Olle Eriksson on 07/09/05 19:59, wrote:
And it allows programmers the luxury of being lazy in their UI design. We should assume that people won't read the docs, and build our products with that assumption in mind.Fine in theory. In practice, any product that is easy enough to use without reading documentation is not likely to provide an optimally efficient way to accomplish the task at hand. You can't please all of the people all of the time.That depends on the nature of the task. In most cases I believe you can have a default behaviour which satisfies most newbies but still provide a lot of options and control for the experienced users. Unless we want to make Linux/GNU software so difficult to use that newbies or people who are not willing to read through pages of documentation are "filtered" out.I'm not too familiar with the new installer, but couldn't there be a question about whether or not a GUI should be installed and have the GUI as the default option. People who know what they are doing can select the non-GUI option and the rest will probably be happy with getting a GUI.
Now I'm not a Debian developer and I don't know what their mind-set is regarding the direction they take (and the amount of work it involves) but I would have thought a great option would be to have an install program that asks the installer to choose between a simple and an advanced installation procedure.
I mean the simple procedure would provide an 'out-of-the-box' solution for installing a system that boots up into the desktop with a set of standard defaults.
--There are places I'll remember, all my life, though some have changed, like Debian Linux 2.6.12.3