Burning ISO's is a big hurdle for newbies

[Telengard]

Re: Burning ISO's is a big hurdle for newbies

Have you watched a non-technical user try to burn an ISO? It's not pretty. Hand them some instructions, and the only thing you achieve is convincing them that "if it needs instructions, it's too hard for me". Doubleclick on an installer and following prompts is much less scary for them.

The fact that you actually want to cater specifically to people who refuse to read a single paragraph of simple instructions is just disturbing to me. It is difficult to imagine these willfully ignorant people having a good experience with Kubuntu.

Well, good luck with the program.

[Troberg]

Re: Burning ISO's is a big hurdle for newbies

So, do I understand that the proposal is to develop "ISO Burner", a Windows app especially designed to select an ISO file and make a bootable CD in 3 clicks?

Nope, a program which is preconfigured to burn a specific ISO image in three (or at least as few as possible) clicks.

But, if they're going to have to use Google to find "ISO Burner", then they're not any better off than the ones who google "how to burn an iso file" today

They are not. They are going to download a file (possible a selfextracting archive with program and ISO, even though, of course, the ISO should still be available as a standalone for the rest of us), doubleclick it and follow the guide which tells them to insert a blank CD. They will not see it as a generic CD burning program, they will see it as a "make Kubuntu CD program".

So you want a program which will:
(snip)
* Download the selected ISO

Actually, this could actually be a good thing, as I think some more about it. If the program use a modern swarming protocol, such as bittorrent, the load on the servers hosting the ISO could be drastically reduced, while download performance could be similarly drastically improved. It's still out of scope for the problem at hand, though.

The fact that you actually want to cater specifically to people who refuse to read a single paragraph of simple instructions is just disturbing to me.

It's not that they refuse to read it, it's that they lack the knowledge to understand it. Face it, most users hit a brick wall when they get to statements such as "make sure the path to the file is correct". It's not that they don't want to understand, they lack the prerequisite knowledge needed to understand, and the simple task soon explodes into more and more questions, each answer leading to more questions.

I've developed administrative software for non-technical users for almost 20 years, and seen quite a lot of the support cases, and you really have to be überclear about everything, guide them as much as possible and let the computer handle as much as possible for them.

I actually went through the download process now to check the current instructions. To find them, the user must first click on one link in a list of eight links on the download redirect page. This is a page that users don't usually read, as they are focused on the task of downloading the file, and once they see the file trickle in, they are happy and close the window.

The instructions then gives two separate options on how to do it. The problem here is that to know which option is preferable, you need to know enough to not need the guide. This makes a user hesitant. Choose one way that works and stick to it.

It is difficult to imagine these willfully ignorant people having a good experience with Kubuntu.

They are not willfully ignorant, they just feel unsecure in front of a computer. As I've said, once they get past that first stage, things usually go fine. Removing or lowering that first hurdle would mean a much better first impression, and less people dropping off before they even get to try it.

Well, good luck with the program.

No need to be snarky about it. If no one else gets around to doing it, I might very well do it.

However, as I said, I've just bought a house (actually, it's four houses, a small island, a bridge, a beach, lots of lawn, some forest and some other stuff ( 60°27'6.54"N 15°27'48.93"E , basically everything east of the road on the west side of the river, up till around 200 m after the bend, including the island)), so it will not be a priority for me for a while, as I'm sure you can see, my priorities need to be elsewhere for a while.

I do, however, plan to use the large room in the big house (the SW wing, made to hold 150 people) to hold Linux install activites, where people can drop by with their computers and get Linux installed by experts while getting a cup of coffee or going for a swim. This is also partly due to the kind of problems discussed in this thread, a way of getting people up and running without trouble. As the house has some public interest, I think it will be easy to get some media attention for these activities. These activities will not start until next summer, at best, for the same reasons as mentioned above.

So, to the best of my abilities, and as permitted by other commitments, I do my part, and I feel that the snarks are somewhat undeserved.

[Telengard]

Re: Burning ISO's is a big hurdle for newbies

Well, good luck with the program.

No need to be snarky about it. If no one else gets around to doing it, I might very well do it.

I didn't mean to be snarky at all, so I apologize.

Really, good luck with this project. If it turns out to be useful to someone, then you'll have done a fine service to the community.

[Troberg]

Re: Burning ISO's is a big hurdle for newbies

In that case, I apologize for my repsonse. I mistakenly interpreted it as a typical "So go do it yourself!" post.