[fedora-india] A suggestion

[Siddhesh Poyarekar]

On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 2:07 PM, Dharmit Shah <shahdharmit at gmail.com> wrote:
> I made a suggestion on Fedoraforum.org. A guy there asked me to communicate
> directly with the fedora project. Since there are contributors from India I
> thought of posting it here. Here's the link to my post. It's a humble
> suggestion with no aggression. So if someone of you finds it harsh, don't
> start firing me. :-)
>

It would have been nice if you could actually paste your suggestion
here instead of simply linking to it (that too in html). It helps
keeping context of the conversation for those who read the mailing
list via the web interface. I will paste it here for you:

===================
Hello,

I am a happy Linux, specifically Fedora, user since almost 2 years.
But I've tried various flavors of Linux till now. I've been telling my
friends to use Linux and ditch Windows. Some of them have given a shot
to Linux as well. But there is one thing that confuses many.

During installation everything except partitioning is simple. For
experienced Linux user, it is not an issue at all. But I've seen many
newbies getting confused when it comes to partitioning. They generally
use default option and at times it wipes out the entire hard disk.
Windows' installation gives a very simple layout of partitions on the
hard disk which makes its installation very simple for dumb computer
users as well. The wiping out of data makes people feel like Linux is
too tough to install. Even worse thinking that some people around me
have developed is that Linux takes up entire hard disk in
installation. On the contrary, we - the Linux fans, know that it
hardly requires 5 GB of disk space.

I think there needs to be little change or modification to the
installer in order to make the installation bit more newbie-friendly.

PS - I am not being harsh to Linux installation. I am die-hard Linux
fan and want to see Linux flourish day-by-day. So this is a simple
suggestion from my side.
===================

Newbies never ever try to install Windows alongside another OS, so it
would be unfair to compare installation simplicity based on
partitioning. A fair comparison would be default partitions for
Windows vs Linux (fedora, Ubuntu, etc) and they're not too different.
I would vote for the Linux installer being better purely because it
allows decent control in case of multiboot.

As for the default option, I understand that it is to use all linux
partitions and empty space as of Fedora 13 and that should not eat up
your Windows partition. I have never had a chance to explore this
lately though, since I have not installed Windows and Linux in
parallel for some years now.

-- 
Siddhesh Poyarekar
http://siddhesh.in