Date: 08 Apr 2003 10:34:01 -0700 From: swear@attbi.com (Gary W. Swearingen) To: Johnson David <DavidJohnson@Siemens.com> Cc: "Gregory A. Gilliss" <ggilliss@netpublishing.com> Subject: Re: Brilliant and very useful for FreeBSD, IMHO Message-ID: <98he98nbau.e98@localhost.localdomain> In-Reply-To: <200304071107.40633.DavidJohnson@Siemens.com> References: <20030406172035.GA45332@netpublishing.com> <200304071107.40633.DavidJohnson@Siemens.com>
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Johnson David <DavidJohnson@Siemens.com> writes: > Frankly, the expections set forth by the reviewer are unrealistic. She True, but with few exceptions, it's only unrealistic because the many people with the moderate skills needed to do the job are unwilling to invest their time on the job. (I include myself in this category.) I'm not sure why this is. The most skilled and ambitious seem to prefer hacking the guts of the OS or leading their own application project. I suspect that the job of improving the User Experience requires too much difficult human interaction by designers, etc. I've observed a couple of Linux distribution developments which make me think that the problem of "ease of use" is more one of desire to do the job well than one of huge difficulty/manpower. The first is "Red Hat Linux" from 1995-2000 while I used it. Until fairly late in that period, almost all of the installation stuff was developed by one or two guys and almost all of it was developed early on. Horrible, poorly-documented, user-unfriendly crap that they just kept pushing out the door while improving their BS marketing machine. They spent millions on lord knows what, supporting kernel developers, GNOME people to re-develop the GUI wheel to replace KDE, etc. They could have easily afforded to polish their installer using the same old character-based GUI, or even the development of a real GUI installer like their poor cousin Mandrake did. Eventually, they made a poor attempt to catch up with Mandrake, but it's still unfriendly, even (and especially?) for experts. The second is "Lycoris" (formerly "Redmond Linux"). This was mostly developed by one guy (with some help from a few remote helpers). I laughed when I heard his early ambitions, but I've read at least one glowing review of his product and it has satisfied at least one OEM. > wants a Windows clone. If an easy-to-install GUI Linux OS is a Windows clone, then yes. Few people wouldn't want such an OS. Even without better automating the install process, the FreeBSD installer could be greatly improved with *relatively* little effort. The thing is just un-polished and unfriendly. Several confusingly- different ways of navigating menus; use of esoteric, undocumented terms, poor help system, poor explanations of what's happening at each step, etc. The many efforts devoted to a developing better GUI installer software would have been better spent re-thinking the use of the old VGA software, but of course, that wouldn't have been as much fun and one can't fault people for doing what pleases them instead of doing what would be better for FreeBSD. I might as well mention my pipe-dream installer. It's text-based; has few features and fewer options; boots off one or a few floppies (or CDROM); offers to install to pre-existing unpartitioned areas of hard disks with selectable levels of "autoness"; offers to partition disks; installs only a minimial OS (ideally, text or VGA option) to a temporary OS directory tree from which the real OS installation (selectable binary or source, from CDROM, FTP, NFS, etc. distribution) is performed. The temporary OS has sufficient tools for allowing OS config tweaks, FreeBSD Handbook & FAQ, and a good software installer (same used for install and updates of both kernel and basic & ported applications) which allows the real OS and applications to be selected (by pre-configured sets and/or individually). Ideally, it would come with M$Win software to allow the user to use M$Win tools to pack the M$Win partitions and create unpartitioned areas of disk for dual booters who want to share a disk.
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