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Debian GUI Operating Systems Software

Debian Installer Beta 3 Usability Review 401

Posted by timothy from the new-member-of-the-newbie-pantheon dept.
Marcus Thiesen writes "Debian Installer Beta 3 was released two days ago and I wrote a small review concerning the installation part. The new debian installer is good way to set up your favorite distribution. Nontheless there are a few usability things and I thought that it might be a good idea to write a walkthrough from another point of view: Bob 'average' User."
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Debian Installer Beta 3 Usability Review More

Debian Installer Beta 3 Usability Review

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  • Wow (Score:5, Funny)

    by Dark Lord Seth ( 584963 ) on Tuesday March 16, 2004 @07:57PM (#8584555) Journal
    The new debian installer is good way to set up your favorite distribution.

    The Debian Installer can install Slackware then?

    • Re:Wow (Score:5, Funny)

      by RichardK ( 459623 ) on Tuesday March 16, 2004 @08:06PM (#8584632)
      The Debian Installer can install Slackware then?
      Don't you know that EVERYONE'S favourite dist is Debain?? Or at least SHOULD be Debian.
      Throw caution to the wind. Grow some new chest hairs and install Debian, the only GREAT distribution!

      This is, of course, my unbiased opinion... can't you tell?

      • Re:Wow (Score:5, Funny)

        by Billly Gates ( 198444 ) on Tuesday March 16, 2004 @08:43PM (#8584902) Journal
        No that would be FreeBSD silly.

      • Re:Wow (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Lord Kano ( 13027 ) on Tuesday March 16, 2004 @08:48PM (#8584939) Homepage Journal
        Grow some new chest hairs and install Debian, the only GREAT distribution!

        If you want to get frustrated enough to pull out all of your chest hairs, try installing Gentoo.

        After about 6 hours, I have given up on it. The gentoo-cursors package wouldn't install from ANY of the mirrors.

        LK

        • Re:Wow (Score:4, Interesting)

          by Afrosheen ( 42464 ) on Tuesday March 16, 2004 @10:05PM (#8585453)
          Yeah, but the Gentoo-cursors package wouldn't install ALOT FASTER than other distributions.

          Gentoo people, can you back me up on this one? Gentoo is lightning quick from what I hear!

        • I find Gentoo a lot easier than Debian to install. I've installed Gentoo on x86es and SPARCs without much of a headache. But try as I might I cannot get Debian to install right on any platform. I've tried dozens of times; I've gotten a bootable system maybe 5 times and never gotten X to work. For some reason installing Debian reminds me of programming a VCR, which I also can't do.

          It's like on the one hand you have RedHat or SuSE-type installs where you get a nice GUI that makes installing easy. On the othe

          • This may be horrible advice, but this is how I always get X to work:

            First, get any distro that gets X to run properly on your system (Knoppix generally does well). Copy the /etc/X11/XF86Config file. When you're done installing the new distro, if X barfs, make a backup of their XF86Config, copy the working file over, and restart X. More than likely, it will work.

            Also, if you care about how the config file works, looking at the differences between the two is illuminating.

            I know it's silly that

        • Some keen observations... (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Sevn ( 12012 )
          Gentoo threads get overrun by people talking about how great Debian is. That starts flamewars.

          You almost never see a Gentoo user start an anti-debian thread in a Gentoo story. It's always started by some anti-gentoo/pro-debian comment.

          Debian threads (like this one) get overrun by people flaming Gentoo for no apparent reason at all. It's always a Debian user that brings Gentoo up like some ex-girlfriend that slept with their friends and dumped them.

          Level headed people like myself that use both OS's step i

    • Re:Wow (Score:4, Funny)

      by Tuxinatorium ( 463682 ) on Tuesday March 16, 2004 @08:10PM (#8584658) Homepage
      No, but here's what God has to say about slackware, you Debian-hating infidel: thus spake GOD to the Debian Infidels [zoy.org]

  • Bob? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Deraj DeZine ( 726641 ) on Tuesday March 16, 2004 @07:57PM (#8584557)
    point of view: Bob 'average' User

    What happened to Joe User? Did he finally wise up about using GUIs and get fired or something? I never really liked Joe User, anyway (I mean, what an idiot!), I'm just curious.

  • Isn't "new" and "debian" in the same sentence (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 16, 2004 @08:01PM (#8584585)
    an oxymoron? :P

    • Re:Isn't "new" and "debian" in the same sentence (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Trejkaz ( 615352 ) on Tuesday March 16, 2004 @09:18PM (#8585155) Homepage

      I couldn't see much difference between this installer and the last one anyway. Although the notable difference is there doesn't seem to be any way to do alternate steps this time around.

      Still, when I heard "new installer" I was thinking "GUI". Sucks to be disappointed.

      • Re:Isn't "new" and "debian" in the same sentence (Score:4, Insightful)

        by phrasebook ( 740834 ) on Wednesday March 17, 2004 @02:10AM (#8586691)
        Still, when I heard "new installer" I was thinking "GUI". Sucks to be disappointed.

        I'm relieved actually. Nothing worse than booting up into some cheap-looking GUI setup program, likely running in some weird VGA mode at a headache-inducing refresh rate. (Ok that's how it was a while ago, I dunno recently since I've been using Debian. I guess so long as your hardware is supported by X it's alright).

        Debian's installer works fine. I've always liked it. All I use is up, down, tab and enter keys to move through the simple screens. I've never had it crash or do weird things, unlike my experiences with some other installers. Thank goodness it hasn't changed (much), and I hope it is going to be as reliable as the old one.

