Here are some of my ideas for Fedora 8 and Fedora 9

[Christoph Wickert]

Am Mittwoch, den 04.07.2007, 15:17 +0200 schrieb Valent Turkovic:
> On Wed, 2007-07-04 at 14:49 +0200, Christoph Wickert wrote:
> > How exactly should this happen? Another screen with questions like:
> > "Do
> > you want to mount your NTFS volumes? y/N" and "Do you want your NFTS
> > volumes to be mounted read only? Y/n"? I don't think bothering people
> > with more questions is necessary or useful.
> 
> Offcource not. The devels can choose whic is technically better default
> (RO or RW) and only have an option in advanced mode to change it,

What advanced mode are you talking about? AFAIK we don't have an
advanced mode. There's no such thing as "linux expert".

>  or
> after the install of Fedora via some gui tool perhaps?

But in the end it comes out to these two possibilities:
1. Do it automatically: Something that not all users like. I'd like to
have control over what a the installation does.
2. Bother people with another question: No matter if it is during
install or in firstboot, this sucks.

> > You already have the opportunity to configure NTFS mounts during
> > install. Usually I tell anaconda/disc druid to mount my Windows
> > partition to /mnt/windows. Now that we have ntfs-3g in default
> > install,
> > you have r/w access when you first boot your computer after install. 
> 
> Are you sure? I wouldn't be writing this if it worked. AFAIK you can't
> choose NTFS partitions in anaconda during the partitioning and give them
> mount points. NTFS partitons are grayed out and can't be even selected.
> If I'm wrong please correct me.

I just looked it up and you are correct. Sorry, I could have sworn that
it was possible.

So IMO all there needs to be is possibility to give NTFS partitions a
mount point, the rest should be done by the users. And I don't think
this needs to be enabled by default, we could do this like we do with
xfs for example.

> > > * Beagle and Deskbar installed by default
> > > these applications make all the difference for an desktop user
> > between
> > > an "OK" user experience and "wonderful" user experience.
> > 
> > This topic has already been beaten to death on this list before you
> > raised it again. We did have beagle in the default install in FC6 and
> > it
> > was decided to take it out for F7. Please be so kind as to search the
> > archives or at least read the Fedora Weekly News:
> > http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FWN/Issue88#head-7fdee0a1251926827abf631c707a2dadcb25ea10
> 
> My point is that maintainer of the package said that he doesn't have
> time to work with this package and it is easier for him to remove it
> that look at some non-trivial problems.

If this was the only problem I'm sure we would have already solved it by
now.

> > BTW: If you speak German I suggest you search for beagle @
> > fedoraforum.de: 37 hits and 35 of them are complainants.
> 
> Well I would argue that the people who remove it are a minority, not the
> other way around.

35 of 37 of doesn't look like a minority to me. ;) Most of the problems
are like "My computer is horribly slow", "My computer locks up" or "My
laptop battery is empty so much faster now". And most of them are solved
with "yum remove beagle".

> I have seen beagle installed on multiple systems and
> it is as unobtrusive as an app can be. I have tested it on Fedora Core6,
> multiple Fedora 7 installations and now I'm testing it on Rawhide. So I
> have extensive experience with beagle.

>From what I see from bugzilla [1] you have been testing it on a machine
with 1536 MB RAM. There are at least 6 search processes running with
2.6% mem each. This comes out to ~ 240 MB in total. And now think about
the people, who have only 512 MB RAM installed.

> Only saying "me too" to a forum, bugzilla entry or on a mailing
> list makes beagle look bad but only because the majority of people who
> don't have issues with beagle don't even go to these mailing lists or to
> bugzilla.

I think the "me too"-people are not included, I only counted the threads
but not the people. It's most likely that there is a large number of
people who had the same symptoms, searched the forum and followed the
advice to remove beagle without writing another "me too" comment.

>  If you have tested beagle on multiple systems and find it
> causing problems then please excuse me - show us your test results and
> that is ok.
> 
> Has anybody of the 35 people on fedoraforum.de looked at the actual
> problem with beagle and saw where or why they have some issues?

You have to decide from which point of view your are talking. From a
developer's point of view you are right: Users should file bugs,
investigate the problem, do testing and troubleshooting to help beagle
to improve. But from a users point of view, "yum remove beagle" is the
answer in most cases.

