Only handle the simple cases. When they don't tell you exactly what they are going to do, well then they are useless because you can't trust them. Gonna touch the gpt ? Gonna create a hybrid mbr? Gonna force me to use CSM? Gonna *touch* any other partition than what I tell you??? hard pass.
I actually miss the older style gui installers where you picked all your options and which packages you wanted to install first, then let 'er rip. I guess asking too many questions up front was seen as intimidating to newbies.
Sadly, as soon as someone makes a decent installer, they feature creep it into uselessness. The anaconda installer for Red Hat is a prime example, compounded by the room full of monkeys trying to write Hamlet that wrote the GUI for writing kickstart configurations. anaconda supports writing multiple sequential '%post" or "%pre" scripts, but the GUI for writing
Holy crap, what a great article . . . and also a reminder of why a crap GUI isn't any more useful than a crap CLI, much less a good CLI.
Sadly, IMO, the CUPS user experience hasn't improved all that much in the intervening 15 years. Many distros provide their own tooling which is much better. But go to http://localhost:631/ [localhost] on most distros and you will find yourself just as lost as you would have been 15 years ago.
Now, for me, fighting with CUPS from time to time, and a half dozen other things like it, is an acceptable price to pay in exchange for what Linux brings me overall.
But for Aunt Tillie, it is not, and, given that the experience has changed little in 15 years, I think it is fair to say that unless someone else sets it up first, desktop Linux is probably not for her.
GUI installers (Score:-1)
Only handle the simple cases.
When they don't tell you exactly what they are going to do, well then they are useless because you can't trust them.
Gonna touch the gpt ? Gonna create a hybrid mbr? Gonna force me to use CSM? Gonna *touch* any other partition than what I tell you???
hard pass.
Re: (Score:5, Interesting)
I actually miss the older style gui installers where you picked all your options and which packages you wanted to install first, then let 'er rip. I guess asking too many questions up front was seen as intimidating to newbies.
Open Source Interfaces (Score:1)
Eric Raymond did an essay years ago about open source interfaces and why they're so bad
http://www.catb.org/~esr/writi... [catb.org]
Sadly, as soon as someone makes a decent installer, they feature creep it into uselessness. The anaconda installer for Red Hat is a prime example, compounded by the room full of monkeys trying to write Hamlet that wrote the GUI for writing kickstart configurations. anaconda supports writing multiple sequential '%post" or "%pre" scripts, but the GUI for writing
Re:Open Source Interfaces (Score:2)
Holy crap, what a great article . . . and also a reminder of why a crap GUI isn't any more useful than a crap CLI, much less a good CLI.
Sadly, IMO, the CUPS user experience hasn't improved all that much in the intervening 15 years. Many distros provide their own tooling which is much better. But go to http://localhost:631/ [localhost] on most distros and you will find yourself just as lost as you would have been 15 years ago.
Now, for me, fighting with CUPS from time to time, and a half dozen other things like it, is an acceptable price to pay in exchange for what Linux brings me overall.
But for Aunt Tillie, it is not, and, given that the experience has changed little in 15 years, I think it is fair to say that unless someone else sets it up first, desktop Linux is probably not for her.