Hi, While we debate the future for standalone installers, I think there's a few simple things we can do to improve the existing installer in the meantime. These suggestions come from my helping a new user over the weekend to install some edu apps from scratch. Some problems were down to finding the installer through our websites which I'll address elsewhere, but seeing the installer through the eyes of a complete newbie to KDE made a few simple problems rather obvious.
The single best thing we can do is to add a choice of "Standard" or "Advanced" mode at the start as is common with Windows installers. We already have the option on the second run to use the previous "basic settings" (a confusing term itself), and I see little reason we can't do the same for the first run in Standard mode, defaulting to "stable latest" from winkde.org. In the picklist for apps, we use group and package names like "kdeedu" and "kdesdk-kioslaves" which are largely meaningless to new users and I doubt would make any sense to a non-English speaker. These should be replaced with proper names like "Education". The package notes could also be improved. The Language and Spelling groups should use the actual language name rather than package names. We probably shouldn't refer to "Packages" either. Longer term, sourcing these details from the AppData files would be preferred. The picklist itself could be more usable, especially if in a Standard mode. The Action column really should be the first column, and we should remove the version number. I'd suggest adding two more group buttons for "Games" and "Education" on the left to reduce the "Applications" list size, and I'd also remove the smaller module group names like kdetoys and kdemultimedia that only have 1 and 3 items under them. Longer term, an icon grid layout may be more user-friendly, but for now adding the icon may be an option. I think we could also leave out more packages in the Standard mode, kde-workspace and kdeplasma-addons especially, but things like kioslaves and strigi analyzers are meaningless to new users and should be hidden, being automatically selected as required. The confirmation dialog for extra dependencies should also be skipped, we don't need to tell new users stuff like that. Alternatively, don't show the package list and just ask for confirmation to download XX MB data. The final screen should probably also direct users to UserBase and Forums. Scripty now supports native Qt translation files so it shouldn't be much work to get the installer translated now. A new langauge selection panel could be added at the start of the installer that could also default the langauge packages to be installed. Alternatively just default to the current system ui language. The Windows menu folder is called "KDE Release" which doesn't make much sense to new users, "KDE Software" or "KDE Applications" may make more sense. I'm also not sure if a full tree hierarchy in the menu is useful, especially as most people will install only a few apps. Any thoughts on these suggestions? I'm willing to help out with coding them, but it may be quicker for someone more familiar with the code to take the lead. Cheers! John. _______________________________________________ Kde-windows mailing list [email protected] https://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-windows
