On Fri, Mar 17, 2017 at 11:18:57AM -0400, Catherine Gramze wrote: > Cc: Jonathan Dowland <jmtd@debian.org> Please do not mail me directly, I am subscribed to the list. I put this prominently in my email signature. I also set Mail-Followup-To (MFT[1]) accordingly. Consider switching to a mailer that supports MFT (I personally recomment mutt). Also, please read over the Debian Mailing Lists Code of Conduct[2], specifically the bullet point "When replying to messages on the mailing list, do not send a carbon copy (CC) to the original poster unless they explicitly request to be copied." [1] https://cr.yp.to/proto/replyto.html [2] https://www.debian.org/MailingLists/#codeofconduct > > On Mar 17, 2017, at 10:28 AM, Jonathan Dowland <jmtd@debian.org> wrote: > Beginners are installing server systems as their first experience with Linux? > I think not. I didn't say 'first experience', but even so, perhaps. Although my first experiences are possibly too old to be relevant nowadays, they were with Red Hat, Debian etc. on PCs to use as personal web servers. With the excitement around IoT, small embedded devices, things like the Arduino, Pi and mashups of the two, I think it's very plausible that people who are new to Linux may be using things that are not classical PCs with proper displays. > Any sane server administrator is going to set up a test system first, and > probably on a desktop so they can easily mess around with it while they learn > about the tools it offers. Sane sysadmins will set up test systems, true, but they will not deviate dramatically from the configuration of the prod server in doing so, or the test is less useful. Installing a large amount of software in a test system that won't be present in a production environment is very likely to cause deployment issues. A graphical desktop stack is a large amount of software. If we get back to your initial suggestion for a moment: > It would be nice if people intuitively understood that the "base system" was > not going to meet their expectations of a minimal install, which includes a > desktop environment, but noobs don't understand that. I agree with this. There is a problem here to be solved. Perhaps we can consider renaming or rewording 'base system'. > Equally nice would be an "advanced installation" option to only do a base > system installation. Making the selection of a mirror and desktop > environment an unskippable part of the installation, unless you chose that > advanced "base system" would be very user friendly, particularly for noobs. The suggestion here is what I disagree with because it will frustrate people who don't want a full desktop. However there might be some middle ground that improves the situation. I don't have an installation image locally to test this as I write, but your messages indicate that the graphical desktop options are by default not selected in the installer, regardless of which installation medium (netinst, CD, DVD) is being used. If they simply defaulted to on, but could be disabled as normal, would that not address the "noob" issue without frustrating those who know they don't want a desktop environment? Although your message suggests the behaviour is not different between netinst/CD/DVD, I can understand if some believe that we should not default "on" any selection which is not satisfied by the installation media in use. In which case improving our documentation on the websites around where the images are obtained is worth exploring. -- Jonathan Dowland Please do not CC me, I am subscribed to the list.
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