        • I was thinking a fallback would be workable. Run 800x600 at the highest refresh rate possible, just using the vesa driver. If it can't do graphics, it could just fall back to the text version. Two views to the same model.

          At the very least it would have been nice if they used some kind of pretty font for the console.

      • Re:Isn't "new" and "debian" in the same sentence (Score:4, Informative)

        by zonix ( 592337 ) on Wednesday March 17, 2004 @02:59AM (#8586846) Journal
        Still, when I heard "new installer" I was thinking "GUI". Sucks to be disappointed.

        Come on, it has been stated multiple times that the new Debian installer, when done, can easily be hooked up to a fancy GUI frontend!

        From the "About the Debian Installer" [debian.org] page:
        It has been designed to be more modular, easier to use, and more extensible than the old installation system.

        Anyway, it's still in development, and much that's being changed is happening behind the scenes. When the time comes you will see a GUI frontend, I'm sure! Of course, it doesn't stop there.

        z
  • Why not have a single selection at the beginning that says "Install all defaults"? Hit that, let the installer figure out all your hardware settings, and come back an hour later with a fully installed OS.

    Maybe throw in a warning that the whole disk will be wiped out, but how much user interaction does an installer really need?

    • Re:Bob just chose all the default selections (Score:4, Insightful)

      by NanoGator ( 522640 ) on Tuesday March 16, 2004 @08:07PM (#8584636) Homepage Journal
      "Maybe throw in a warning that the whole disk will be wiped out, but how much user interaction does an installer really need? "

      Seeing as how the big mindset is that Linux has choices upon choices of stuff for every little task, I'd say it's pretty much painted itself into that little corner. "Why put Konqueror there instead of Mozilla?" (Yeah, I know, not a great example.)

      I guess what I'm saying is deciding on the defaults is sort of like trying to order pizza for everybody in the room.
      • That's the Idea behind UserLinux. Set package defaults, so that when you go to install it, the least amount of user interaction is needed to set up, not only desktops, but corporate servers, etc etc. So what if there is choice? Users should be taught every early on that there is choice, and how to get that amount of choice is to use Apt-get install "choice". With choice, comes the responsibility of using it (think: voting).

      • Re:Bob just chose all the default selections (Score:4, Insightful)

        by shadowbearer ( 554144 ) on Tuesday March 16, 2004 @11:29PM (#8585994) Homepage Journal
        Considering that Konqueror is a browser that is integrated with KDE, while Mozilla is a standalone browser which is cross-platform, no, I wouldn't say that it's a good example at all.

        As to choices, that's the great strength of linux. There are distributions such as Mandrake, which asks minimal numbers of questions per install (basically, what do you want to install/how do you want to use the system, + basic network mouse questions - for newbies) to distributions like LFS/Gentoo/Debian, giving the abilility to be able to install and customize the system to your liking, down to the most minute detail.

        Windows cannot, and most likely will never be able to, span that range of options. Sure, even the most user-friendly dists like Mandrake and Redhat (Lycoris, Lindows, etc) need some tweaking. But they are well on their way.

        MS Windows is just plain *limited* - and when you are customizing installs for customers who want to do certain things, that's a liability.

        Now, let's argue about operating systems that are friendly not only to users, or to techs, but to *both* because that makes a huge difference when it comes to having your box serviced :)

        SB

    • Maybe throw in a warning that the whole disk will be wiped out, but how much user interaction does an installer really need?

      Which disk? (I know! the wrong one!)

    • Re:Bob just chose all the default selections (Score:5, Insightful)

      by saberworks ( 267163 ) on Tuesday March 16, 2004 @08:18PM (#8584727)
      Agreed. Most people setting up linux initially (especially those that need this installer), don't care about how their drive gets partitioned or what gets installed where. What they do care about is whether their sound works, whether they can print, whether they can change their screen resolution, etc.

      • Re:Bob just chose all the default selections (Score:5, Informative)

        by AKnightCowboy ( 608632 ) on Tuesday March 16, 2004 @08:35PM (#8584845)
        Most people setting up linux initially (especially those that need this installer), don't care about how their drive gets partitioned or what gets installed where.

        Debian's current installer is absolutely horrible. The Solaris text based installer is even easier than Debian's! I've lost more than a few potential converts based just on the fact that they got lost trying to figure out how to do something simple like setup their network card. Off to Mandrake they went and they're happy. Oh well.

    • Re:Bob just chose all the default selections (Score:5, Informative)

      by MBCook ( 132727 ) <foobarsoft@foobarsoft.com> on Tuesday March 16, 2004 @08:21PM (#8584750) Homepage
      I think that's a BAD idea. All those choices are important. Some may be confusing (like the Grub stuff) but it's important. If you make a "choose the default for everything" option, I would be FAR too worried that there would be many people who would choose that and then find out that it overwrote their whole hard drive, when they only thought it would choose the default selection of packages and such. As long as there are sensible defaults, I don't see any reason not to prompt them for that stuff.

      That said, much of that DOESN'T have defaults. What's the default langauge/keymap? If you have an odd keyboard you could find yourself in serious trouble. What's the default timezone? And I don't think the machine name/root password/user name/etc have good defaults either.

      I think they did a great job, and if the user wants the defaults they can just hit "enter" a bunch of times like you have to in so much software. The "all defaults" setting doesn't really start to apply untill you get to package selections and configurations. Windows does it the same way, and it makes great sense.

