lubuntu-desktop team mailing list archive

[C David Rigby <c.david.rigby@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 2009-06-29 at 18:40 +0100, Ed Hewitt and several others wrote:

<discussion of "keep it light" or "feature complete" elided>

Restating the obvious, but the engineering trade off is always between
"ease of use/fully featured" on the one hand and lightweight on the
other. The necessary criterion is to decide what we really want to
build, and make it unique and useful enough to attract interest.

I've proposed it before, but I'll say it again as more people are on the
list now (sorry that I've missed the IRC meetings for the last two weeks
where the app mix has been the topic of discussion). How about the
possibility of a very slim base install with the installer offering
"bundles" to meet individual needs and desires? Something like the
FreeBSD or Debian text installers comes to mind.

The base installation would be just a command-line, network-capable
system plus enough of X to get LXDE operational. We would be pushing the
real work to the installer. The installer, whether text-based or
grahpical, would need to provide a lot of choices of bundles to
install. 

More importantly, I think the installer should provide something I have
yet to see. That something is extensive documentation of the choices of
bundles of applications, and what they mean in terms of system
performance vs features. It should be organized so that a savvy user
could bypass the explanations (or load a jumpstart script), but a novice
would get a detailed explanation of what the choices are and what they
mean for the final installed system.

My $0.02.

Cheers
C David Rigby