From owner-freebsd-hackers Thu Jul 1 12:19:55 1999 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from feral.com (feral.com [192.67.166.1]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 9A19215232 for ; Thu, 1 Jul 1999 12:19:51 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from mjacob@feral.com) Received: from semuta.feral.com (semuta [192.67.166.70]) by feral.com (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id MAA18049; Thu, 1 Jul 1999 12:20:14 -0700 Date: Thu, 1 Jul 1999 12:19:27 -0700 (PDT) From: Matthew Jacob Reply-To: mjacob@feral.com To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" Cc: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Lizard... In-Reply-To: <68739.930855955@zippy.cdrom.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG >OK, I'll add a few comments to this. And I'll respond... The actual pros and cons of the current installer and what a new one would look like is not the real question to answer here,... I have to say that what we have isn't that bad- it fails only in some areas where it violates the principle of least surprise. It's quite similar to the Slackware install in that it's simple but does have some fastpath items that work for a large number of cases and it tries to sanity check as it goes. That's really all that's needed for almost all the cases (I assert). I'm really not sure that the Windows-like look is a smart move. I mean, KDE looks like a VGA version of win95 and this was all a clever joke with fvwm95 but it's wearing thin. What actual marketing information do we actually have that says that in order to go after the desktops we aren't currently installed on we have to add a lot of engineering effort to the installer? Would it be better to try and work some deals with Compaq or Dell (so that they hedge their bets on Linux) and be a preinstalled choice for those systems instead of trying go after the (exceedingly rare and getting rarer) desktop user who actually installs an entire OS from CD? -matt To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message