Interested in helping improve the Fedora desktop experience?

[Adam Williamson]

On Wed, 2009-10-21 at 14:21 -0400, Máirín Duffy wrote:

> These are great points. We definitely don't want build bandaid upon
> bandaid upon bandaid of cruft.
> 
> Generally speaking, no matter what the specifics are of the issue the
> users might run into, do you think the following ideas make sense:
> 
> - having an area in get fedora, perhaps the proposed post-download
> splash
> (https://fedoraproject.org/w/uploads/f/fb/Getfpo-downloadfinishsplash_1.png),
> perhaps even further up front, where as issues with the installation
> process (and general experience post-install) are reported, they are
> listed with workarounds right there
> 
> - similar to the above, but have the actual installer some how (i don't
> know how yet) give you some fair warning or suggestion when things go
> around (things like Colin's bugzilla idea)
> 
> So maybe we don't hard code nvidia, or maybe on a server somewhere
> there's a listing based on reports that anaconda could try to connect to
> and if it detects something... or maybe it's all documentation, there's
> no HW detection involved. I don't know. It's hard to suggest specific
> ideas to solve the problems before we've gone through the process of
> completely combing it and identifying all the problems in play here.

I think simplicity and generic-ness are are friends here. Having the
common bugs page and release notes prominently highlighted during the
install experience seem to address a lot of the issues, or at least
start to, for me. It should be relatively easy for the post-download
splash to include or link to the 'Installation issues' section of the
common bugs page, for instance.
 
> Yep. I think it's an *excellent* improvement to the install user
> experience right now that the page is even available. I think as part of
> this project I'm proposing, we should look at how we can make it more
> visible and useful for folks like my friend so he could have noticed the
> workarounds before wasting so much time and suffering so much pain!
> 
> How did the similar page work in Mandriva? How did you folks broadcast
> it to your user base then? Was it pulled into any apps or marketed in
> any way we might be able to learn from?

The actual layout of the page is much like the Fedora one, really,
there's no significant difference. It was explicitly linked to (along
with the release notes) in the installer. Any release communication
included references either direct to the release notes and errata, or a
link to the general page for the release (like this one:
http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/2009.0 ), which itself links to the errata
and release notes. I did a lot of IRC and forum support and would always
link to the errata page entry for any issue that came up, if there was
one. Together, all of these seemed to get the page into the 'collective
consciousness' so I'd often see other people on IRC and in comment
threads and so on referring to the errata page.

-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net