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.
