Disk Druid - Fedora flame #1

[David Liguori]

James Wilkinson wrote:
> Jeff Vian wrote:
> 
>>What I do not understand is why choices are being removed from menus and
>>hidden.  I thought this was about freedom to choose, as well as making
>>it attractive and easy for new users.
> 
> 
> This comes down to basic distribution philosophy, actually.
> 
> The logic is that a good program should be as invisible as possible. It
> should attempt to do the Right Thing as often as possible. Certainly it
> should ask if there is a real decision that needs to be made, but it
> should have sensible defaults. And if those defaults work well enough
> for everyone, then it might make more sense not to have any other
> options.
> 
> That doesn't necessarily mean "what most users want", but takes into
> account how bad it will be if something goes wrong. For example, when
> users choose "Quit" in an application, the chances are that they want to
> quit. But if they've been editing a large document, then good
> applications will still ask "Are you sure?"
> 
> The thread is about installing Fedora, so I'll take that as an example.
> There are probably a lot more questions that the installer could ask: it
> could offer to install lilo instead of grub. It could ask if you wanted
> rhgb while booting. 
> 
> Each of those options requires a certain amount of thought. Each option
> makes installing Fedora longer and more difficult. Even if you really do
> want to turn off rhgb on a new install, you will probably still be
> faster using a simplified install then making the changes you want, than
> if you made your way through a more complex install that offered that
> option and twenty or thirty others.
> 
> You'd probably find it easier, too: when presented with an option, you
> need to understand it enough to at least realise you don't want it: that
> goes for complex menus, too. If the installer can make intelligent
> guesses, then you have to think less. And worry less: installing an OS,
> even if you're used to it, involves a lot of time, a lot of decisions,
> and some of those decisions can have major ramifications. The fewer
> decisions you have to make, the less you have to worry that you got one
> wrong.
> 
> The choices are still out there. But making it easy to choose doesn't
> necessarily make things easier, even for someone who doesn't want all
> the defaults.
> 
> There are a lot of rants out there on this subject. This one is long,
> but it's worth reading:
> http://www.joelonsoftware.com/uibook/chapters/fog0000000062.html
> 
I don't disagree with this philosophy.  On the other hand, a "one size fits all" approach fits almost no one.  What's needed is a compromise between the two.  To this end, couldn't the fdisk option be put back into the text and/or expert modes and left out of the gui mode? (I have to add, though, that the text-mode version of Disk Druid is particularly annoying to use).  Actually, I think that's the way it was in Red Hat once.  The option to type "linux expert" or "linux text" at the boot prompt is documented at the prompt, the "ctrl-alt-f2" (or whatever it is) to drop to a shell is not.  That's my only gripe.  By "poorly documented" earlier in the thread I didn't mean to imply that the information is not available (we all read the installation how-to from beginning to end each time we do one, right?) just not within the installation where it's needed.  Self-documentation, while avoiding excessive verbosity as pointed out in the article, is also a feature of good user interf
ace design.

Another choice I would like to see restored, by the way, possibly to expert or text mode, is a text-mode boot option: no rhgb, run level 3 all the way.  The way that option has been relegated to post-install tweaking is eerily parallel to Microsoft's marketing of Windows 95 as dos-free, though obviously for different reasons.  But James may be right about this, in terms of the total time users who want rhgb spend deciding they want it versus the time it takes a few users who don't want rhgb to change it later.  That's not true for partitioning: if it's not the way you wanted it, or totally unworkable, a reinstallation is pretty much the only option, plus restoration of your backups if you hosed another OS.

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David Liguori