On Monday 17 December 2018 09:48:10 pm Steve Litt wrote:
> On Sun, 16 Dec 2018 11:10:20 +0100
>
> KatolaZ <katolaz@???> wrote:
> > On Sat, Dec 15, 2018 at 08:19:31PM -0500, Steve Litt wrote:
> > > On Wed, 12 Dec 2018 14:36:45 +0000
> > >
> > > g4sra via Dng <dng@???> wrote:
> > > > Media partitioning, formatting
> > > > Configure mountpoints
> > > > Install Bootloader
> > > > Install Kernel, Modules & Firmware
> > > > Install Shell & package management software
> > > > Configure console
> > > > Configure network
> > > > Boot
> > > >
> > > > Discuss...
> > >
> > > Above all else, query the user for his/her preferences, and coach
> > > the user while making such decisions. Such decisions serve as input
> > > to your list, which seems quite complete to me.
> >
>
> Perhaps reframing it would make a difference. Perhaps renaming the
> second program "Install Software" (install_software),

[snip]

:Software
Yes, something that separates software into its own screen and also gives much
better definition as to what the 'Software' being installed is would be very
helpful. 'Web Server' makes sense to most people, but 'Console tools' means
nothing to that same group.

Further selection into even 'Web Server' would be helpful, especially as most
read that as what LAMP stack are you installing for me. Does the user want
Apache or nginx? Does the user want MySQL, MariaDB, MongoDB, or ??? Does
the user want PHP, Perl, Python, or ???


:Firmware
Firmware currently seems to need some work. Non-free won't install even
though the packages are on the install media (DVD) and the computer has a
hard-wired Ethernet connection.

I’m not even sure if the Devuan installer even tries to install graphics
drivers. Depending on whose survey you’re using (Steam in this case) NVIDIA
has over 50% of the market in ~15 GeForce GTX cards. Add in the next 2 major
groups* and it would seem 70-80% of these drivers would be installed ‘out of
the box.’

* Maybe just one group? AMD Radon seems about it outside of a few Intel's up
to the 90% total usage mark.

GPU driver full disclosure:
Since there don’t seem to be any Devuan instructions, following Debian
instructions I can’t even get the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1060, supposedly the
most used graphics card, drivers to install. Being butthurt might be biasing
my opinion a bit...

Humor aside, having the distribution that installs ~75% of people graphics
cards ‘out-of-the-box’ would be a pretty major reason for people to install
Devuan over anything else.

> > > You know what would really be fun? An installer that asks *all* of
> > > the necessary questions right at the front, so you can walk away
> > > and do something else while it installs itself. I find installers
> > > that keep asking me questions every 10 minutes annoying.
> >
> > You can use preseeding for that. And you are not asked any question at
> > all.
>
> Not the same thing. I want the discoverability of a menu when I define
> all aspects. Perhaps the best of both worlds could be obtained by
> having a Curses or GUI program providing questions to create the
> preseed. Now THAT would be cool!

I’ve always wanted this. The downside having always been, you come back 4
hours later and it barfed in the first 10 minutes. Maybe continually flash
the screen upon an error or something, since having the old PC speaker
standby is iffy now.

Best,
Michael