hindsight/user experience

[John Billings]

I followed up with him this morning, he's not a MCSE or technology
consultant or anything, a semi-retired quality assurance consultant
and all around good guy.  This was his response to my email to him
this morning:

"John,

Thanks for your help after I dove in not knowing how deep the water
was.  It was an interesting lesson.  I've lost things that I created 
after my last backup in February.  I believe that I can recover 
those, too.  It'll just take time."

Not everyone would choose to take this a learning experience, I'm
just concerned that for a lot of people if this was their first
experience with Linux, they might say, well, I tried Linux but it
deleted all my files, I'm not using that again.   

He thought the installer would automagically partition his system so
that he could have both operating systems.  This sounds plausible to
someone who may have heard a little about dualboot systems, but not
familiar with partitioning issues.  It's certaintly partly my fault
for not explaining the danger involved with the install disk.  He may
have noticed that I dual booted my machine at work which was
orignially just a win2k box, and assumed you could do this with the
installer program. 

> The installer displays a prominent warning and asks the user for
> confirmation before making any destructive changes; it defaults to the safe
> option.  This is the only realistic safeguard we can create against this
> situation. 

I would just like to suggest that maybe the warnings aren't scary
enough. 

Sincerely,
John Billings



On Fri, 08 Apr 2005, Matt Zimmerman wrote:

> On Fri, Apr 08, 2005 at 12:30:28PM -0400, John Billings wrote:
> 
> > I'm afraid something like this could happen elsewhere and create a bad
> > introduction to Gnu/Linux for someone. So my point is please reconsider
> > distributing a live cd and an install cd together. I thought about sending
> > this to the developer list, but thought it might be a good story to relate
> > to users as well, and there are probably some developers on here. 
> 
> 
> Indeed, this can happen just as easily with an install CD alone: users who
> are accustomed to a single operating system do not necessarily realize that
> installing Linux could overwrite their Windows system (after all, installing
> Adobe Acrobat doesn't create such a problem, and they're both programs,
> right?).
> 
> -- 
>  - mdz
> 
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