  • Mandrake (Score:5, Insightful)

    by kundor ( 757951 ) <kundor@nOSPam.member.fsf.org> on Tuesday March 16, 2004 @08:02PM (#8584596) Homepage
    Really, I've never understood why distros don't take advantage of the GPL and use the easy-to-use installers with magic hardware detection from the likes of Mandrake.

    Everything mandrake does is gpl'd, so there's no reason that debian couldn't keep their crazy "hard" installer for traditionalists and setup the mandrake installer to install debian easy-like for newbies. why duplicate effort?

    • Re:Mandrake (Score:2, Interesting)

      by jrockway ( 229604 ) *
      I really like the Debian installer. I'm used to it (on x86 AND ppc), and it just works for me. I know what to expect, I know that I don't have to get graphics working to install the distro. The more I use it, the better it seems.

      Then again, I've never used a graphical installer.

      • Re:Mandrake (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Karamchand ( 607798 ) on Tuesday March 16, 2004 @08:13PM (#8584682)
        Right, you like it because you're used to it, because you used it many times.
        But here we're speaking about mainstream. Mainstream's hobby isn't installing an operating system. It's not even playing around with a computer. The computer is a tool, the operating system is installed not more than once.

        And with one installation you're certainly not used to an installer like Debian's.
        Accept it - human being remember and recognize pictures more easily than plain text.

        • Re:Mandrake (Score:4, Interesting)

          by jrockway ( 229604 ) * <jon-nospam@jrock.us> on Tuesday March 16, 2004 @08:22PM (#8584758) Homepage Journal
          Windows is for the Mainstream crowd. I mean, most people don't care about Freedom or choice in software. Sometimes you have to deal with a "hard" installer to get a "better" OS.

          I was raised on MacOS. I have no problems with anything under Linux.

          I am good at reading, though. If you like reading, and don't mind having to think, Linux is for you. Otherwise, it's probably not worth it.

    • Re:Mandrake (Score:5, Insightful)

      by debrain ( 29228 ) on Tuesday March 16, 2004 @08:13PM (#8584689) Journal
      Everything mandrake does is gpl'd, so there's no reason that debian couldn't keep their crazy "hard" installer for traditionalists and setup the mandrake installer to install debian easy-like for newbies. why duplicate effort?

      That would require porting the Mandrake installer to all the Debian ports [debian.org]. There are good x86 installers for Debian, from Progeny [progeny.com] at least, but it, like Mandrake's, just isn't portable enough to be officially Debian.

      • Re:Mandrake (Score:3, Informative)

        by buchanmilne ( 258619 )
        There are good x86 installers for Debian, from Progeny at least, but it, like Mandrake's, just isn't portable enough to be officially Debian.

        Mandrake's installer is in perl and perl-GTK2. A platform that doesn't have perl isn't a real unix, and one that can't run perl-GTK2 isn't going to be worthwhile for GUI use ...

        And, considering the community [mandrakesoft.com] is reviving the sparc/sparc64 port of Mandrake and maintaining the alpha port, the Mandrake community would welcome help in porting DrakX to the architectures i

    • Re:Mandrake (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Smitedogg ( 527493 ) on Tuesday March 16, 2004 @08:17PM (#8584718) Homepage
      At COMDEX I asked one of the progeny guys about this. He told me that it was because they try to be as multi-platform as possible: it should work on an old ultra-5 as well as on your amd-64. Making sure something works on a headless box is higher priority than making it pretty. Comes down to design philosophy I guess.

      Dogg

    • Re:Mandrake (Score:2, Funny)

      by miryth ( 732380 )
      In fact, why not use the Gentoo installer? It's installed Gentoo perfectly for me two times out of three! Whereas all the Debian installer did for me is install Debian... oh and Xfree didn't work by default. And since this was in my early struggles with linux, when I found out that the gui didn't work and that I didn't have a clue how the configuration file for Xfree worked (much less which part was broken), I just went on to Slackware. Of course, until it stopped working with my soundcard one reboot, then

    • *11* platforms (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Chris Pimlott ( 16212 ) on Tuesday March 16, 2004 @08:33PM (#8584831)
      Debian has it harder than the other guys; most distributions focus on just one platform (intel), or just a few (alpha, sparc, powerpc). Debian supports 11 hardware platforms [debian.org]. They need a flexible system that supports the needs of all of them. I'm not personally knowledgable about the internals of either the Debian or Mandrake installers, but this is probably one of the reasons they can't just use an "off-the-shelf" installer from another distro.

    • here's why (Score:4, Informative)

      by qortra ( 591818 ) on Tuesday March 16, 2004 @08:48PM (#8584938)
      Go to Mandrake forums and read about all the poeple that have difficulties with getting the installer to work properly. Don't get me wrong; I'm not flaming Mandrake. They have their purpose, but it is a different one than Debian's.

      If you have normal stuff (1 year old intel processor, intel chipset, nvidia video card, one 1024x768x24bpp screen, ata133 hard drive) than those automated installs work just fine. But deviate too much from the norm, and things start getting really hairy with Mandrake. The fact is that Debian supports a TON of architectures and a TON of hardware, those automated installs probably won't work properly at all on many of the architectures that Debian supports.

      That being said, Debian is probably going to eventually get a nice new graphical installer [progeny.com] courtesy of Red Hat.

