Date: Sat, 7 Jan 1995 17:30:46 -0700 From: Nate Williams <nate@bsd.coe.montana.edu> To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com>, Wankle Rotary Engine <wpaul@skynet.ctr.columbia.edu> Cc: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Graphical installations and such... Message-ID: <199501080030.RAA18083@bsd.coe.montana.edu> In-Reply-To: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@time.cdrom.com> "Re: Graphical installations and such..." (Jan 7, 4:14pm)
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> EASY. I only use 2GB disks as my boot disks. You're thinking in the > past here, Mr Rotary Engine (god, I should have guessed! It's obvious > now! :-). You're looking at this sea of aging PC equipment around > you and you're projecting it as a much larger problem than it actually > is. Sure, we have to support the old stuff, and there will be some > minimal "FreeBSD lite" installation that *specifically targets* these > aging old-before-their-time 386 relics and brings them up to an > acceptable level of functionality. You want to convert one into a > workstation? You lose! Not to be too obnoxious, but I would venture to guess that the *majority* of the users of Linux have 8MB machines with less than 200MB of disk. And, a greater number of folks have 4MB in comparison to those with 16MB of memory. Just because YOU have lots of $$ to throw at 2GB drives as *boot* disks doesn't mean the average user does. > > That's what this boils down to, folks: burying a couple of otherwise > > simple operations under tons and tons of graphical manure, just to make > > some simpletons happy. It's been established that UNIX, in general, > > Mr Paul, I love ya, but you're an elitist reverse-snob boob! :-) IMHO, assuming that the average user will have the ability to run our WYSIWYG install utility is a quite a bit elitist. Having just been in the University environment, most of the folks were turned off originally by FreeBSD's hardware requirements. That changed with shlibs in 1.1, but as of late I see a *BIG* trend toward that area. Yes, we are picking up alot more 'experienced' hackers, but in my experience we are also turning away a number of folks who are overwhelmed by the magnitude of BSD. When I see a install that works on the majority of machines I see I'll believe it. This is not meant to discourage anyone from developing a nice GUI front-end based on X, but to raise the question 'Is it worth spending alot of time on something which IMO the *minority* of the folks will find helpful?' Nate
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