Dear fellow guixers.
First of all, congratulations with much gratitude for all the
work poured on this new release. It shows and it shines. :)
I installed guix 1.5 on an 8 year old Dell Latitude starting
with a small USB drive and booting from it, using Spanish as
language and everything went very well. This machine has -sadly-
some hardware that includes proprietary blobs, but this is the
machine I have now and those issues are off-list.
I'd specially like to applaud the excellent language and
keyboard support: I use Spanish Dvorak, a not so popular option.
;D
I would also like to share and discuss, with the most
constructive attitude, some small details arising from this
installation that may potentially impact new users and could be
changed for good.
The installation was done on a shared SSD disk that included an
old Debian and a couple small auxiliary, like a 16 Mb swap,
partitions.
1. The manual partition installer that I had to use -because
there was another working partition to be cared of in the disk-
gave me no indication about a swap partition. I know it is
manual and so it may assume complete knowledge, but now I don't
know if the OS has no swap and it needs it, or if it uses the
existing one. That is, there is a kind of medium level of
knowledge that allows manual installation but could benefit with
a good practices overview and a suggestion (even if it may be
needed to be applied manually in a manual install).
2. During that installation, there is a question about the
cypher tag (in Spanish "etiqueta de cifrado"). There is no
explanation about what this is, and being part of an encrypted
partition, could cause some confusion (at least it caused /me/
some confusion ;P). Maybe we could add a small text indicating
that this is only a name for the partition, and what does this
name mean in the system, so it is not confused with any
passphrase or password?
3. Something similar happened with mount point ("punto de
montaje"). Some minimal information about what is it, and how
can impact the resulting OS could give a bit more tranquility to
the person doing the installation.
4. When the installation ended and after rebooting I've found
with real anguish that the other bootable partition was not
present in the grub menu. Being used to the Debian installer
including them, just didn't imagined that it could be any
different. Of course this is perfectly possible, it is just that
-as with anyone- my previous experience configured the
expectation about what was supposed to happen. While it is not
at all a hard requirement and it is easy for me to propose it
since being no programmer I have no idea if it takes 2, 20 or
200 hours of work, I'd like to ask if we could evaluate the
possibility to search for -and include- other bootable operating
systems in the grub options. There are 2 main reasons for this
request: the 1st one is expressing care and consideration for
people's options (being a values related reason make it personal
and so, it may or not be valid for everyone). However the 2nd
one is much more concrete: *being able to keep their current
working OSs andd partitions lowers a lot the barrier to try
guix*. And more guix users are good for everyone in this
community and the guix mission in general. :)
5. Contrasting with the previous, this last point is really a
very small one. The desktop environments chosen to be installed
were Mate (just a simple one to start if in trouble), i3 (the
one I use) and exwm (with the hope to try it). Mate didn't
include by default any web browser. I'd like to argue that since
it is such a common and fundamental tool for most people these
days (we can debate if this is good and/or desirable), if it is
within our reach by default we should provide one. Anyone would
do, no matter how simple.
All in all, I understand that guix is a highly developed and /in
development/, new, and very complicated beast, used today by
people with a lot of knowledge about linux, technology and
computation. As such, our community it is very faithfully
painted by the famous XKCD "Average Familiarity"
(https://m.xkcd.com/2501/) comic.
While I am far from your level of expertise on guix and linuxes
I am probably a bit above average and anyway suffered some
confusion and 3 complicated days to recover my working partition
and be able to work. I am not at all whining or asking changes
for me; after all and with the help from this wonderful list, my
computer is working again. b(^‿^)d
I simply expose here what happened from a hybrid, UX<>tech point
of view with the hope to make the new guix user experience
better for others. :)
And of course, while can't program, I can help with interaction
design and kindly offer that help if it's understood as needed
and useful.
Again, congratulations for the new version. :D
With much appreciation, warmest regards to you all...
--
eduardo mercovich
Donde se cruzan tus talentos
con las necesidades del mundo,
ahí está tu vocación.
(Anónimo)