    • Re:Mandrake (Score:4, Insightful)

      by TwistedSpring ( 594284 ) * on Wednesday March 17, 2004 @05:12AM (#8587257) Homepage
      [!!!!] Option

      Welcome to Debian. Choose your poison:

      [x] Nice installer
      [ ] Insanely difficult installer

      [ Cancel ] [ OK ]
  • the installation seemed to contain a lot of stuff I didn't know. At least they had recommended choices to keep some unwanted stuff from happening.

  • Knoppix (Score:4, Insightful)

    by timefactor ( 265504 ) <timefactor.public@gmail.com> on Tuesday March 16, 2004 @08:05PM (#8584614)
    Hasn't Knoppix made the Debian installer a moot point for Bob 'Average' User, at least for the desktop?
    • Yup, I got an entire class of non-tech people through the knoppix-installer stuff. Works like a charm :)

    • Re:Knoppix (Score:3, Informative)

      by bfree ( 113420 )
      Hell NO! I like/love Knoppix BUT when I recently decided to install a Debian based desktop for someone else, I tried both types of knoppix installs and a pure debian install from beta2. Beta2 won hands down, because afterwards I could figure out how to get my packages into order, updating them and getting what I wanted. With Knoppix you end up with a hodge-podge of sources that don't really sync up that well together and lots of setup stuff that can make it more ackward to go and adjust things. This

      • Amen (Score:4, Interesting)

        by freeweed ( 309734 ) on Tuesday March 16, 2004 @11:31PM (#8586008)
        I'm a relatively recent Debian convert, thanks to my friends raving about apt-get mostly. I shied away from Debian for a long time because I could never figure out the installer. It's just about the most user-unfriendly application I've ever used. Almost as if they went out of their way to have everything different than everything else (hint: if 99.9% of apps use the arrow keys and enter to select options in a menu, you may want to do the same. Random keys to choose things do not help the user).

        Anyway, after struggling with dselect and whatever else is involved (quite frankly I always got lost about 1/4 of the way in), I discovered Knoppix. It's a non-guru's wet dream, really. Until the day I entered "apt-get upgrade". The next time I booted my machine, squid and apache were both running and were actually listening for connections. My machine tried to load ISDN drivers for some reason, along with something related to braille. I never really spent the time trying to figure out why a metric shitload of new services/modules were being loaded, because unfortunately I needed to use my computer in an unsecured environment. Oh, and I can't remove openoffice anymore either. Apt claims it's not installed, yet it runs fine. *shrug*

        Installing software (and removing things other than openoffice) are a dream. Apt-get is godly. Knoppix itself has just the right amount of stuff in it for me, with some interesting extras I never would try if they weren't there. But I'll never again try an entire upgrade :)

  • Different from Windows xx how? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sphealey ( 2855 ) on Tuesday March 16, 2004 @08:05PM (#8584623)
    I don't want to be too critical of something written in a humorous style, but there were several comments of the form:
    He decided to use the standard and got again a whole bunch of lines of funny things he didn't understand. "Quite a log of stuff I don't understand today" he thought.
    There was nothing I saw on any of the installation screens that would have stopped (or for the most part even confused) anyone who has installed, from scratch, any version of MS Windows from 3.0 through 2000 (I haven't done XP from scratch yet personally). Sure, there are things he wouldn't understand, but then again I don't think there is even anyone at Microsoft who understands what "registering components...updating registry" means!

    If he had never installed any OS from scratch before, sure, he would be confused - but he would be just as confused if he had pulled out the raw W2K install disks on a rainy Saturday.

    sPh

  • Debian Going Mainstream? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by MadWicKdWire ( 734140 ) * on Tuesday March 16, 2004 @08:06PM (#8584626) Homepage
    With RH losing a lot of stock in the tech world, I foresee Debian becoming more mainstream. The only problem about this is, Debian is usually an elitist group of users. Many users of Debian before I switched (06/2003), would just say... "You use Redhat? What are you a girl or something?" I just told them, "Bah... you stink! RPM is the coolest thing ever!" Well, I wish I could have gone back to the days when I was stupid. :) The new Debian install almost makes it as easy to install as Windows. I don't think a GUI is needed for installing an OS onto a machine, plus it causes overhead in the installer and on the disk.

    IMHO... someone should create a "smart" installer that says... "I see you have Windows installed. I can remove it for you. Please press return."

    I don't think it would be any problem. A good scripter/programmer could easily figure it out. I wish I could...

    "Debian... Next to Jesus, it's the only way to Heaven"

  • Those screenshots look familiar... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 16, 2004 @08:06PM (#8584628)
    So this is where RedHat 5.x installer went to... I was wondering what happened to it.

  • Interesting (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Phezult ( 729465 ) on Tuesday March 16, 2004 @08:06PM (#8584629)
    A lot about the process can be learned this way. Most of us are used to this process, and think it all makes sense, but, as the author points out, there are a lot of things that WON'T make sense to "Bob User."

    Debian should have a look a this to see what they can improve.

    IBM is doing something smart, a call went out to employees looking for volunteers to install Linux on their company laptops. This is a great way to start, because those employees will probably feel a lot like "Bob" but have access to internal tech support.

    Wouldn't you like to convert your friends without having to be THEIR tech support?
  • Any word on better working SATA support in Beta 3? I spent a good part of last week trying to get Debian installed on a customer's SATA drive (VIA chipset) It was a far bigger pain than it should have been. I would like to see Debian have some good SATA support in the installer considering how it's taking off.

