This is a suggestion, and not a complete one (yet). No ETA (won't be ready for Fedora 15 GA, that's for sure), no official approval, nothing but a suggestion.
Problem
- Minimum requirements on the website are not detailed enough. We don't have a list of GPUs that support 3D acceleration (and thus able to run gnome shell) on the website, and such list would be too long.
- Gnome 3 fallback mode is not very usable, and gives bad experience for users with low end hardware.
- Assuming that machines with no 3D acceleration are usually old and has low RAM and knowing Gnome 3 fallback is as ram hungry as gnome 2.32 was, we should recommend an alternative, light-wight Desktop Environment For users who can't run gnome-shell.
- Gnome 3 fallback mode is not very usable, and gives bad experience for users with low end hardware.
- New users might not know what their exact hardware specification is, or how to check it
- We don't want users to install fedora, discover that the installation is broken or really slow, and panic (new users usually panic).
- We have many spins, enabling the users the freedom to choose something that fits to their needs, but many options confuses the new users, and they can't really understand the difference between KDE or GNOME, for example.
Solution
The first step of the solution would be adding a link to get-fedora page, something like "I'm not sure what I should download! help me!" (maybe with a small panda). This link would point to a spin selection wizard which will ask the users to select their hardware (amount of ram, gpu model, cpu model and such), and will suggest the best spin that matches those requirements.
Getting the hardware specification could be difficult for new users. Two solutions to make it easy sounds reasonable:
- Providing platform specific detailed instructions on how to get HW information, with screenshots.
- Crating a cross platform (windows, mac, linux) utility that will analyze the hardware and post it to the wizard.
- Maybe it is possible to do this in browser, with Java. Further investigation required.
- Nice to have: smolt integration, to provide extra information.
The wizard would also be able (optional, users might want to skip this part) to ask the users about their main use of the computer (aka. user profile), and suggest the matching spin accordingly (design spin for designers, games spin for gamers), with a clear explanation that downloading the games spin is not required to play games and everything can be installed trough add/remove software.
It should be easy to use, well designed, and should contain pandas.
It is a huge project, that will require a lot of work, help is appreciated.
Benefits
- Users wouldn't need to download a really big CD image just to know if fedora can run on their computer.
- Users will get the best match to their use cases and hardware capabilities.
- It helps show the users that there is a huge selection and many options in fedora.
- Less confused users.
- Pandas.
Requirements
- A lot of work, mostly from the websites team.
- For the non-automatic method:
- Screenshots and detailed explanations on how to find out hardware info in each platform.
- For the automatic method
- C, C++ or python developers, that knows how to get hardware information on windows and mac (linux is not a problem) and has time to implement this utility.
- Complete list of known working and non-working GPUs, motherboards, and other hardware, but mostly GPUs.
- Pandas.
TODO List
- Discussion.
- Revise this page to match the discussion, if required. Continue discussion until result is satisfying.
- Detailed specifications.
- More discussion.
- Mockups.
- Screenshots (mostly of each spin).
- Text (explanations on each spin, mostly, that wouldn't sound like an advert but rather pros, cons, features)
- Code.
- Pandas.