For the website team - Error on the website

[Pasi Lallinaho]

On 25/04/15 19:38, Addam Murad wrote:
> It took me so long to reach this:
> http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/xubuntu/releases/

What does "so long" mean? Technically, not using the Torrents adds one
more click to the process.

> I hate torrent alot..
>
> Why not (For Example) put this:
> http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/xubuntu/releases/14.04/release/
> to download 14.04 instead of torrent or long way though many websites?

Torrents are the preferred method of downloading since that eases the
burden for the servers which provide the ISOs. If everybody downloaded
from the servers, it would actually be quite a lot of slower near
release days, which is when many people happen to download the ISOs.

> Make it easier! Because making it that complicated will push people
> away, I was going to give up on you at some point.
>
> And it would be better if (For Example) you just put:
> http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/xubuntu/releases/15.04/release/xubuntu-15.04-desktop-amd64.iso
> to directly download 15.04 64 bit and ofcourse to do the same to 14.04
>
> NOT everyone will know what to choose or what to download so help
> people and make it simple like Ubuntu website.

There is a fair point buried in here and I will talk with others on
possible improvements to either the download page or the mirror header.

However, please note that the Ubuntu website has code that figures out
the "best" server for the user; we don't have access to that code. If
you are willing to contribute this code and make sure it passes the
Canonical code audit as well as maintain it, I'm happy to talk you
through with the details.

Furthermore, when you download Ubuntu Desktop from the Ubuntu website,
you actually need more clicks in order to be able to download the ISO.
Is this more acceptable than one more click when not using a Torrent
when downloading Xubuntu?

> I was else wondering why I can't reach direct links to older versions
> on your website? Many people use too old PCs and Laptops with 256 RAM
> and less!

We are linking to the latest supported LTS release and the latest
supported regular release. A few thoughts on this:

1) Since you argue that it is already very hard to figure out what to
download, wouldn't offering even more choices just confuse the regular
user more?

2) The overlapping support period for two consecutive LTS releases is
one year and for two consecutive regular releases 3 months. Offering
these all would mean more maintaining burden for the team. Unsupported
releases are not mentioned on the download page because we don't want
people to use them. They can still use them, but it shouldn't be an
obvious choice, thus not listing them makes sense.

Cheers,
Pasi

-- 
Pasi Lallinaho (knome)                » http://open.knome.fi/
Leader of the Shimmer Project         » http://shimmerproject.org/
Ubuntu member, Xubuntu Website lead   » http://xubuntu.org/