a minimal X or server, requires little material difference in mouse clicks than less powerful and flexible installers that need more RAM and/or swap to get done the more limited amount that they can do.
YaST allows me to get virtually all global configuration done during the installation process, so that my personalized system has all necessary and desired software, and no more, installed and ready to go when I login the first time, leaving me to need only fix a few unfortunate defaults and disable bling to get back to work. In YaST, I get to add wanted or lock out unwanted software on a package by package basis if I so choose. I don't have to install all KDE's bloatware to get the parts of KDE, and no more than is absolutely required of Gnome/GTK to run Geckos, required to get my work done. It also lets me add repos, so that I can include software that didn't fit on the DVD.
KISS has its place, but IMO, a Linux distro installer is a poor location for it as high priority policy.
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