On 23.02.2015 08:44, Tim wrote:
On Sun, 2015-02-22 at 15:01 -0700, Chris Murphy wrote:
What you're talking about might be in-scope for blivet-gui. It definitely sounds out of scope for a GUI OS installer.
Windows, OS X installers have maybe 2-3 total layouts between them. And their installers are completely, totally, bullet proof. They don't ever crash, or ask the user to create required partitions, they always succeed in their penultimate goal which is to install a bootable OS. And there are essentially zero user complaints about these installers. There's nothing at all to even complain about because they don't do anything except meet their primary requirement. Not even their developers or testers even complain about the installer, it does one thing successfully.
While I don't find it hard to believe that Windows developers won't complain. After all, just about all Windows users do is install Windows as a new install, or over the top of a previous one, with no intention of doing anything like dual-boot. Shoe-horn it in, that's all they care about. These days, it's all single-partition, or act like it's single-partition with a hidden boot/recovery partition that the user doesn't know about.
I find it harder to believe that users don't complain about the Windows installer. I've certainly seen it fuck up, and I can't be the only one. It was a gamble to see whether an install over the top could manage to keep existing data, never mind settings. And trying to get it to install to the right drive in a two-drive PC was nothing but trial and error (one drive for Windows, a second drive for video on a non-linear editing suite).
I, also, am rather incredulous of how difficult it is to have the Linux installer simply do what the user tells it to do, instead of second-guessing them and denying them of what they want to do. If I select custom partition, and edit partitions myself, type of options, I expect it to have a GUI that does what I tell it to do.
In the past, before the live DVD install era, I'd boot the install disc and wait for to pause on some screen, then CTRL + ALT + FUNCTION-KEY to another terminal, and fdisc my hard drive, and go back to the installer and have it use my pre-defined partitions. Even further back, I'd select the options to check partitions for faults, rather than get a nasty surprise a few months in when the drive reaches a certain amount of fullness and comes across a bad section.
I don't know what's really so hard about giving us a simple GUI hard drive partitioner somewhere in the install routine. Using the command line tool is a pain (e.g. you cannot see any details about the rest of the drive while you're working on making a partition), and there are other standalone GUI partitioning tools that exist.
Leave the so-called automatic smart partitioning to those people who choose the full-automatic option.
Don't be depressed, who care about proprietary nonsense crap, in the first place. :)