Re: GNOME Installation Howtos

[Claus Schwarm <clschwarm googlemail com>]

Paul,

thanks for copying the marketing list.

Darton,

yes, if a distribution on the 'installation' page has no official howto,
remove it. The 'installation' page is there to advertise those who
maintain official guides.

The presence of different distros in each version may indeed confuse a
handful of people -- but it won't be many.

Just imaging what steps someone needs to make to arrive at the
distribution or the installation page: he or she must have...

 - heard about Linux,
 - heard about desktops for Linux,
 - heard about GNOME as a desktop for Linux,
 - come up with the idea to search for 'GNOME',
 - read the 'about' section, and finally
 - read the 'download' section.

Let's face it: This is not going to happen very often. It's more likely
that Microsoft open sources Windows.

The 'distribution' and 'installation' pages are there for existing GNOME
users and fans to research switching options. They can deal with
different versions and distribution names.

However, there's no need to list more than the last three GNOME
versions. We can remove GNOME 2.22 completely.


Regards,
Claus


On Wed, 2010-02-17 at 20:14 -0600, Paul Cutler wrote:
> On Tue, 2010-02-16 at 11:42 -0500, Darton Williams wrote:
> > Hi All,
> >
> > In reference to http://website-editors.gnome.org/download/installation:
> >
> > The only existing links to Howtos were for *BSD. Since these guides
> > were on the official distribution websites, it made sense to try and
> > find guides on the official site for each of the other listed distros.
> > However, many are nonexistent and others such as PCLinuxOS recommend a
> > fork built with GNOME.
> >
> > So the question is, should we find reliable unofficial guides (e.g.
> > howtoforge) to fill in the blanks, or simply remove the distros
> > without official guides and try to focus on the distros with? I've
> > started this with the 2.28 list, taking the distros listed on older
> > versions which do have official guides.
> >
> > Also, I think the distinction between the versions and the presence of
> > different distros in each version list may confuse people.
> >
> > Best,
> >
> > dartonw
>
> Hi Darton,
>
> First, thank you so much for helping review and edit the content.
>
> For both the Distributions and the Installation page, I agree that the
> presence of multiple versions is confusing.  I believe we should only
> link to the latest release, in this case 2.28.  (I also think we should
> list the distros alphabetically to avoid the perception of playing
> favorites).
>
> For installation, I think the original intent of that page was to give
> an overview for building from source or using jhbuild, not for
> upgrading / installing GNOME on distros.  I think the distro support and
> unofficial guides should be out of scope for our website. (Copying the
> marketing list for feedback on this).
>
> Paul