On Mon, Oct 26, 2015 at 4:50 PM, JAYDEN CHARBONNEAU <jcharbonnea...@cpsge.org> wrote: > The more options in the installer,the better.There will always be people > (Trust me,I am one of them haha) that will wonder "Where's the program > options","WHY CAN'T I CHANGE THE NAME OF MY DRIVE" or "WHY CAN'T I CHANGE > THE INSTALLER SCHEME TO GREEN ON BLACK?". (The last two would probably be > me).Plus,it allows for smoother installation of the OS.If you give someone a > car,and tell them they can only change the seat,they won't get the car > anywhere. (That was a horrible analogy,but it proves its point.).Take LINUX > for example.It has a rather simple installer,dumbified for the less > tech-savvy people.But,it also has options for advanced/power hungry user.Our > installer should be able to meet ALL of the ranges of people.Hence,why we > have an advanced mode and a simple mode.
As someone who works in usability testing on the side, I'll comment that aiming for "average users" with "typical knowledge" covers almost all of your bases. This misses the people at the low end, who are unlikely to want to install a DOS operating system anyway. And it misses the needs at the top end, folks like you who want a bazillion knobs and switches to customize the install experience and control DOWN TO THE PACKAGE what gets installed and what gets left out. It's great that you want that level of "Advanced" control during your FreeDOS install process, but I still ask "Do we really need that level of customization?" I don't think so. I think we need a simple install process. DOS isn't that big; MSDOS 5 came on like three 3.5" floppies. FreeDOS isn't that big; we have several software sets with useful software, but it's still a far cry from the Linux distros you mention which might be tailored for "advanced/power hungry" users like sysadmins and developers. FreeDOS needs to be simple. If the install process is too difficult or too obtuse, those "average users" will not want to install FreeDOS. The only people who will want to install FreeDOS are those top-end power-users, who could just as easily use FDISK and FORMAT to set up the target drive, then UNZIP or FDNPKG at the command line to install the packages. I believe the critical moment is during that installation. It needs to be simple. It needs to be fast. It really should be as simple as "do you want to install everything or just BASE?" and "do you want to install source code, too?" (And setting up the target drive, of course.) Jim ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Freedos-devel mailing list Freedos-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freedos-devel