    • Re:SATA Support? (Score:2, Informative)

      by oddpete ( 710031 )
      From the release notes:

      - new easy to use partitioner that supports automatic partitioning and LVM
      - grub as the default boot loader on i386
      - wireless networking support
      - 2.4.25 kernel, with SATA support and security fixes
      - support for the XFS filesystem
      - support for these architectures: i386, ia64, sparc, m68k (mac), mips, alpha
      - fully translated to 25 languages
      - a boot logo (by Mark Riedesel)
      - a draft installation manual

  • I have tried (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Wierd Willy ( 161814 ) on Tuesday March 16, 2004 @08:13PM (#8584684) Journal
    Several times to install Debian/Gnu on my SGI Indy. As a relative cherry when it comes to goofy installs this is a problem. The websites I have found all seems to take for granted nuances I should probably already know but are left unsaid. Suuch things as WHICH machine to set up WHAT file on and suchlike. The Indy is an r4400 with 96 meg and a 4.3 Gig HD. It does NOT boot from disk. Instructions aimed at knuckleheads such as myself need this goofy level of detail to learn things y'know. I do have a pretty decent redhat 9 machine on the network here that is supposed to be used for the TFTP bootloader but there is detail about setting that up that is also left unsaid. It would be really cool if someone actually tried to understand that there are geeks out there that dont know things and want to learn.

    Dammit.

    • Re:I have tried (Score:5, Informative)

      by graveyhead ( 210996 ) <fletch AT fletchtronics DOT net> on Tuesday March 16, 2004 @09:17PM (#8585149)
      I've installed debian on 2 boxes. You need some other unixy box to start with where you:

      1) Make sure tftpd is installed. Put the 'tftpboot.img' in the tftp root (check /etc/xinetd tftp entry to find out where the root is) Also install the tftp client so you can `tftp localhost` then 'get tftpboot.img' to make sure you have access to the file.

      2) Install dhcpd. Give the SGI box an entry like this:

      host babybox {
      hardware ethernet nn:nn:nn:nn:nn:nn;
      fixed-address 192.168.0.51;
      }

      You can get your hardware ethernet address in the boot command monitor on the SGI.

      3) You may need bootparamd, but I can't figure out exactly what it's doing. I just put `192.168.0.51 = :/` in my bootparams file.

      4) There are 2 odd instructions on debian site that are necessary if you're installing using the 2.4 linux kernel as host:

      echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_no_pmtu_disc
      and
      echo "2048 32767" > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_local_port_range.

      Hope this helps!

  • This looks like progress... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MsGeek ( 162936 ) on Tuesday March 16, 2004 @08:13PM (#8584687) Homepage Journal
    ...especially if they put Kudzu or something like it into the mix to autodetect things like Knoppix does.

    I especially like the option in the auto-partitioner for a separate /home directory. Anyone who doesn't do this is asking for trouble. Knoppix's knx-hdinstall doesn't, and requires some wizard-level incantations to repair.

  • A walkthrough shouldn't be needed... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by abh ( 22332 ) <ahockley@gmail.com> on Tuesday March 16, 2004 @08:14PM (#8584690) Homepage
    If it were truly easy to use, there would be no need for a walkthrough guide... each screen would present choices, and offer help if needed. Software installers should NEVER require external documentation.

  • I've had enough! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Captain Rotundo ( 165816 ) on Tuesday March 16, 2004 @08:15PM (#8584698) Homepage
    Can we all please make this the last GNU/Linux "usability" study that begins with some ridiculous description of a "joe shmoe" mythical target user. I am sick and tired of it. It is possible to make something usable for "normal" users, while at the same time comfortable for both "mewbies" and "power users". Please let us retire "Bob" and "Aunt Tillie" and "Grandma" and every other stupid target user.

    If you don't agree with my statement in the first paragraph go look at http://www.google.com - great for newbies AND power users. I've never heard anyone say "Google works fine for Aunt Tillie and Uncle Bob but I really could use MORE features to the interface." Its interface is clean, simple and completely intuitive. And if you want to do some arcane power search you CAN!.

    And if google isn't a good enough example for you (because its a website and not an OS, etc.) look at GNOME. GNOME has proven that you can make a good clean interface that is user friendly, newbie friendly, and has all the access a "power user" could want. Yes, I firmly believe that the whining about lack of config options in every panel is entirely from masochistic freaks that simply like to know they can easly change whether the delay to close a window when the close button is clicked is 2ms or 3ms WITHOUT having to open a configuration editor. And BTW gconf-editor IS super simple and user friendly ANYWAY!)

    Besides, I am probably what most people would consider experienced with Debian GNU/Linux (been using it exclusively for about 3 years) and I like a good clean, intuitive interface over something that is so-called "geek friendly" any day.

    BTW - No I haven't read the whole article yet, I saw the bob bit and HAD to get this off my chest before I read the rest (now I will).
    • PS - It is not usability at work when you have to read an entire suposedly technical article in the third person, as if I can't figure out what a resonable person would feel if they see something, I need the author to tell me.

      How about next time you just tell me what YOU think about the install, not your imaginary friend.
    • GNOME is a terrible example. GNOME 2.x caused a lot of GNOME'ers to migrate away from the platform. Its very feature-limited, and even as a Linux guru, I find gconf user-friendly only if you understand the hierarchy already.

      Its not just useless features missing in GNOME. Very important things are missing (my personal ones --- no pervasive toolbar editing, no menubar at top).
      • I didn't understand the gconf hierarchy and I figured it out.

        GNOME 1.4 didn't have pervasive toolbar editing, and as a matter of fact GNOME is closer to that now more than ever.

