[Mageia-discuss] "Beginner" "Medium" "Advanced" and "Expert"

[Hoyt Duff]

On Sat, Oct 30, 2010 at 3:02 AM, Dj Marian <djmarian4u at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> ´Categories such as "Beginner" "Medium" "Advanced" and "Expert" are very
> subjective terms. What one may consider an "Advanced" person may really
> be a "Medium" user by someone else's definition and etc.´
>

I've always looked at it this way:

If your target customer is "advanced" or "expert", then they are
capable of selecting their own packages to suit their preferences.
Mandriva addressd this by offering a "minimal install" which was
reasonably obscured from a novice user.

For everybody else, a preferred selection of applications in several
categories was offered. my opinion is that the categories were overly
broad and they installed applications of dubious utility. Again, my
opinion is the choices be limited to KDE desktop, GNOME desktop and
LXDE desktop and "select individual packages", all with single
instances of applications (for example, not three different MP3
players, two word processors and so on). As novice users gain
experience, they can explore and add other applications.

How aout things like samba and sshd, you ask? Those could be done with
a wizard in a separate part of the install (with an appropriate
explanation of why one might want them) like ntp and CUPS.

In summary, the Mandriva approach is a good compromise only in need of
a few tweaks and the install "choices" could be made simpler since
network servers and the like are usually in the "advanced" user
domain.


-- 
Hoyt