New Users Learning FreeBSD

[JJB]

There will all ways to the party line drawn between the developers
and the users. Developers want total freedom about how to install
and config while the users wany automated no question asked install.
If FBSD was an commercial product, the developers world would never
be seen by the customers. There is no question that the sysinstall
process is not new-be friendly. Heck it's not even user friendly to
experienced users. FBSD all ready has an division point called the
development code branch for the developers and the stable code
branch for the user community. The stable branch can be considered
akin to an commercial product release version. The problem is the
development total freedom install method is not really appropriate
to the technical knowledge level of the general user community and
this division between communities has always gone in favor of the
developers.  This will never change as long as developers are in
control for it's their nature to be blind to the needs of the users
of the finished results of their labor. This is even evident in the
tone and depth of the documentation of the man pages and the
handbook. Every thing is geared to the documentation reference needs
of the developer and technical knowledgeable user. There really is
no provisions for the people new to FBSD. They are kind of just left
on the sidelines and have to dig through a lot of old outdated
public internet how-to's, man pages which are so cryptic they are
next to useless, and the handbook which is written in an style that
is very hard to comprehend, the poor new user has to learn by trial
and error. We can all see that this situation is almost designed on
purpose to make the new user pay their dues before they can join the
FBSD developers club. All this does is inhibits the growth that FBSD
could really experience. An good compromise which services the wants
and needs of both communities would be to add an newbe user-friendly
install process on stable branch only. A step-by-step instructional
install guide that explains how the system is designed to be used
would go a very long way to speeding up the learning process of the
newbe and go an long way to removing the frustration that we see
voiced all the time in this questions list.

Just my general observation's and comments based on what I have seen
and read in the list.





-----Original Message-----
From: owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
[mailto:owner-freebsd-questions at freebsd.org]On Behalf Of Chuck
McManis
Sent: Saturday, March 06, 2004 1:40 PM
To: Chuck Swiger
Cc: FreeBSD Mailing list
Subject: Re: New Users Learning FreeBSD

At 06:00 AM 3/6/2004, Chuck Swiger wrote:
>Chuck McManis wrote:
>>To put it in perspective, the best way to start USING FreeBSD as
opposed
>>to acquiring it to develop with, is probably to by an Apple
machine with
>>OS-X installed. All the integration is handled for you. It pains
me that
>>there isn't an organization of Apple's caliber providing a
complete
>>FreeBSD workstation product that I could load on any machine with
a
>>simple install.
>
>Apple has some advantages when writing an OS to run on their own
hardware;
>FreeBSD needs to deal with a much wider variation of hardware than
Apple
>does in terms of both quality and complexity.

Well until 5.x the FreeBSD problem was no more difficult than the
one
Microsoft dealt with :-) I agree that if you limit supported configs
it
makes install easier.

>I use both MacOS X and FreeBSD on a daily basis; they aren't the
same OS
>nor do they make although knowledge of one is often useful on the
>other.  OS X auto-defaults to installing everything into a single
HFS+
>partition, which is ideal only in the sense that such an
installation
>avoids having the user make a decision about drive partitioning.

That is a good example of a "user centric choice." Most application
users
(non-developers) derive little benefit from having multiple file
systems.

>That being said, my point is not to disagree with you so much as to
say
>that if you think the FreeBSD install should behave differently,
you've
>got the sources: make a few changes to streamline the process and
see
>whether other people like them.

And my point was that the primary population of people who would
have an
opinion would be developers who violently disagree that there should
be an
"easy" or "dumbed down" install process. Did I mention that I also
was the
manager (acting) for the group that owned "Sun Install" at Sun 15
years ago
? (God that makes me feel old :-) The current install program has
many
external similarities to that one. I've heard all of the arguments,
no one
at Sun would tolerate an "EZ" installer and I doubt hardly anyone
here
would as well. Part of the problem is that interaction between
installation
and the need to have the developers provide hooks for it. The
package
system is quite good and frankly I think passes muster for both
newbie/app
user/ and developer alike. The XFree86 configuration/install is
pretty
horrific if you don't know much about computers (asking for the chip
used
in the video card? please!)

My observation is that this is the sort of battle/change that cannot
be
manifested in an open source community. If you're familiar with the
Cathedral and the Bazaar paper, its impossible to get everyone in
the
Bazaar to be quiet so that one person might speak to everyone at
once.
Conversely its impossible in the open source model to have one
requirement
impart requirements on everyone else. It just isn't in the nature of
the
community to accept such a constraint, and in parts of the community
the
hint of something like that generates huge antibodies.

--Chuck

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