Interested in helping improve the Fedora desktop experience?

[Máirín Duffy]

On 10/21/2009 12:17 PM, Colin Walters wrote:
> Well...it's tricky because this stuff changes so rapidly, and we may
> simply not know how well a particular card works with a particular
> version of the driver.  Then of course multiply that matrix by
> configuration like multihead...
> 
> I guess a lot comes down to the details.  Are we just special casing
> PCI vendor == nvidia?  Or something more elaborate?

Nvidia has sucked for a really long time though. I bet if you ask around
we could come up with a decent set of heuristics for which hardware
devices cause the most angst, maybe maintain some sort of list and if
one of them is detected we give the users a fair warning. I think we
really need to set expectations for new users, from their decision point
to try to download Fedora, to running the live media, to installing it
for real, to running it. Somewhere in that process I think we need to be
giving them more fair warning.

If we set them up to expect it will just work (which we basically do
today) we get people very upset as in the mail I shared. This person, by
the way, works on open source software and is highly technical. We keep
talking about breaking out of the technical-person niche for Fedora, but
we're failing even there.

> Graphics is especially tricky, because linking to a wiki page is
> obviously problematic if the driver is failing entirely, since you
> wouldn't be able to see our error page...

Right, so in that case the implication might be we add some kind of
warning to the webpage so the user sees it even before starting the
install process. For other issues it might be more visible to place it
in the installer itself maybe. (These are just off-the-cuff ideas though!)
> 
> In the end graphics just has to work.  I think we should spend time on
> big picture issues that impact all users (e.g. root password, upgrade
> experience); there's a lot of great work going on by all accounts in
> the nouveau driver, and it's likely F12 would work better for him
> already.

But for my friend I posted the email from, he'll never get the chance to
appreciate that work if he gives up the 1st, 2nd, or 3rd install
attempt... if he at least knew ahead of time what to expect it could
have carried him through the 4 or 5 attempts he did make with a lot more
confidence.
> 
>> Same with the anaconda crashes he was having in the partitioning screen.
>> Apparently it was a known issue:
>>
>>
>>
>> How could we expect him to know to even look for the known issues wiki
>> page? How would he know it existed?
> 
> This one is much more targeted would probably be fairly easy to do.
> Doesn't anaconda already have a crash handler that submits to
> bugzilla?  We'd just need a link on the bugzilla page for anaconda to
> its common bugs list in the wiki.

I can ask him if a crash handler popped up for him but he seemed to
indicate not.

~m