Fedora Present and Future: a Fedora.next 2014 Update (Part I, "Why?")

[Ranjan Maitra]

> So, I don't know what may be different in my configuration (maybe the windows swap?) that allowed me to compete the exercise.  But surely, it isn't totally broken for everyone.

Perhaps not. And in fact, I have sort of figured out what to do to get
exactly the old anaconda way of doing things for me. (I say sort of.)
The trouble is that lots and lots of stuff is hidden in nondescript and
(to many, a counterintuitive) way of doing things. 

The problem is that we don't reinstall (or install F) every few weeks
or months so it is very easy to forget what/how this was done every six
months. Yes, we can take notes, but recall that this is a time when
making notes on the machine itself is not that easy because we are at
the installation phase. Also, many things have to be discovered and in
particular getting to the manual paritioning setup to me was completely
hard to follow: you hit Done or something like that and then you get to
the installer.

Months later, I have figured out that there are buttons to set the time
according to a desired network provided. It is all hidden, and I
accidentally found it by looking and wondering why this option should
not have been included in the install options.

I guess some of us are trying to say that the installer has become
quite opaque. Some of us can scrape away the opacity easily sometimes,
some can do it rarely, while some can do it all the time. The question
that I wonder about is: was this at all necessary.

Personally, I like letting stable functional things stay, and
think that it would have been better to rebuild on the old installer.
But then I am not at all an expert in any of this, and maybe this was
not possible. However, the new installer is far too removed in process
from the old one, and the least that could be done could be to include a
manual and an FAQ (question bank) with the installer. This could be
searchable (and included with the installer, because, again note that
the machines functionality is not that high at the time of the
install). Of course, this takes effort and time which volunteer
developers may not have or wish to put into.

Btw, the new installer is uglier in terms of looks than the old, too,
but that is a matter of personal like! 

My rambling is all to say that while I eventually got my stuff the way
I wanted, I am not sure if it should have taken all that while. I had
installs happening in 3-4 minutes with the old installer (now the time
taken is exponentially higher). So, while I appreciate all the hard
work done by the developers, I can not but wonder if their hard work has
been in vain (to an extent) in the sense that many of us old and loyal F
users are unable to fully appreciate all their contributions in this
regard.

Best wishes,
Ranjan





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