Jo-Erlend Schinstad [2011-12-15 12:20 +0100]: > Many of these users will be presented with a "New distribution > available" upgrade for the very first time. It is likely that many > will just go right ahead and install the upgrade. When they reboot, > they will log into a completely new environment. As we've seen, this > can upset people when they don't expect the change.
This sounds like we should perhaps address this in update-manager? It could show a slideshow similar to the one in Ubiquity, and/or also point out that the default desktop changes? > My proposal is that users who _upgrade_ from 10.04 should be > presented with a Gnome Panel desktop, kept as close to the setup in > 10.04 as possible. At some point we need to switch those users to the current stuff anyway, we can't keep the old panel stuff forever. Even today, only few people are still working on it. Also, if you upgrade to a totally new OS version, it is really not realistic to not expect any change. I do agree that the change is indeed quite big, and I've heard a few complaints and "how do I do X now?" questions myself, but if Unity has some discoverability/usability issues (and it does), we need to address those for all people, not just for LTS upgraders. Also, from a purely technical perspective, changing the configuration for all existing users by packages or even update-manager is a no-go area. u-m could switch the default session at the system level, but then new users/guest session would also use the old one, and you would never see the desktop which we actually support anywhere. If users see the GNOME-3 variant of GNOME panel, they will rightfully have the impression that there's nothign really new, just a lot of stuff has stopped working. Is that really the experience we want to convey? I think not. > This should be very easy since most of the stuff on the panel has > been converted to indicators in any case, and the indicator applet > has been upgraded to Gnome Panel 3, along with the default applets. > At the first login after the upgrade, the user should be presented > with a dialog that tells the user about the new desktop and that you > can open a guest session to try it without any consequences. That sounds more feasible -- you could show a screenshot/dialog how to switch back to the old environment. One thing that we should do is to make sure that LTS->LTS upgrades will keep gnome-panel installed, to already have the session available in lightdm (for fresh installs you need to explicitly install that package). > The only issue I can think of that might require a little work, is > panel applets compatibility. Some will not have been upgraded and > therefore not available. In fact, the vast majority of panel applets are gone now, so there's nothing to upgrade. Cf. my statement above about nobody really working on the old panel stuff any more. > It would be nice to have something similar to what Firefox has for > its extensions. The upgrade mechanism isn't the problem here -- if a panel applet package is available for GNOME 3, it'll be upgraded automatically. The problem is that nobody has ported all the old panels in the first place. Thanks! Martin -- Martin Pitt | http://www.piware.de Ubuntu Developer (www.ubuntu.com) | Debian Developer (www.debian.org) -- ubuntu-desktop mailing list ubuntu-desktop@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-desktop