        And all my GNOME installs since 2.0 have had a top menubar (but if you meant you don't want one, it is EASY to move the panel)
        • The gconf hierarchy is much more confusing to understand than KDE configuration panels. And even with gconf, there are lots of things you still cannot configure

          GNOME 1.4 didn't have pervasive toolbar editing, but KDE does. GTK+ 2.4 has the infrastructure for it, so we should see it by GNOME 2.8 (2.6 won't have it).

          And that's not a top menubar, that's a panel. I'm talking about how OS X does it, with the application's menubar at the top.

    • Re:I've had enough! (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday March 16, 2004 @08:39PM (#8584871)

      Can we all please make this the last GNU/Linux "usability" study that begins with some ridiculous description of a "joe shmoe" mythical target user. I am sick and tired of it. It is possible to make something usable for "normal" users

      First you criticise use of "mythical joe shmoe"s, and then you turn around and talk about "normal users". Don't you understand that "joe shmoe" is simply a synonym for "normal user"?

      It is possible to make something usable for "normal" users, while at the same time comfortable for both "mewbies" and "power users".

      One simple example: where should the close button go on windows? If you put it at the top right like on Windows, you will get loads of absolute beginners missing the maximise button that is only a pixel away. Having a destructive* button so close to an often-used but unrelated button is quite simply bad usability.

      But wait - what about the power users that are used to the Microsoft Windows interface? It'll be annoying for them to have to retrain their habits. It boils down to a choice between doing what is best for newbies and doing what is best for experts. Do not make the mistake of thinking this is somehow a special case, there are thousands like it.

      * Of course, most properly-coded applications will ask if you want to save your work if you haven't already, but for an absolute newbie, a window going away when you didn't want it to, and having to figure out how to start it up again is a big deal, even if you haven't lost any work.

      GNOME has proven that you can make a good clean interface that is user friendly, newbie friendly, and has all the access a "power user" could want. Yes, I firmly believe that the whining about lack of config options in every panel is entirely from masochistic freaks that simply like to know they can easly change whether the delay to close a window when the close button is clicked is 2ms or 3ms WITHOUT having to open a configuration editor.

      That's nice - you define anybody who doesn't fit into your argument as "freaks" rather than realising your argument doesn't work. Furthermore, you take the most extreme example possible (1ms difference in some animation? Come on, that's not even close to the complaints) to try and discredit the "freaks".

      Basically, you claim that GNOME gets it right, and then stick your fingers in your ears when people complain about it. You are either fucking stupid or a troll.

    • Hehe. Speaking of usability of google, I've seen someone who had there IE homepage set to google (someone else must have set it for her) and everytime she wanted to go to a web address she would type it into google. Like, she would search for www.cnn.com and of course the first result would be what she wanted. Little did she know that there was an address bar...

  • Muhammad "average" User (Score:5, Interesting)

    by pjpII ( 191291 ) on Tuesday March 16, 2004 @08:15PM (#8584700) Homepage
    I certainly hope that Debian's Arabic support isn't as bad as that in the installer- the letters don't connect! They're typed from left to right! This would be like having the English installer say something like the following:
    (ASU)hsilgnE ni deecorp ot siht esoohC

    Except that its even worse - imagine all the i's seperated from their dots, which are written separately next to them in linear order. And even that would be less ridiculous.

    As someone who does use Arabic frequently when computing, it's something less than a stunning endorsement of Debian

  • Easy Install? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by SoupIsGood Food ( 1179 ) on Tuesday March 16, 2004 @08:17PM (#8584714)
    I've been playing around with various operating systems on an old dual-processor Sun Ultra2 Creator3D, including Debian.

    By far the easiest and quickest install was NetBSD and OpenBSD... if it weren't for lack of SMP support (OpenBSD) or Creator3D ffb framebuffer support (NetBSD), I'd stick with one of them and be happy.

    Gentoo required a copy of the install guide at hand, but it went smoothly until the time came to unpack the stage from the LiveCD... all three were corrupted, choked and died in mid un-tar. I'm going to see if there are newer LiveCD ISO's available, but it's not a rolicking start, and requires too much command line fiddling to start the show. Still, apart from the abject failure to install the tarballs, the process itself is very straight forward.

    Unlike Debian, which has a miserable interface that's at once too convoluted and too spartan to be of any use, and is rotten at picking reasonable defaults. I spent the better part of two days trying to get a booting, networked operating system out of the damn thing.

    Maybe Splack, Aurora and SuSe are better... haven't tried them yet, but compared to NetBSD's clean ASCI console installer, the two popular Linux distros come up way short. (Solaris isn't much of an improvement.)

    Here's the trick: simplify and automate wherever you can, and pick reasonable defaults while offering options to users who know what they're doing. No need for bright, shiny MS-DOS psuedo-GUI's, just a reasonable curses-based interactive program that prompts the user when needed, but otherwise goes and installs a working operating system on its own with minimal intervention required, but available if wanted.

    SoupisGood Food

  • I used Network Install a few days ago and... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by antdude ( 79039 ) on Tuesday March 16, 2004 @08:18PM (#8584721) Homepage Journal
    My rants...

    Last week, my friends convinced me to try Debian [debian.org] OS to replace my old Red Hat [redhat.com] Linux 7.x boxes. I either could go to Gentoo [gentoo.org] or Debian since I didn't want Red Hat any more due to the recent news. A few hardcore Linux users told me to try Debian first. So, I grabbed the Network Install [debian.org] to a bootable CD-RW.

