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.
:)