Re: Notes on improving the installer

I have also added "Intended Use" section to the wiki, please
update/delete as you wish :-)

https://wiki.freebsd.org/ImproveInstaller

The general idea is to propose a set of tools so user gets a working
setup after install, just like popular Linux distros. This step would
be optional and advanced users can simply skip it or select "bare
metal" to get where we land right now. For instance if a company needs
an office box they will select "desktop / office", developers will
probably select "desktop / software development", someone who wants to
quickly setup www server will select "server / www", etc.

I think this may attract new people that want to try out the FeeBSD
(i.e. switch from windows), or if we want to install FreeBSD on a
family/friend/customer machine quickly. This also may act as kind of
simple package manager frontend after install, or this package manager
frontend may be a separate application and launched by the installer.
Newcomers may need also UI version of the tool which may be the first
step here.

If you like the idea some brainstorming will be required what sets of
useful packages may be proposed to fulfill "intended use cases", how
deep should we let users to select packages, will this fit the pkgbase
stuff, etc :-)

Intended Use

* This functionality should allow selecting intended use of the target
installed system (i.e. desktop, server, etc) so the workstation is
ready to use after install.
* This may be used after installation too if someone skips that point
during initial install.
* This will help first contact users of FreeBSD not to land in shell
asking "what do I do now" but have operational workstation.
* Easy customization of target use (i.e. here is the installer run it
on 100 machines and all will be ready to use by our organization).
* Bare Metal: do not install anything additional, I just want the base system.
* Desktop:
  * Xorg or Wayland or Terminal?
    * Terminal: vim, tmux, mc, wget, curl, links, lynx, mpv, vlc, ocp etc.
    * Window Manager: KDE, GNOME, XFCE4, Enligthenment, LXQT, etc.
    * Office: Firefox, ?LibreOffice, VLC, ?AudaCity, etc.
    * Software development: some GUI IDE, vim, tmux, mc.
    * Embeded: adruino, arm-toolchain, riscv-toolchain, etc.
    * Mutimedia: VLC, Audacity, Milkytracker, Soundtacker, MIDI utils, etc.
    * Games: list of games.
    * etc.
  * Server:
    * WWW: Apache, Nginx, PHP, Python.
    * File Server: Samba, NFS, etc.
    * VPN: OpenVPN, Wierguard, etc.

Thanks :-)
Tomek

-- 
CeDeROM, SQ7MHZ, http://www.tomek.cedro.info