Does your mom know what a Chromium is?

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1

Mine sure does not. While I think those first steps are nice to have, for fully tech illiterate people this is overwhelming.

From experience I know that, unless instructed by a system to “press the button at the bottom right” with a big fat arrow pointing at it, most people won’t know what to chose here.

Think about it this way:

I either set up the PC for my mom, meaning I am by her side for the entire process, I don’t need that popup, because I already know beforehand what to install. (As if I were to set up fedora for her)

Or I let my mom install the system by herself in that case the popup is not needed as well, because she will call me to tell her what to choose, defeating the purpose of the popup all togehter.

Most moms don’t care about choice, they just want to look at stuff online.

2

Hello, would it be better to have a “simple setup” mode or “advanced setup” mode. My idea was to allow picking whatever browser a user is already familar with, which they would likely click Chrome or Firefox from their past Windows use, but it is bad for the users who just use Safari or Edge.

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3

I do understand that thought process, and I guess this is hard to decide on what’s helpful and what’s “too much” choice.

That just popped into my head, as I recently had to help collegues switch over to new work laptops, and they struggle with the very most basic things like “choose a search engine when edge starts for the first time”.

The very simplest thing would be an take it or leave it approach. When it comes to internet browsers, most people just want something that works (and their bookmarks ofc) and not have to think about it.

I would not even recommend reducing the choice down to firefox chrome and edge as that would not alleviate the issue.

It probably comes down to testing and how (non-technical) users interact with that promt. Had I to suggest a way forward it would be the take it or leave it approach.

Or maybe simple and advanced in a way like this:

This is your internet browser
   firefox.png    Firefox
    (Grey Change Button)


(Back Button)            (OK Button)

Where the change button redirects to the list that’s already available.

4

I was thinking to add a “simple” and “advanced” mode to quick setup which if you click simple it chooses everything for you, doesn’t even show the screen for picking programs at all, and if you click “advanced” it lets you choose. Someone who is nontechnical could just use the simple setup. Do you think that would make things easier?

5

It depends how the simple mode is presented.

If the user has to decide on:

How do you want to continue:

(Advanced Setup)      (Simple Setup)

Then I think it would be not ideal.

However if you hid the advanced setup, for example by using a SplitButton and set the default as the simple mode, that would work, eg.

You can now use your PC.

                 (Finish|\/)
                         (Advanced Setup)

You could also just show a checkbox to make it more prominent, but that also has has some “call son to ask whether I should check the box”-potential.

In my mind the important part is that simple is default and that, when you don’t know what you are doing, then you cannot make a wrong choice.

6

_00’s mom notwithstanding, I like the idea of Simple/Advanced options. It’s 2026 after all and ‘most’ people are familiar with (windows) laptops and are not complete idiots. I think where they’re going to run into problems is not so much with the UI–but with things like:

  1. Find the app to burn this .iso to USB stick
  2. Go into the BIOS to make it boot from this stick
  3. Find the correct drive to install the OS on
  4. Format the drive [choosing between ext4/btrfs/zfs, etc.
  5. Install the OS
  6. Removed the USB stick before rebooting

*Those* are the things I think newer users will experience as a ‘roadblock’ and, of course, they are out of your control. There is only so much ‘hand-holding’ you can do as a dev, right?

Having said that, you could leave instructions on the above steps and………….ahem….hope nothing goes wrong without you there every step of the way. Facepalm.

7

I agree with that, but also sooner or later there will be hardware you can buy with stillOS preinstalled and this will be a non-issue.

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8

I recently had a very humbling experience, where I noticed, just how very incapable the average Joe is when it comes to setting up anything.

I was huge fan of leaving the 10% behind, but perhaps not anymore.

However concerning initial installation. I realize there is a way to install an OS without the need of an USB-Stick, merely a separate partition.

There are plenty of “1 click linux installs” available, however I kept forgetting the project names.

Maybe that is a route worth investgating when it comes to initial installation, before setup.