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

[lee]

"Powell, Michael" <Michael_Powell at mentor.com> writes:

>> It doesn`t give you choices.  It leaves you in the dark about that it is somehow
>> possible to use an non-gui installer and to do a minimal install.  It leaves you
>> in the dark about what exactly happens when you do the partitioning and
>> with trying to figure out how get the partitioning you want.
>
> As I said before, the entire installer was rebuilt to promote a more
> laid back approach. The user can choose the order they wish to
> customize / experience the GUI installation instead of being forced
> down a specific path. There might be a couple mandatories, but for the
> most part it's all about choice.

Which installer are you referring to?  As to Fedora, I have only used
the ones of F17 and of F19, and none of them gave me any choices.  You
can start the installer and it doesn`t even let you do the partitioning
you want, which is the only choice you are getting.

I`m not an expert with Fedoras installers in any way.  This is simply my
"user experience".  Maybe the "user experience" the installer provides
should be different.

> A non-gui installation is not something that the majority of users
> will choose so it's not apparent, but if you want that method, here
> you go:
> http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/20/html/Installation_Guide/ch-guimode-x86.html#idm219166212128

Says who?  And why not give the users that choice instead of hiding it?

>> Partitioning took me about three hours with the installer of F19, with a very
> [...]
>> It was seriously awful.  It would have taken 10--15 minutes with the Debian
>> installer.
>
> I definitely think the usability of the partitioning scheme in the
> current installer needs work, but as I stated earlier, I think some
> people are just griping about the change instead of there actually
> being an issue;

Well, I don`t know what changed.

> although, it does sounds like you actually had an issue with it not
> detecting the correct size / free space of your drives.

It did detect the disks and showed them, but it didn`t let me do what I
wanted.

> You might want to submit a defect, because in comparison, I have a
> multi-drive setup with LUKs encryption and I can have both drives
> wiped and start all over with encryption in less than a minute or if I
> want to retain one disk scheme but clobber the other it takes about 3
> minutes.

Sooner or later I`ll probably try installing on a software RAID-1 with
encryption, with nothing else on the disks.  Can I make a video of that
by recording what`s on screen, after booting the life system?  It would
be possible to store the video over network.

>> > A large majority of the information from the older installer is still
>> > there, it's just up to the user to seek it out.
>> 
>> I don`t know anything about "the older installer" or how to seek out
>> information about it; I didn`t even know that there is an "older installer".  The
>> first Fedora installer I used was the one with F17.
>
> F17 had the 'old' installer. The 'new' installer was introduced in F18.

I like the old one better.  Except for not letting me have a /usr
partition, it worked.

>> > In essence the installer went from a hardcore presentational format to
>> > a more laid back format - a shift every OS has consciously made in the
>> > last decade.
>> 
>> I don`t know what you mean.  The Debian installer got more options and
>> some more clarity which was an improvement.  Otherwise it didn`t change,
>> you just do country and keyboard setup --- which is missing in Fedoras
>> installer, there was no way to tell it that I have a German keyboard ---
>> network setup if you don`t use DHCP, partitioning, a bit of package selection
>> if you want to, and then it installs.
>
> Keyboard configuration is not missing... it's one of the main hub options:
> http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/20/html/Installation_Guide/install-hub-x86.html

That one looks rather unfamiliar.  Was that in the F17 or F19 installers?

>> It`s easy and straightforward as it used to be for the last twenty years, and I
>> never had trouble using it.  Why suddenly make installing such a PITA like
>> Fedoras installer does?
>
> The computer industry knows that more and more people want
> installations to be less scary and faster. This trend has been seen in
> the evolution of the Windows installer, MacOS, most Linux distros, and
> even iOS or Android. There are going to be some Linux distros that
> don't embrace this, you mentioned Debian and I'm sure slackware and
> Arch won't either, but in the end it's all about attracting more users
> to the product. The choices are there, but us hardcore users just have
> to look more since we're the minority.

Faster, ok, that mainly depends on what the bandwidth of your internet
connection is and what the server side delivers.  The only two scary
things are the possibility that the network device doesn`t work (like
Debian missing modules for some) and, far worse, potentially loosing
your data.

The Fedora installers I used were fine with network devices and
extremely scary with the not loosing your data part.

Having more choices doesn`t make installing any slower or any more
scary.  It makes it easier.  Not having choices makes installing much
slower and more scary.


-- 
Fedora release 20 (Heisenbug)