Jesús Guerrero wrote:
El Jue, 5 de Febrero de 2009, 7:07, Nikos Chantziaras escribió:
Sebastián Magrà wrote:
The installation experience with the traditional method must be
mandatory... That's why I think we are better now that GLI is
deprecated...
That's not good. It hurts Gentoo's popularity if it's not easy to
install. But since there are not enough devs left for the GUI installer,
not much that can be done.
Gentoo isn't unsuitable for a GUI installer. It's stage 3, after all.
That's definitely good. It never worked and newbies came to
Gentoo thinking that it as some kind of uberfaster ubuntu
thing that could be installed by just clicking next.
Than I'll rephrase my statement: Gentoo would need a non-bugged GUI
installer ;)
Then they ran away yelling how bad this gentoo crap is that
doesn't work at all unless you do a lot of black magic on the
command line! "Because I want full control over my system, but
only clicking next. The OS should read my mind!"
I don't think anyone should care about that. Installation and
maintenance are two different things. A good GUI installer would pretty
much allow you to do the same things as the CLI installer. It's just a
different interface. And besides, installation is much more
"standardized" than actual maintenance. There's no reason why a GUI
installer can't do the same things as the CLI one. You'll just have GUI
widgets instead of text-mode characters, maybe with a lot of automation
and safe defaults thrown in.
Personally, even though I'm an old fart (I installed Slackware when it
first came out, used it for years), I prefer GUI installers.
Installation is *boring*. I need to do the steps manually even though
they're pretty much the same every time you install. I'm OK with CLI
maintenance. But for the installer I really prefer GUI.
If we clear that from the beginning so everyone knows what to
expect from gentoo AND WHAT GENTOO EXPECTS FROM YOU then that
problem is gone.
You don't need to make such a statement through the installer. There
are other, more suitable places for this. Like in the docs, website, or
a notice in the... installer :)
Also, Gentoo isn't really black magic. There's no good reason why
emerge for example isn't GUI based. Or revdep-rebuild. Or layman.
Or... I hope you get the point ;) Yes, those things need a lot of work
and there are no people willing to do the task. But I'm just trying to
make a point here: the way you do maintenance in Gentoo isn't based on
the traditional Unix tools. That means, you could have GUIs for all of
them.
But I'm drifting. The installer is pretty much separated from all this.
After all, "all" it needs to do is set up stage3 and tweak the settings.
Some would call this a nazi attidute of mine, I would say that
you can't drive an f-17 unless you are willing to prepare
yourself to do so before. It's called realism. You need to
learn before you can do. Even a child can understand that.
Yes, but learning is made a lot easier through a GUI interface. Not all
GUIs are created equal. You can have a simple "click next" wizard (not
suitable for learning) or a collection of GUI tools that do different
things but offer many options without actually obfuscating what's going
on. A GUI for emerge for example, could simply have a line at the
bottom where the actual command is shown that would be executed with the
chosen option. The user knows here that he can simply type that command
himself. That's different to tools like openSUSE's YaST for example,
where you have no clue how it actually does what it does.
GUIs for the simple things is good. Maybe CLI for the hairy stuff.
Someone would argue that's too hard to start, but that's why
we have excellent docs, mailing lists, forums and irc, with
a very high traffic and lots of friendly people giving away
their time for free to help you. So, whomever can't find a
way is either too lazy or too shy to talk to the people around.
Gentoo was never meant to win a popularity price. I prefer to
stay without nothing at all that to have the lot of problems
that the installer has been creating during 3 years of existence.
It harmed the gentoo popularity (if you like that argument)
much more than the lack of a installer.
But popularity is good for the project. It ensures that it stays
healthy, supported and can draw in new devs. If popularity gows down,
devs leave, more bugs show up that don't get fixed, etc.
Besides that, there's no easy way that you will understand Gentoo
if you are not going to read the handbook. And even then, it takes
time to become familiar with the way that USE flags truly work
(and I mean to understand it, and not just do -qt -kde +gnome +gtk
blindly that most users do (or the other way around) without
even knowing what's behind the scene and how USE flags and ebuilds
relate to each other.
Now this is actually a pro-GUI argument. Why? In a GUI interface, you
can simply throw the truth at the user's face in an elegant way. "Well
dude, those USE flags you see here actually control the way we are going
to build the sources. Click here to get a description of what the gtk
flag means for this package."
The user learns.
Let's assume it: you are building a distro. It's easy enough as it
is. Usability is good, but the only way that Gentoo could get
easier is just by taking features away and lowering the degree of
control that the users have.
Gentoo is easy as it is. How easier could it get? GUI tools don't
really result in less features. They're only there to deal with the
most common of them.
There are enough easy-to-use distros. Let us, "masochists", live in
peace. We love pain, why do people care so much about what we do
with our privacy? :P [it's a joke, in case anyone didn't notice]
You would still be free to use the CLI. Hell, even I would for many
things. But an nice tray icon that goes like "Gentoo Updates are
available" wouldn't hurt me either. I click it, the emerge GUI shows up ;)
There have been several attempts to make a decent installer. They
all failed miserably and got abandoned. Why? Because to tell the
truth, no one has an authentic interest in the matter. The simple
answer is most probably the right one.
And that's because Gentoo is not really popular. :P
By the way, did I already said that anyone that can read can also
install Gentoo? Lost of people with no experience with linux did
it with very little or no help.
GUIs have fonts. You can read those too ;)
