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

[Bill Davidsen]

Powell, Michael wrote:
>> 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.
>
> 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
>
Thank you, I'll look at this. It's also possible some of the issues mentioned 
come from installing off a live CD instead of an install disk. I'm assuming that 
what "life disk" meant...

>> Partitioning took me about three hours with the installer of F19, with a very
>> simple setup and not even data to preserve and neither RAID, nor
>> encryption, and it was only possible after I created the partitions outside the
>> installer.  There was no way to do it with the installer, it kept saying there
>> isn`t enough room despite there was plenty, and it did what it wanted rather
>> than what I wanted.
>>
>> 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; although, it does sounds like you actually had an issue with it not detecting the correct size / free space of your drives. 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.
>
On this we agree, it needs a manual partition mode which really does just that, 
allows the user to create and remove partitions, share partitions between 
release versions installed, etc. The "old installer" wasn't perfect at this, I 
have booted live {CD,USB} and partitioned the drives manually, as mentioned 
above, but that was some really complex layout. I don't consider sharing /home 
and SWAP between two bootable releases to be so complex it must be done in rc.local.


> 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.
>
One of my issues with Fedora is that at times the "make it easier" flag is 
waved, and other times the marching song is "we are cutting edge." There really 
seems to be division in the policy, or an assumption that "choice" and "easy" 
are somehow mutually exclusive.

Easier install means a good default, and clear unambiguous ways to do complex 
configurations. Note, I don't suggest that "simple" or "easy" are requirements, 
but ways to see the raw hardware clearly and tell the OS how to utilize it seem 
to fit "unambiguous" perfectly.

-- 
Bill Davidsen <davidsen at tmr.com>
   "We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from
the machinations of the wicked."  - from Slashdot