Debian Installer Beta 3 Usability Review

Marcus Thiesen writes "Debian Installer Beta 3 was released two days ago and I wrote a small review concerning the installation part. The new debian installer is good way to set up your favorite distribution. Nontheless there are a few usability things and I thought that it might be a good idea to write a walkthrough from another point of view: Bob 'average' User."

Comments

Mandrake

[kundor]

Really, I've never understood why distros don't take advantage of the GPL and use the easy-to-use installers with magic hardware detection from the likes of Mandrake.

Everything mandrake does is gpl'd, so there's no reason that debian couldn't keep their crazy "hard" installer for traditionalists and setup the mandrake installer to install debian easy-like for newbies. why duplicate effort?

Re:Mandrake

[Karamchand]

Right, you like it because you're used to it, because you used it many times.
But here we're speaking about mainstream. Mainstream's hobby isn't installing an operating system. It's not even playing around with a computer. The computer is a tool, the operating system is installed not more than once.

And with one installation you're certainly not used to an installer like Debian's.
Accept it - human being remember and recognize pictures more easily than plain text.

Re:Mandrake

[debrain]

Everything mandrake does is gpl'd, so there's no reason that debian couldn't keep their crazy "hard" installer for traditionalists and setup the mandrake installer to install debian easy-like for newbies. why duplicate effort?

That would require porting the Mandrake installer to all the Debian ports. There are good x86 installers for Debian, from Progeny at least, but it, like Mandrake's, just isn't portable enough to be officially Debian.

Re:Mandrake

[Smitedogg]

At COMDEX I asked one of the progeny guys about this. He told me that it was because they try to be as multi-platform as possible: it should work on an old ultra-5 as well as on your amd-64. Making sure something works on a headless box is higher priority than making it pretty. Comes down to design philosophy I guess.

Dogg

Knoppix

[timefactor]

Hasn't Knoppix made the Debian installer a moot point for Bob 'Average' User, at least for the desktop?

Different from Windows xx how?

[sphealey]

I don't want to be too critical of something written in a humorous style, but there were several comments of the form:

He decided to use the standard and got again a whole bunch of lines of funny things he didn't understand. "Quite a log of stuff I don't understand today" he thought.

There was nothing I saw on any of the installation screens that would have stopped (or for the most part even confused) anyone who has installed, from scratch, any version of MS Windows from 3.0 through 2000 (I haven't done XP from scratch yet personally). Sure, there are things he wouldn't understand, but then again I don't think there is even anyone at Microsoft who understands what "registering components...updating registry" means!

If he had never installed any OS from scratch before, sure, he would be confused - but he would be just as confused if he had pulled out the raw W2K install disks on a rainy Saturday.

sPh

Interesting

[Phezult]

A lot about the process can be learned this way. Most of us are used to this process, and think it all makes sense, but, as the author points out, there are a lot of things that WON'T make sense to "Bob User."

Debian should have a look a this to see what they can improve.

IBM is doing something smart, a call went out to employees looking for volunteers to install Linux on their company laptops. This is a great way to start, because those employees will probably feel a lot like "Bob" but have access to internal tech support.

Wouldn't you like to convert your friends without having to be THEIR tech support?

A walkthrough shouldn't be needed...

[abh]

If it were truly easy to use, there would be no need for a walkthrough guide... each screen would present choices, and offer help if needed. Software installers should NEVER require external documentation.

I've had enough!

[Captain Rotundo]

Can we all please make this the last GNU/Linux "usability" study that begins with some ridiculous description of a "joe shmoe" mythical target user. I am sick and tired of it. It is possible to make something usable for "normal" users, while at the same time comfortable for both "mewbies" and "power users". Please let us retire "Bob" and "Aunt Tillie" and "Grandma" and every other stupid target user.

If you don't agree with my statement in the first paragraph go look at http://www.google.com - great for newbies AND power users. I've never heard anyone say "Google works fine for Aunt Tillie and Uncle Bob but I really could use MORE features to the interface." Its interface is clean, simple and completely intuitive. And if you want to do some arcane power search you CAN!.

