Graphical Distribution Upgrades

[Christian Schaller]

----- Original Message -----
> From: "drago01" <drago01 at gmail.com>
> To: "Discussions about development for the Fedora desktop" <desktop at lists.fedoraproject.org>
> Sent: Thursday, April 9, 2015 8:33:00 AM
> Subject: Re: Graphical Distribution Upgrades
> 
> On Wed, Apr 8, 2015 at 9:52 AM, Florian Weimer <fweimer at redhat.com> wrote:
> > On 04/06/2015 10:56 PM, Stephen Gallagher wrote:
> >> Broken from the "Summary of Reddit thread".
> >>
> >> Fedora's lack of a graphical major-version updater comes up
> >> constantly. I think it's probably time to start brainstorming how
> >> to solve it, with a stated intention of having things work for
> >> upgrading Fedora 23 -> Fedora 24 *at minimum* and an ideal
> >> situation of having Fedora 22 -> Fedora 23 upgrades work (with
> >> changes made during Fedora 22's stable lifecycle to support this).
> >
> > Is this really a good use of development resources?  I mean, really—if
> > developers are the primary user group, is it unreasonable to expect
> > that they will use a shell once or twice per year to perform the upgrades?
> 
> That might surprise you but no; there are developers who aren't really
> used to a terminal and are uncomfortable using it "that's like DOS".
> Those coming from the Windows side ... the (developer) world does not
> consists of UNIX (Linux + OS X) users but the vast majority is using
> Windows.
> --

I would also want to point out that being able to use the command line
isn't the same as wanting to at every opportunity. The challenge with
command line stuff is that they tend to require more work from the users
in terms of reading docs or howtos. So while using command lines might
be quicker and more efficient for stuff you want to do on a daily basis,
for the reason I explained above they can be really annoying for this you
do on an irregular basis. For instance I personally use git so rarely these
days that I have to google for the commands everytime I want to tag a release
to get the syntax right.
So I think that even people who like using the command line prefer having
easy to use graphic tools for tasks they don't do all the time, because the
graphics tools can be a lot of self explanatory if designed well. 

Another example is that there is quite a bit of excitement in the Docker community
these days about Kitematic, so while one could claim that the docker developers
are 'command line' people, they still like having nice UI tools for certain
things.

And I think the annoyance with command line tools tend to be a bit cumulative,
so nobody would probably be to annoyed if they had one thing they did once a
year requiring a set of terminal commands, but as things requiring command line
interactions add up and you feel you need to google for commands on a weekly basis
 it for sure becomes an annoyance, especially if you know that other operating systems 
do not require this of you.

So we don't have the resources of course to provide UI tools for every possible task
out there, but I think system upgrades is such a core thing of your system that we want
to make it feel polished and effortless.

Christian