[Ole Streicher] > In my opinion, the situation for the Debian Pure Blends is better here > than for the Desktop environments: If a user doesn't know what the > Blends mean, he just ignores it and doesn't install anything from it.
An unskilled user do not ignore options he do not understand, he worries and tries to understand them in order to avoid making a mistake that will bother him in the future. If you believe options that are unknown or confusing do not cause any harm, I am quite sure you are mistaken. They increase the cognitive strain and force people to spend time trying to understand that the option can be ignored. They also slow down the installation process. Note, I am not against the blends selection option during installation, but believe it should be introduced after taking the negative effects as well as the positive effects into account, not by claiming the negative effects do not exist. There exist usability research indicating that more than 7 options will confuse the human brain and cause a lot of cognitive strain. To me it tell us that we should avoid "just two screenfulls" of options, and instead try to make sure at most one screenfull, and preferably less than 7 options are presented in any dialog in the installer. -- Happy hacking Petter Reinholdtsen