F21 partitioning circus

[poma]

On 23.02.2015 08:44, Tim wrote:
> On Sun, 2015-02-22 at 15:01 -0700, Chris Murphy wrote:
>> What you're talking about might be in-scope for blivet-gui. It
>> definitely sounds out of scope for a GUI OS installer.
>>  
>> Windows, OS X installers have maybe 2-3 total layouts between them.
>> And their installers are completely, totally, bullet proof. They don't
>> ever crash, or ask the user to create required partitions, they always
>> succeed in their penultimate goal which is to install a bootable OS.
>> And there are essentially zero user complaints about these installers.
>> There's nothing at all to even complain about because they don't do
>> anything except meet their primary requirement. Not even their
>> developers or testers even complain about the installer, it does one
>> thing successfully.
> 
> While I don't find it hard to believe that Windows developers won't
> complain.  After all, just about all Windows users do is install Windows
> as a new install, or over the top of a previous one, with no intention
> of doing anything like dual-boot.  Shoe-horn it in, that's all they care
> about.  These days, it's all single-partition, or act like it's
> single-partition with a hidden boot/recovery partition that the user
> doesn't know about.
> 
> I find it harder to believe that users don't complain about the Windows
> installer.  I've certainly seen it fuck up, and I can't be the only one.
> It was a gamble to see whether an install over the top could manage to
> keep existing data, never mind settings.  And trying to get it to
> install to the right drive in a two-drive PC was nothing but trial and
> error (one drive for Windows, a second drive for video on a non-linear
> editing suite).
> 
> I, also, am rather incredulous of how difficult it is to have the Linux
> installer simply do what the user tells it to do, instead of
> second-guessing them and denying them of what they want to do.  If I
> select custom partition, and edit partitions myself, type of options, I
> expect it to have a GUI that does what I tell it to do.  
> 
> In the past, before the live DVD install era, I'd boot the install disc
> and wait for to pause on some screen, then CTRL + ALT + FUNCTION-KEY to
> another terminal, and fdisc my hard drive, and go back to the installer
> and have it use my pre-defined partitions.  Even further back, I'd
> select the options to check partitions for faults, rather than get a
> nasty surprise a few months in when the drive reaches a certain amount
> of fullness and comes across a bad section.
> 
> I don't know what's really so hard about giving us a simple GUI hard
> drive partitioner somewhere in the install routine.  Using the command
> line tool is a pain (e.g. you cannot see any details about the rest of
> the drive while you're working on making a partition), and there are
> other standalone GUI partitioning tools that exist.
> 
> Leave the so-called automatic smart partitioning to those people who
> choose the full-automatic option.
> 

Don't be depressed, who care about proprietary nonsense crap, in the first place.
:)