Most of the time your point of view is the user's, but now you suddenly
switch to the developers sight. In your perspective users often are to
stupid do even the most trivial tasks (like to install the applications
they need with pirut), and now you expect them to do in depth bug
hunting? That's not logical. 

BTW: Many of the developers say beagle simply is doomed, because it's
written in mono. It's a failure of design itself.

> > > * Tomboy installed by default
> > > - I have all the same arguments here as I do for Beagle and Deskbar
> > 
> > deskbar and tomboy might be worth discussing, but I don't think many
> > people are using them. So I'd say they should stay out.
> 
> It depends what Fedora is trying to do. It if it is trying to be a linux
> Desktop and not only for us who are geeks then it should include nice
> apps by deafult - any maybe put some promo video material that explains
> what each app does.

As I said above: On the one hand you are arguing users are not able to
find out what an application does, on the other hand you expect them to
do serious bug hunting? So what's your target audience then?

> > > * Desktop shortcut for joining Fedora IRC (aka "Get Live Help")
> > 
> > Although this is a good idea I'm not sure how to achieve this
> > technically: Yes, there is an IRC url scheme [1], but I'm not sure if
> > all desktops are able to open IRC links. Other questions are: What
> > application should be used to open this link and how to we make sure
> > this application really is installed?
> 
> Why IRC url? It can be a shortcut to a script. At least there are
> multiple choices. Devels should make this choice, I trust them. Do you
> see some actual problem here?

I'm afraid there needs to be a bunch of if-else-statements to cover
every IRC client we ship. Maybe you can give us more details about how
the sabayon guys have covered this?

> > > * Desktop folder with examples of what "this linux thing" can do :)
> > 
> > Personally I hate "example" folders. "Example
> > Pictures/Music/Playlists/Whatever" is the first thing I remove on a
> > fresh installed Windows.
> 
> Gnome also comes with these folders, I dislike them in Gnome also.
> You are confusing examples folders from windows and a much better
> example from Ubuntu example folder (and that is not in plural).

No, you are confusing an "examples" folder with xdg-user-dirs. This is
something completely different.

> > > * a working Burning app for Fedora Gnome desktop
> > > Put any new user in front of fresh Fedora 7 desktop and ask them to
> > > burn some files to CD or DVD - any watch them as they wiggle
> > > unpleasantly as they can't find any burning app under gnome desktop.
> > > Puting a link for nautils burner under "Places / CD - DVD Recoder"
> > > doesn't help.
> > 
> > Really? I have been installing computers with fedora for a while now
> > and
> > giving them to my customers. _No_one_ has ever asked me how to burn
> > CDs/DVDs. 
> 
> Do they burn discs? Do they even have burners? Do they even know they
> have a burning option?

Erm, I guess if I sell them a computer with DVD burner but without the
necessary software to burn I would have heard _lots_ of complainants. ;)

> Have you asked your customer to burn a CD or a DVD and see what he/she
> does?

Today a customer handed over his laptop to me in order to upgrade it to
F7. "Don't worry about the files," he said "I have backed up everything
onto DVD." So I guess my customers know that they have the ability to
burn discs.

> Or you have had to teach them to use rhythmbox and gnome burning
> tool because they didn't know how to use it by them selves?

No, I did not have to teach them but only tell them to launch rhythmbox.

> > I have to admit that starting rhythmbox to burn audio discs is
> > not really intuitive but it works. 
> 
> And that is what I'm talking about! It has to be intuitive or it doesn't
> float.

I remember the "shiny desktop" thread where you said that we should
learn from Apple. By default the only way to burn an audio disc in MacOS
is to use iTunes. Same in Windows with it's Mediaplayer BTW.
As I said before: It's not really intuitive for audio, but if there is
one lesson we should learn from other OSes it IMHO is: No duplicate
functionality in the base install.

> > So IMO we shouldn't add duplicate
> > functionality to the default install.
> 
> There is no duplication if you add only a shortcut for gnome burner
> "burn:///" under gnome "Applications" menu instead of being only in
> "Places" menue - which is really not intuitive.

For most of my customers it is. Everything they see in nautilus first of
all is a "place" for them but not an "application" (of course nautilus
itself is an app, too).

Chris

[1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=217031#c26