Linux Mint

Bug #1325786
Comment #2

Comment 2 for bug 1325786

Revision history for this message

Barry Rueger (barry-rueger) wrote on 2014-06-03:

Hi Clement - I'd like to assist the team working on this. I'm hardly a beginner but I've always found the Mint installer confusing at that point.

If it's aimed at beginner users (or ordinary people) the installer is pretty much flawless except for this one real weakness.

If they're installing from scratch to a new hard drive, or installing to create a dual boot setup (such as with Windows) the two options are probably fine - Mint will set up and partition the drive in a fine fashion with no further input.

If, though, they're trying to upgrade versions they'll get that far and (if lucky) be stumped about which to choose to do an upgrade of the OS. If they choose option A they'll get two versions of the OS on their drive. This might not hurt them, but it's probably not what they want or need.

If they choose option B they lose all of their data.

If they can figure out that neither of those are what they want they wind up being dropped headfirst into the whole drive partitioning process - not something that average users can or should try to do.

Heck, even I feel vaguely uncomfortable with it, and I've done it more times than I can recall.

I don't code, and don't know how complex it would be, but what's really needed is way to separate users doing an INSTALL from users doing an UPGRADE, and give them appropriate options.

This is important. Mint is recommended to an awful lot of new Linux users, and overall it's a very, very easy switch. If those new users find themselves stopped dead part way through the install, not sure what to do, or worse if they nuke their whole drive, they'll never come back.

Adding this to the Release notes is good, but at a minimum I'd suggest some kind of incremental update to the Installer that adds some REALLY explicit language saying "This will delete ALL partitions and ALL data from the ENTIRE hard drive."

That's just a few more characters (maybe some boldface tags) to catch them at the specific spot where damage happens. Better to do that than to tell them after the fact "You should have read the Release Notes."

Part of the reason why this is needed is the sheer size of modern drives. It's almost impossible to buy a drive under 1 terabyte. This greatly increases the likelihood that people won't backup, so they need protection when doing installs and upgrades.

And even if they do backup (Say using Mint Backup) the backup will be large enough that placing it on another partition is the obvious choice - not everyone has a second hard drive kicking around.

I doubt that most people will manage to store even a MintBackup to a USB stick, and can't think that CDR or DVD-R are even remotely an option anymore.

Hi Clement - I'd like to assist the team working on this.  I'm hardly a beginner but I've always found the Mint installer confusing at that point.

If it's aimed at beginner users (or ordinary people) the installer is pretty much flawless except for this one real weakness.

If, though, they're trying to upgrade versions they'll get that far and (if lucky) be stumped about which to choose to do an upgrade of the OS.  If they choose option A they'll get two versions of the OS on their drive. This might not hurt them, but it's probably not what they want or need.

If they choose option B they lose all of their data.

Heck, even I feel vaguely uncomfortable with it, and I've done it more times than I can recall.

I don't code, and don't know how complex it would be, but what's really needed is way to separate users doing an INSTALL from users doing an UPGRADE, and give them appropriate options.

This is important. Mint is recommended to an awful lot of new Linux users, and overall it's a very, very easy switch.   If those new users find themselves stopped dead part way through the install, not sure what to do, or worse if they nuke their whole drive, they'll never come back.

Adding this to the Release notes is good, but at a minimum I'd suggest some kind of  incremental update to the Installer that adds some REALLY explicit language saying "This will delete ALL partitions and ALL data from the ENTIRE hard drive."

That's just a few more characters (maybe some boldface tags) to catch them at the specific spot where damage happens.  Better to do that than to tell them after the fact "You should have read the Release Notes."

Part of the reason why this is needed is the sheer size of modern drives.  It's almost impossible to buy a drive under 1 terabyte.  This greatly increases the likelihood that people won't backup, so they need protection when doing installs and upgrades.

And even if they do backup (Say using Mint Backup) the backup will be large enough that placing it on another partition is the obvious choice - not everyone has a second hard drive kicking around.

I doubt that most people will manage to store even a MintBackup  to a USB stick, and can't think that CDR or DVD-R are even remotely an option anymore.