Hi Chris, Thanks for this very comprehensive feedback. I hope you will forgive me if I don't respond to every point you have raised. I have however read them all, and they are all relevant and useful. So thanks very much.
Some particular points however: * Currently there is no mouse support at all. I hope to add that later. * It would be great if you could try to find out why your wireless failed. * I hope, eventually, to remove the reliance on cfdisk. * From your comments, and those from others it is clear to me that the part of the user interface involved with creating filesystems and allocaing mount points needs to be redesigned. - so after that, there will be a whole different set of issues! * What would you suggest instead of the "Reboot" message? On Sat, Jan 14, 2017 at 08:06:09PM -0800, Chris Marusich wrote: Hi! I successfully installed GuixSD on my Libreboot laptop using the installer! It's awesome to see some work in this area. Thank you! I've got a lot of feedback. Some is minor, some is less minor. Even if you don't incorporate all of it, I hope that it will help make the installer better! * Left-clicking on buttons, entries, etc. had no effect. I expected it to be equivalent to pressing enter or space. * Left-clicking leaves the clicked square (i.e., row+column intersection) highlighted, which is visually distracting. * The installer should either guide the user through a linear series of steps, or explain at the beginning what the user should do. I wasn't sure what to do at first when I was dropped into the installer. This doesn't preclude a non-linear path through the installation phases, but I do think a more guided path would be less confusing. * The installer begins with nothing selected. This contributed to my initial confusion: what am I supposed to do? * The installer should display a keymap, or a hotkey which displays help info (like the help page in cfdisk, or top). * I think you made the first letter of some commands bold (like the "C" in "Continue"), but I didn't notice it until I tried the installation on a machine with a different monitor. More contrast, or an underlined character, might help call that out more. * I'm not sure how, but I got stuck in a menu loop between "Partition the disks" and "Choose mount point". Hitting "Continue" and "Go Back" in any order never took me to any other step, or back to the main menu. I worked around the issue by getting a shell and rebooting. * Partition the disks: when launching cfdisk, consider explaining that we're going to launch cfdisk to do the actual partitioning, and the user needs to quit cfdisk to come back and continue the installation. * The interface was at times sluggish - there was a noticeable delay (hundreds of milliseconds) between pressing e.g. the left-arrow key and the next bottom-menu item being selected. * By default, this installer provides a lot of manual control over how the disks are partitioned, what file systems will be installed, and what their mount points will be. Perhaps by default we should offer one or more common configurations - e.g., one partition, containing an ext4 file system, mounted at / - and move the finer-grained manual controls into a sub-menu of some kind. For comparison, I've just installed Ubuntu and Debian today, and both of their installers offer such simplified paths for installation. - useful if someone does not know much about that stuff yet or they just want an easy default. * Following that note, if we presented pre-set combinations of partitions/file systems/mount points, I can imagine adding another "simple configuration" to that list, for encrypted home partition, or an entire encrypted disk. For various use cases. * The installer contains various input text boxes (e.g., for file system label). These boxes are invisible; a border would help call them out (I almost didn't realize they existed). Also, left/right arrow keys did not scroll left/right, which surprised me, but backspace and delete worked well enough. * The generated operating system configuration should use file system UUID or label, if possible, rather than device path. * Choose mount point: since you can also set the label here, maybe change the title of the section to "Choose file system and mount point" or something? * The installer takes a "window within a window" approach for installation phases. This conflicts with the "replace the whole window" behavior that occurs when running cfdisk. I think that using a "replace the whole window" approach for the whole installer would help unify the overall look and feel. So, instead of creating a window within the installer window for the "Partition the disks" phase, just replace the entire window with the relevant interface for the sub-menu. * Choose mount point: clarify what the actions Check, Write, and re(Create) mean. I wasn't sure until I tried them all! * Passphrase entry (for wireless setup): after inputting my wireless network's passphrase, the message "Successfully initiated wpa_supplicant" was displayed without a newline on the same line where I had just put my passphrase, which looked clunky. * I couldn't get wireless working, so I had to plug in an ethernet cable to continue the installation. I'm not sure why the wireless failed. * I didn't realize that "enter" performed a different action than "space." On some menus it seems to matter which one you use, but on others, it seems like they behave the same. I think clarifying the keymap/interface will help with this. * Generate the configuration: for some reason, when I entered this menu, I was dropped back into the "Allocate disk partitions" menu, which was confusing. Perhaps I was just confused and hit the wrong button! * Allocate disk partition: label the header. I didn't realize there was a column for "mount point" until I set up a mount point; a header would have helped call out the fact that I had not yet set up a mount point. * Install the system: there was a 10-20 second delay after pressing enter to begin the installation, during which I wasn't sure if anything was actually being done. Not sure if that's the installer's fault, though. After that, the installation began. * Install the system: there were a lot of ^[[ characters at the start of the lines which were output in the window showing the progress of the installation. Also, there was a lot of flashing underneath lines like "Downloading https://mirror.hydra.gnu.org/... | 3.4 MiB transferred", as if the underscore symbol was being moved super fast from the start of the line to the end of the line repeatedly. * Final step: the installer told me to remove the installation device and reboot. I followed these instructions by removing the device. When I tried to reboot, the program crashed with a kernel panic - not surprising, I guess, since I had removed the entire system out from under it... This was benign, since I was able to just power cycle my system, but maybe we need to change the wording or something here? * My opinion is that the reasonable default is to create a user, or at least give an opportunity to ask for the creation of a user. I understand this is not what you want in an installer, since you use LDAP for account info, but I suspect most people would expect this. Thank you again for taking the time to make this installer. All in all, it was really easy to use! The biggest usability issues were failure to set up wireless, getting lost in a menu loop which required a reboot to break out of, and the final kernel panic which was benign but scary. -- Chris -- Avoid eavesdropping. Send strong encrypted email. 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