    Since I only wanted to explore the OS, I used VMware [vmware.com] v4.0.5 (256 MB of RAM) on a Pentium 4 3 Ghz host machine. Everything was going well until Debian installer asked a few tricky questions. They were tricky enough even for me, as a computer geek and Linux user (not an expert).

    I struggled with partitioning. The text based UI is nuts. I couldn't use up and down arrow keys. Also, there was no mouse pointer at this stage. At least add a mouse pointer or make this part GUI like Red Hat [redhat.com]'s installer (only used 7.x versions). I also had difficulities setting up partitions which is I am never good with even with Microsoft [microsoft.com] OS'.

    With the help of a Debian friend, I got through this part. Then, the questions got really tricky like which mouse port (/dev/what?). I don't remember. There should be some type of autodetection. IIRC, Red Hat did autodetect for me and that was about three years ago.

    More questions came up. There was one part where I had to enter a hostname. Little did I know, I was NOT supposed to use any capital letters. For example with JohnDoeFooBar, I kept getting an error later during setup from Debian about hostname problems. I changed it to something like johndoe, and no more problems! The setup never told me this. On my old Red Hat Linux boxes, it let me use capitalized letters like: JOHNdoe-P2.

    The other part I struggled was, why didn't Debian's setup give me an option to boot into text mode. I didn't want gdm or any GUI login screens. I prefer text modes like in the old days. Red Hat 7.x did give me this option. I had to get help from my friend to fix this.

    I am still learning Debian slowly. I just learned apt-get command which is nice. It isn't easy for a Debian newbie like me. The installer does need to be improved.

    • Re:I used Network Install a few days ago and... (Score:5, Informative)

      by calc ( 1463 ) on Tuesday March 16, 2004 @08:32PM (#8584822)
      You most likely used the Network Install from Debian 3.0 (boot-floppies) which is 2 years old. The current installer is available from http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/ for testing and fixes most of the problems you mentioned with respect to autodetection, etc. It has worked well for me for the past year.
  • Wouldn't making Linux easy defeat the purpose?

    Not to be a troll (I use linux myself, gentoo) but... what is so special about easy to use GUI installers? I think Microsoft and RedHat have been doing it for quite some time.

  • Eh? (Score:5, Funny)

    by be-fan ( 61476 ) on Tuesday March 16, 2004 @08:26PM (#8584777)
    Though the earlier screen had told him that his selection would affect his location he was still at the same place, in front of his old PC. ...and...
    But it didn't matter as he just had deleted his Windows 98 with fdisk.

    The "average user" is happy to see that the computer didn't teleport him somewhere else, but can still figure out Windows 98 fdisk???

    Online reviews would be much better if we could moderate by throwing rotten fruit at the author...

  • Easy Install Distro for Noobs (Score:3, Insightful)

    by The-Dalai-LLama ( 755919 ) on Tuesday March 16, 2004 @08:31PM (#8584813) Homepage Journal

    For what it's worth, I am the "Bob User" that he wrote for, and the article seemed to fairly accurately reflect the thought process that I would have gone through.

    As far as easy installs go... I've plugged this before [slashdot.org], but I think it's worth repeating that Arklinux [arklinux.org] has a really smooth install (including a little Tetris game to play during loading). After using Knoppix only a few times, I was able to install Ark on a Compaq laptop and give it a whirl.

    Of course, your mileage may vary, but I'm dual-booting Ark on my home computer, and I've switched to using it exclusively (except when I'm playing Disney's Toontown [toontownonline.com], which only runs on I.E.), and I know next to nothing (I sort of know what a command line is, but that's about it.)

    It's still in Alpha, so do be careful, but I would HIGHLY recommend it for clueless "windoze" users looking to get their feet wet.

    The Dalai Llama

    I would while away the hours conversatin' with the flowers... if I only had a .sig

  • This is supposed to be a new installer for Debian? Apart from the opening splash page, it looks just like the installer I used to install Woody and Potato years ago. What am I missing?

    Schwab

    • Re:The *New* Installer? (Score:5, Informative)

      by calc ( 1463 ) on Tuesday March 16, 2004 @08:38PM (#8584863)
      The look ncurses-style tui wasn't intended to be changed. All the actual code, questions, autodetection, etc are new though. Also, the installer is now modular which should help keep Debian from having to take years to fix the installer between releases like was the case with the previous installer.

  • whats the deal with command line installers? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by xot ( 663131 ) <fragiledeathNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Tuesday March 16, 2004 @08:34PM (#8584840) Journal
    Why is it that there are so many people out there who just don't like things the easy way?? Mostly i think they just pretend to like the harder command line interface and wag their tongues when they see a lovely easy click n go installer.heh.
    But seriously , easy installation is one of the key factors through which Linux or unix based systems can gain more marketshare in the desktop section.

  • Bob's installation will fail (Score:3, Insightful)

    by irgu ( 673471 ) on Tuesday March 16, 2004 @08:43PM (#8584897)
    Google says [google.com] Bob will use XP with the preinstalled NTFS [microsoft.com] and it's quite probable he doesn't want to dump it immediately and because Debian still doesn't support non-destructive NTFS resizing [rulez.org] thus the install will fail for him.

  • can somebody please tell me ... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Combuchan ( 123208 ) <seanNO@SPAMemvis.net> on Tuesday March 16, 2004 @08:59PM (#8585017) Homepage
    why Joe User or Bob, rather, is installing debian anyway? The last Debian install I did was on a AMD 5x86/100 tablet (three nights ago). Before that, it was on my Dell Inspiron 1100 that had a crockload of not-well-supported hardware that required me to get 2.5.69 (the latest release at the time).