And if google isn't a good enough example for you (because its a website and not an OS, etc.) look at GNOME. GNOME has proven that you can make a good clean interface that is user friendly, newbie friendly, and has all the access a "power user" could want. Yes, I firmly believe that the whining about lack of config options in every panel is entirely from masochistic freaks that simply like to know they can easly change whether the delay to close a window when the close button is clicked is 2ms or 3ms WITHOUT having to open a configuration editor. And BTW gconf-editor IS super simple and user friendly ANYWAY!)

Besides, I am probably what most people would consider experienced with Debian GNU/Linux (been using it exclusively for about 3 years) and I like a good clean, intuitive interface over something that is so-called "geek friendly" any day.

BTW - No I haven't read the whole article yet, I saw the bob bit and HAD to get this off my chest before I read the rest (now I will).

Re:I've had enough!

[Anonymous Coward]

Can we all please make this the last GNU/Linux "usability" study that begins with some ridiculous description of a "joe shmoe" mythical target user. I am sick and tired of it. It is possible to make something usable for "normal" users

First you criticise use of "mythical joe shmoe"s, and then you turn around and talk about "normal users". Don't you understand that "joe shmoe" is simply a synonym for "normal user"?

It is possible to make something usable for "normal" users, while at the same time comfortable for both "mewbies" and "power users".

One simple example: where should the close button go on windows? If you put it at the top right like on Windows, you will get loads of absolute beginners missing the maximise button that is only a pixel away. Having a destructive* button so close to an often-used but unrelated button is quite simply bad usability.

But wait - what about the power users that are used to the Microsoft Windows interface? It'll be annoying for them to have to retrain their habits. It boils down to a choice between doing what is best for newbies and doing what is best for experts. Do not make the mistake of thinking this is somehow a special case, there are thousands like it.

* Of course, most properly-coded applications will ask if you want to save your work if you haven't already, but for an absolute newbie, a window going away when you didn't want it to, and having to figure out how to start it up again is a big deal, even if you haven't lost any work.

GNOME has proven that you can make a good clean interface that is user friendly, newbie friendly, and has all the access a "power user" could want. Yes, I firmly believe that the whining about lack of config options in every panel is entirely from masochistic freaks that simply like to know they can easly change whether the delay to close a window when the close button is clicked is 2ms or 3ms WITHOUT having to open a configuration editor.

That's nice - you define anybody who doesn't fit into your argument as "freaks" rather than realising your argument doesn't work. Furthermore, you take the most extreme example possible (1ms difference in some animation? Come on, that's not even close to the complaints) to try and discredit the "freaks".

Basically, you claim that GNOME gets it right, and then stick your fingers in your ears when people complain about it. You are either fucking stupid or a troll.

I used Network Install a few days ago and...

[antdude]

My rants...

Last week, my friends convinced me to try Debian OS to replace my old Red Hat Linux 7.x boxes. I either could go to Gentoo or Debian since I didn't want Red Hat any more due to the recent news. A few hardcore Linux users told me to try Debian first. So, I grabbed the Network Install to a bootable CD-RW.

Since I only wanted to explore the OS, I used VMware v4.0.5 (256 MB of RAM) on a Pentium 4 3 Ghz host machine. Everything was going well until Debian installer asked a few tricky questions. They were tricky enough even for me, as a computer geek and Linux user (not an expert).

I struggled with partitioning. The text based UI is nuts. I couldn't use up and down arrow keys. Also, there was no mouse pointer at this stage. At least add a mouse pointer or make this part GUI like Red Hat's installer (only used 7.x versions). I also had difficulities setting up partitions which is I am never good with even with Microsoft OS'.

With the help of a Debian friend, I got through this part. Then, the questions got really tricky like which mouse port (/dev/what?). I don't remember. There should be some type of autodetection. IIRC, Red Hat did autodetect for me and that was about three years ago.

