[Mageia-discuss] Mageia review with bad experience

[TJ]

On 10/10/2011 05:31 PM, Michael Scherer wrote:
> Le lundi 10 octobre 2011 à 17:40 +0200, Romain d'Alverny a écrit :
>> On Sun, Oct 9, 2011 at 16:34, Frank Griffin<ftg at roadrunner.com>  wrote:
>>> The goal should be rather that the user has less or no *need* to look at the
>>> help.  But it needs to be there for safety and comfort.
>>
>> Yes, that's the point. Making the installer so the user can be
>> confident enough into it and shouldn't have to call for help (then
>> installer "story" would then anticipate potential fears). And still
>> make help available as a last resort.
>
> But the installer can mess the disk. So it has to be scary enough so
> people stop and think about what they do.
>
It certainly can. Or could, a few years back, if there was an underlying 
problem. Mandrake 10 did that to me a while back. I had purchased a new 
computer, and rather than simply migrating my Windows 98 system to it on 
one big partition and then installing Mandrake 10 on the unused space, I 
used the hard drive manufacturer's software to create two partitions, 
one for Windows, another to be for Mandrake. Unknown to me, the 
partition table was incorrect. When Mandrake installed, it destroyed the 
Windows partition - even though I had instructed it to use the other 
one. Unfortunately, I blamed Mandrake 10, and tried installing Mandrake 
9.2 after restoring Windows again. That worked fine, reinforcing my 
mistaken belief that there was a serious bug in Mandrake 10.

I looked for help on Usenet, and got only insults because of my lack of 
knowledge and experience, and because I insisted in blaming Mandrake 
because that's what the evidence I saw looked like to me. So, I decided 
to try Fedora Core 4. That refused to install, thus forcing me to look 
more closely at what was wrong. Partition Magic identified the problem 
right away and fixed it, and I was able to go ahead with Fedora. (I 
didn't go back to Mandrake because the installer hadn't seen that there 
was a problem, as Fedora had.) But Fedora wasn't for me, and I came back 
to Mandrake after a year or so. (or was it Mandriva by then?)

So yes, the installer certainly can mess things up, or appear to be the 
cause, anyway. And to a newbie who feels like he's on his own, that's a 
very scary thing.

TJ