will F18 allow simultaneous installation of more than one desktop?

[Felix Miata]

On 2012/07/09 15:59 (GMT-0700) Adam Williamson composed:

> Chris Lumens wrote:

>>  (1) In our experience, most people will decide they are advanced (they
>>  genuinely think they are advanced, or don't want to feel like they're
>>  missing something, etc.) so there's little point to dividing the
>>  interface like this.

>>  (2) Maintaining two interfaces is a nightmare.

>>  (3) The time for making major design decisions was the first half of
>>  2011, when we started talking about this.

> Note that Mandriva used to have this kind of 'simple/advanced' design in
> its installer and progressively dropped all the 'advanced' dialogs, for
> precisely the reasons Chris suggests.

Most OS installers have been big disappointments to me, particularly 
including Anaconda and Mandriva/Mageia's, which I've used more than any 
others save one. I've yet to sample the new F18 Anaconda, but from what I've 
read here, I expect to like it even less. Why? Read on...

YaST2: SLES, SLED & openSUSE's single interface used for both installation 
package selection/personalization and post-installation package 
selection/personalization; most powerful installer I've ever seen, and 
requiring of less than 0.5G RAM (I did one with 384G recently) and of 0 swap 
to do a full-featured GUI installation. Yet to get a simple installation with 
only one DE and no personalization, or a minimal X or server, requires little 
material difference in mouse clicks than less powerful and flexible 
installers that need more RAM and/or swap to get done the more limited amount 
that they can do.

YaST allows me to get virtually all global configuration done during the 
installation process, so that my personalized system has all necessary and 
desired software, and no more, installed and ready to go when I login the 
first time, leaving me to need only fix a few unfortunate defaults and 
disable bling to get back to work. In YaST, I get to add wanted or lock out 
unwanted software on a package by package basis if I so choose. I don't have 
to install all KDE's bloatware to get the parts of KDE, and no more than is 
absolutely required of Gnome/GTK to run Geckos, required to get my work done. 
It also lets me add repos, so that I can include software that didn't fit on 
the DVD.

KISS has its place, but IMO, a Linux distro installer is a poor location for 
it as high priority policy.
-- 
"The wise are known for their understanding, and pleasant
words are persuasive." Proverbs 16:21 (New Living Translation)

  Team OS/2 ** Reg. Linux User #211409 ** a11y rocks!

Felix Miata  ***  http://fm.no-ip.com/