Website & download

[Mark Ballard]

I would like to give some feedback on a user's experience trying to
download and install Lubuntu, if I may.

It's hard to find the download page. Clicking on "Get Ubuntu" takes  you to
the help page. Then you have to rummage around on the site to find
somewhere to actually download the version you need.

When you do select to download, it gives you v12.04. Even after rummaging
around not possible to see any other versions to download.

The help page talks about other versions. It's information implies that
11.10 is the long-term release. But there appears to be nowhere to download
the long-term release. The importance of short-term releases became
apparent to users recently when, for example, they got shipwrecked with the
short term release of Ubuntu before the Unity overhaul. Had they stuck with
the long term release prior to that, they would not now be shipwrecked. Yes
I am speaking from experience. But what's the point of having a long-term
release if you don't make it clear to users that this is the most advisable
version to download and then point them to it?

The checksum info page contains info only about 11.10 checksums. But the
site downloads 12.04.

The checksum and torrent additions to the download process have really
snarled things up for idiot users - sorry, you can't say that, can you?
It's snarled things up for 'dummies'. No, you can't say that either, can
you? Just because you are not an experienced command-line user,
administrator or nerd hobbyist, that doesn't make you a dummy. But you are
likely to have plenty else to do: looking after kids, working over-time,
fixing the car, fending off zombies. So the install process requires that
you learn about torrent clients and command lines and checksums. That's the
last thing I need to do. That's eliminated most of the population of the
planet as potential users straight off. Point and click, man. What's with
all these complications?

So anyway. What I needed: a guarantee that I've got a version that will
work with the target machine: PIII, 256Mb; a long term release version; and
on the advice of this website, a checksummed version. What I got:
likelihood the version I've got doesn't work with my machine, a short term
release version, and no checksum validation.

On top of all that, I'm dizzy from going back and forth and round the
website for the information I need to perform this simplest of operations:
downloading a version to install.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/lubuntu-users/attachments/20120604/cbeb3047/attachment.html>