    Debian installs usually take me several hours to get most things going from the mini/net install (a linux distro occupying 80 MB on your HD?--yeah, debian does that) to a what-I-consider usable system. However, I've configured everything myself exactly to my liking and probably recompiled once or twice.

    Before I go further on my disorganised rant, a graphical easy to use installer that detected everything and booted me into KDM/X with KDE (I use enlightenment and gtk apps) would do nobody in Debian's core audience any good whatsoever and probably only alienate them further.

    Tho I have to say, a few years ago, Storm Linux had a really kickass installer. Progeny's doesn't/didn't require you to reboot afterwards.

    So I probably should be saying that if Bob wants a Linux distro that's easy to install in the beginning yet insanely powerful in the end (thanks to apt), he should be dealing with Progeny or whatever other debian-based distros there are.

    The article did Debian a tremendous disservice in juxtaposing a mythical user with a distro that he'd never try.

    P.S. My favorite install of all time is OpenBSD's. A twenty minute script was all it took--and I hadn't installed OpenBSD before. How kickass it that?
  • This review criticises the installer for requiring the user to make too many decisions, and using unfamiliar terminology (what's a home directory?), in the belief that the installer is designed to make it as easy as possible for Joe User to install Debian. That belief is incorrect.

    As I understand it, the new Debian installer is designed for two purposes - portability to all the architectures Debian uses, and flexibility so Debian can be installed just the way one likes it on the widest possible variety of hardware. Idiot-proofing is a lot lower priority. You may disagree with their prioritisation. I personally think that if you're not prepared to spend a few minutes reading some instructions before you install a new operating system and totally change the way your computer operates, you shouldn't be installing a new operating system anyway.

    If you want an all-singing, all-dancing, drool-proof, but less flexible Debian installer just for i386, I believe Progeny has built one.

  • My impression of OS installers (Score:5, Insightful)

    by moosesocks ( 264553 ) on Tuesday March 16, 2004 @11:39PM (#8586045) Homepage
    Windows 2000/XP: Partially text-mode, and yet, could be easily installed by ANYBODY.

    Knoppix - Winner for obvious reasons

    RedHat - A bit overcomplicated the last time I used it, but easy nonetheless. The graphical installer is nice, but doesn't always work. If you're lucky, you're sent to the curses-based textmode installer which is lightyears better than debian's. (of course, there are screwups, and videocard detection can crash on exotic hardware)

    Gentoo - No installer is a good installer. HONESTLY! If you carefully follow their directions exactly using the examples they give you, a proficent Windows user could get it working. The installation process is incredibly well-documented. As a plus, a quick post to their forum will usually yield a solution in under an hour. I have yet to see another free distro which offers that kind of support. Despite all this, they still need a REAL installer.

    Mac OS X : Next, I agree, Next, Yes, Reboot. Done. Enough said.

    BeOS: I once accidentally installed this without realizing it (the version that came packaged for windows).

    Debian: From the people that brought you EMACS! Debian was my first distro, mostly because it was availible on floppies (my PC at the time wouldn't boot from a CD), and it had a nifty install-on-demand feature which required you to only download the 20mb base (yes, onto floppies), which would then allow you to set up a LAN or PPP connection to download the proper packages (I was on 56k, so the PPP option was a godsend). Needless to say, it wasn't all that difficult or painful, though it had quite a few rough spots. (Such as a nasty bug where the installer's FDISK mixed up the device names, causing me to nuke the wrong partition.

    This was 3 years ago. The screenshots in the article show an installer that's almost identical to the one I remember. Honestly, couldn't they have made SOME advances? The installer is simply a disgrace, and needs to be 10x easier!

    As for me, I'll stick with my mac. I like an OS that doesn't have to be reinstalled regularly.

  • Joe - stay away from the damn machine (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Tom ( 822 ) on Wednesday March 17, 2004 @03:06AM (#8586866) Homepage Journal
    Why exactly - marketing aside - should the installer care about an average luser? People with no clue nor willingness to acquire one are the main source of virtually any computing problem we have, be it security, spam, worms, whatever.

    I don't want Joe Idiot being able to install a computer. No matter how you do it - and Debian is quite good in warning users about unsafe settings - Joe will fuck it up and bring another machine that's already as good as compromised online. Thanks a lot, Joe!

    Please, care about the clued-in sysadmin. Give Joe the finger. In fact, IMHO the install should fail and tell the user in no uncertain terms that he's too dumb to run this system if he tries something like setting an empty root password.

  • There's two uses for an installer (Score:3, Informative)

    by gilesjuk ( 604902 ) <giles.jones@nospaM.zen.co.uk> on Wednesday March 17, 2004 @10:35AM (#8588697)
    Firstly to install a very basic Linux system which will allow you to get onto the Internet and download all the latest packages.

    Second use is to install a system from the CD tailored to your needs.

    In both these cases I feel Debian's installer requires too much fiddling around. What it needs is menu with "Typical role for this installation" and options like:

    [] Desktop computer
    [] Web Server
    [] Database Server
    [] Minimal install
    [] Custom

    The custom option would allow you to setup the packages you require and allow you to load one of the presets to base your custom selections on.

    Also why can't the installer be a bit more intelligent and read the current disk layout and make some clever suggestions?

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