Feature Proposal: Use cases database

[Christoph Höger]

Hi folks,

in the past weeks I had an idea about how to improve the user support.
I'll sketch it:

1. A "normal" user, especially when new to Linux will probably start his
computer with a concrete idea what he wants to do ("surf the web",
"check my mail", "write a document" etc.). While there are tons of
information (some of them useful, some not), every peace of information
needs the user to at least surf to a given web page and search it for
what he needs (not talking about subscribing to a high traffic mailing
list). That is definitely too much work for our beginner. Especially, if
he wants to know "how to surf the web".

2. The main difference here between Linux and windows is where a
beginner can get support. Obviously the lesser spread of linux
distributions is a disadvantage. But the distribution itself is not only
the solution to this problem, but an even bigger advantage: Thousands of
users have access to the same software in the same version. And all of
them do those use cases. So we should bring the information about how to
do such a use case in our distribution to the user with the distribution
itself.

3. So how could we address that technically? Basically a wiki would be a
good starting point for some (when not all) of the basic use cases. From
there we could bring localized HowTos over a desktop applications to the
user (asking "what do you want to do today"). But that's not all: we
could also
	* deliver a set of scripts to check if the desired
	  software is installed in the correct versions.

	* integrate that system with smolt to get information
	  about which hardware will probably work and which not
	  (this could avoid some frustration)

	* integrate some kind of "how could I use that
	  file?" functionality in our document centric desktop

	* lead to further support possibilties (mailing lists, forums)
	  and how to use them

	* allow a user to easily post a bug report when a use case 
	  should work but doesn't

	* <PUT YOUR IDEA HERE>

What do you think?
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