Re: Easier installer?
On Sat, Nov 18, 2017 at 01:15:22AM +0100, Samuel Thibault wrote:
> Thomas Lange, on ven. 17 nov. 2017 19:20:09 +0100, wrote:
> > On Thu, Nov 16, 2017 at 01:17:47PM +0100, Samuel Thibault wrote:
> > > In Debian, using netinst, we have
> > .
> > .
> > > and that's it.
> > >
> > > That's a bit more items, but not by so much.
> > No, that's a lot more than other installers.
>
> Please tell me what items are there that are not in other installers,
> apart from the ones I mentioned as potentially to be moved to expert
> mode, and the ones I believe we don't want to move to expert mode,
> whatever other installers chosed to do.
>
> > IMO our installer is not for beginners, it's for advanced users and
> > for experts we have much more questions. d-i lacks a beginners mode
> > with only the minimal questions.
>
> Really, the current set is almost minimal.
>
> > All questions were we normally just hit return can be omitted, if it's
> > still possible to switch to a "show-me-more-questions"-mode.
>
> Among the ones I mentioned,
>
> - language/country/keyboard: we can't afford to omit them.
If you _really_ want to do this (and I don't think it's possible) then
you can have a super easy - "Oh, you're in the UK, so you want UK
timezone, British keyboard" where you click on a map and highlight UK
and click OK / hit Enter
This is very similar to the first run of something like MacOS
but - it doesn't cater for minority languages, where you might want to
set your machines to a fixed timezone without daylight saving time ...
To be honest, real simplification may add hidden complexity
> - hostname: other installers invent hostnames, but they still show it
> and allow to modify it. That's really useful.
> - domain name, as I said it could be moved to expert
> - password, can't avoid it
> - username, do we really want to avoid it?
> - timezone, can't avoid it
> - confirmation for using the whole disk, can't avoid it
> - choosing the disk, can't avoid it
> - partition layout. One could argue that it's just confirmation that
> could be skipped. If we do skip it, I believe a lot of people will shout
It would be handy for laptops / dual boot machines if something would
flag up - "You have another operating system here, installed using UEFI.
Stop, check, enter OK twice to continue" because it's easy for people to
mess this step up.
> - last confirmation, don't really want to avoid it.
> - additional CD input, can't avoid it, or else we should just throw away
> the whole sets of CD images as useless.
If we're gradually moving to suggest installations connected to a
network and netinst or similar, yes, 99% of the time this question is
useless to installers.
It might be worth relegating it to expert install and changing our
instructions to say something like: "Debian easy install works well
where there is a possibility of using a wired connection and a steady
speed network. We don't recommend initial iinstall using wireless
because that will involve installing firmware for the installation to
continue. In all other cases / where there is no established network
connetion, please use the expert installation method"
> - mirror selection, as I said perhaps we could avoid it by using
> deb.debian.org by default if it works nice enough. If it doesn't, then
> that's were work should be done.
> - http proxy: that's arguably something one can't avoid. Quite a few
> networks really require it. This question could however be automatically
> skipped if d-i notices that it is able to download over http without
> problems. Again something to be fixed, not just blindly ignored.
> - task selection: can't avoid it.
> - bootloader installation: that has been discussed here several
> times. The result of the discussion is that we just can not detect this
> properly, so we can't avoid it.
>
> So?
>
> Put another way: I *don't* think we want to change this set of
> questions, we'd just lose users. Thus the other proposal, proposed right
> from the start of the thread: have *another* panel of questions really
> meant for beginner, and that advanced users can easily skip, for the 90%
> cases that often match beginners cases.
>
> > > - bootloader installation (we really can not avoid this step, it poses
> > > too many problems).
> > Why can't we avoid this question? I wonder because other distributions
> > do not ask it.
>
> History has shown that we can't have a sane default for this.
>
> > A CentOS 7 installation just asks me the language, which disk to use,
> > a password for root a user name and password. Nothing more.
> > But I still can have a different timezone or keyboard beside the good
> > defaults they set.
>
> It's just crazy to assume that knowing the language allows to know the
> timezone and keyboard. For a huge portion of the world this will just
> fail. And the corresponding users won't even know that they have to
> change the timezone.
>
> Don't try to change that balance it took us years to find just because
> beginners want sometime else. The proposal mentioned earlier in the
> thread looks good to me: really have a *separate* panel for beginners.
>
> Samuel
A CentOS 7 install also will allow you to miss setting up a network -
the question is a bit hidden - at which point you reboot and have no
connectivity :( The CentOS install is also now (mostly) graphical - the text mode installer
is worse than ours is - and that disadvantages any of our folk living
with visual impairments, potentially.
All the best,
Andy C.
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