Comment 1380 for bug 1

On Thu, Oct 21, 2010 at 11:04, Tom <email address hidden> wrote:
> I find that after a decent install most people don't even notice that they are
> using a different OS.  Firefox is there and the menus easy to navigate.
> Documents open with a double-click.

I don't fully agree - e.g. Movie player is not playing a lot of
videos. Need to use VLC for those - so VLC must be installed and for
different files open with must be changed to use VLC instead of movie
player by default. I tend to instruct people to first double-click and
when it does not work use right mouse button and open with VLC. This
is easier than trying to find a sample for each possible format and
change default open. Similar applies for sound formats.

And there are IMHO some other first-to-dos, be it tools to install
(like gsmartcontrol, Thunderbird, ...) and some options to change. -
But I don't want to complain about this because I have plenty more
first-to-dos under Win* and on Ubuntu I start the Synaptic, go once
through the list, ticking everything I want and then save the list to
an external file and never need to do it again manually.

> As G stated it is the install process that is the most difficult part.

No, really, the installation is straight-forward. As with 10.10 it
either already starts preparing the harddrive while I do the last
inputs, is awesome - as well as WLAN already available and downloading
the updates already on the go. And with net access it already knows
the country I am in (regarding time settings). So there is nothing
more I wish to have.

> We try to make that easy and many people have lists of what to do after a basic install
> in blogs and websites or in magazines.

One idea: You could grab the most used sets of pre-installations and
pre-sets and offer that as additional option at installation, e.g.
similar as Fedora does, asking the user for typical use "Home user,
Developer, Designer/Photographer, ..." - that probably would make it
easier for a lot of people and for Canonical it would be just running
a few additional apt-get install lines and maybe some default
configuration files. I personally already have some files containing
those, so for me no problem as it.

--
Martin Wildam

http://www.google.com/profiles/mwildam