More questions came up. There was one part where I had to enter a hostname. Little did I know, I was NOT supposed to use any capital letters. For example with JohnDoeFooBar, I kept getting an error later during setup from Debian about hostname problems. I changed it to something like johndoe, and no more problems! The setup never told me this. On my old Red Hat Linux boxes, it let me use capitalized letters like: JOHNdoe-P2.

The other part I struggled was, why didn't Debian's setup give me an option to boot into text mode. I didn't want gdm or any GUI login screens. I prefer text modes like in the old days. Red Hat 7.x did give me this option. I had to get help from my friend to fix this.

I am still learning Debian slowly. I just learned apt-get command which is nice. It isn't easy for a Debian newbie like me. The installer does need to be improved.

Re:Bob just chose all the default selections

[saberworks]

Agreed. Most people setting up linux initially (especially those that need this installer), don't care about how their drive gets partitioned or what gets installed where. What they do care about is whether their sound works, whether they can print, whether they can change their screen resolution, etc.

*11* platforms

[Chris Pimlott]

Debian has it harder than the other guys; most distributions focus on just one platform (intel), or just a few (alpha, sparc, powerpc). Debian supports 11 hardware platforms. They need a flexible system that supports the needs of all of them. I'm not personally knowledgable about the internals of either the Debian or Mandrake installers, but this is probably one of the reasons they can't just use an "off-the-shelf" installer from another distro.

Re:Bob just chose all the default selections

[Gyorg_Lavode]

They should have 2 all-default options:

• Completely convert computer: (Warning, this will erase the entire computer!)
• 
  
  Install Alongside Windows

The second one can be like mandrake where it will resize the windows partition and use that space.

My impression of OS installers

[moosesocks]

Windows 2000/XP: Partially text-mode, and yet, could be easily installed by ANYBODY.

Knoppix - Winner for obvious reasons

RedHat - A bit overcomplicated the last time I used it, but easy nonetheless. The graphical installer is nice, but doesn't always work. If you're lucky, you're sent to the curses-based textmode installer which is lightyears better than debian's. (of course, there are screwups, and videocard detection can crash on exotic hardware)

Gentoo - No installer is a good installer. HONESTLY! If you carefully follow their directions exactly using the examples they give you, a proficent Windows user could get it working. The installation process is incredibly well-documented. As a plus, a quick post to their forum will usually yield a solution in under an hour. I have yet to see another free distro which offers that kind of support. Despite all this, they still need a REAL installer.

Mac OS X : Next, I agree, Next, Yes, Reboot. Done. Enough said.

BeOS: I once accidentally installed this without realizing it (the version that came packaged for windows).

Debian: From the people that brought you EMACS! Debian was my first distro, mostly because it was availible on floppies (my PC at the time wouldn't boot from a CD), and it had a nifty install-on-demand feature which required you to only download the 20mb base (yes, onto floppies), which would then allow you to set up a LAN or PPP connection to download the proper packages (I was on 56k, so the PPP option was a godsend). Needless to say, it wasn't all that difficult or painful, though it had quite a few rough spots. (Such as a nasty bug where the installer's FDISK mixed up the device names, causing me to nuke the wrong partition.

This was 3 years ago. The screenshots in the article show an installer that's almost identical to the one I remember. Honestly, couldn't they have made SOME advances? The installer is simply a disgrace, and needs to be 10x easier!

As for me, I'll stick with my mac. I like an OS that doesn't have to be reinstalled regularly.

Re:YMMV. Gentoo's easier for me

[Sevn]

Excellent. There isn't much you can't do with one distro or another. Debian is great. RedHat is great. SuSe is great. Gentoo is great. Slackware is great. It's simply a matter of knowing one of them VERY VERY well. I know them all pretty well and I prefer Gentoo on desktops, and FreeBSD on servers. If it has to be Linux on a server, I prefer Debian unless it can't be. Then I use Enterprise Red Hat. Based on my preferences, you would assume that I know FreeBSD and Gentoo the best, and you'd be right. The important thing is that 90 percent of all UNIX and UNIXlike OS's are identical in nature. Learn that 90 percent, then find the one with the 10 percent left that you like the best. Plenty to choose from.