Re: Presentation of iso downloads - simpler like Fedora?
Dear all,
Firstly, many many many thanks for the very constructive thread.
On 08/22/2012 04:05 PM, Ben Armstrong wrote:
> On 08/21/2012 09:05 AM, Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
>> Along the same lines, I suggest to simplify the choices according to the ways of acquiring
>> Debian that are more likely for users. The suggestion is implemented in the attached patch:
>
>> - it put first the two options that I think are more likely for our users, i.e. downloading
>> debian (be it in the live flavor of not), and the other options (buying CD or pre-installed
>> systems) next
>
>> - the choice of "small" vs "large" is now a sub-choice of downloading an installation image
>> (the title of the section points to "small", as I believe is the choice we recommend)
>
> Thanks. I will review/apply soon.
To bring it to a test and get some extra feedback for you all, I yesterday grabbed a Mac user for a virtual installation on his
laptop. I said "fetch any iso and download it", starting from www.debian.org. The button at the top right was not seen. We
followed the "Getting Debian" route. The "Try Debian live" was not chosen (or even not seen), the "small installation images"
appealed most. This brought us to http://www.debian.org/distrib/netinst, no difficulty up to here. Also the selection of "Small
CDs" (which should be renamed to the singular form IMHO) was almost immediate. The problem then was with the selection of the
architecture. The small text describing the 180MB download was fine, but then there was a very different skill level required to
decide for the platform ... I almost dropped dead laughing ... but the selection of the architecture was not possible for that Mac
guy. amd64 (the right choice) was immediately rejected, knowing that it is no longer a PowerPC (also rejected) and Apple back then
did not go for AMD but Intel as a partner. i386 was only understood as the very old stuff, ... well, you can guess about the rest
producing many question marks ... I was glad for the opportunity to explain the difference between kernel and userspace for
kfreebsd ...
We then installed stable, which hurt me just a bit who I would have preferred testing the Wheezy installation, but I did not want
to change rules here. From within stable, I missed
* a preparation for packages from backports.d.o
* instructions how to update to Wheezy from Squeeze, we only found some Squeeze-only package management tool of Gnome.
I started to become a true fan of backports and know some hard core stable/old-stable users depending much on that, praising
Debian for it. To have this more readily for everyone would help also our release schedule, I am sure, since the pain to have a
package just miss the release for a few days is then reduced. Maybe there is way to have backports readily in for Wheezy.
For the architectures-issue on the netinst download page I suggest some support by mouse-over, maybe auto-filled with some first
paragraph taken from wiki.debian.org. The ones reading the page with no JavaScript these days are also the ones who know what to
download already :o)
Steffen
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