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What are you saying? That because a majority of the people in the world use Windows, Gentoo should have a flashy installer?No. That we should not exclude features because they serve no purpose other than to make the computer easier to use for the uninitiated. A flashy installer may be "pointless cruft" or whatever, but a flashy installer in no way inconveniences someone who options to drop to a shell for the installation, and it holds the hand of one who is just getting his feet wet. If someone wanted to create a flashy installer, I get the feeling that Gentoo and BSD types would reject the notion outright, citing technical grounds, but in reality due to the fact that it would threaten their elitism.
If we give all the distros flashy installers and gear them to be simple and not as powerful, I will be in chains with the rest of them, so lets cut the nonsense.Nonsense, indeed. What is it that causes a flashy installer and a power-user installer to be mutually exclusive?
People use Windows/Mac/Fedora/Gentoo/BSD/Amiga/etc because they want to, and that what fits them best.Maybe people like you, the elite, use an operating system because you identify with it as a person. Most people actually choose an operating system on a cost/benefit basis. If it gets the job done, and it's within the budget, it gets used. If I catch wind of something better that comes along, I might evaluate it. If the new is no better than the old, then I stick with the old.
Of course, it's possible that I might not hear about a new platform or its specific advantages unless someone told me about it. Those people are called advocates. When they advocate their platform without paying attention to me or my needs, they are referred to as zealots. Zealots insist that their way is the best way and that you should mend your ways to fit their worldview if you want to use their elite OS.
Unfortunately, this is not such a good formula if you really believe your platform is better and wish to increase its userbase so that it can be even more successful. It is a great formula, however, for remaining on the fringe and ensuring that a minimum of "lame" people use your platform, which is a primary goal of most elitists.
Nothing against zealotry, after all, to each his own. But if you want your operating system to gain mindshare, it is the wrong way to approach advocacy.
It makes sense, and there is nothing wrong with any of those choices. Stop trying to save those that don't want saving.It's not about "saving", no matter how you try to marginalize advocates as religious whackos pushing some lost cause on unwilling people. It's about improving accessibility, and with that comes an improvement in the cost/benefit ratio of your platform. That property in and of itself will draw people to migrate to your platform if the difference is significant enough from what they are currently using.
One part of accessibility is having an easy way to evaluate the software. For most people, that means that they need an installer that will not destroy their existing setup, requires little to no knowledge of the system they are installing, and makes sane decisions regarding their system setup, so they don't have to modprobe this and compile this and that after installing just to get a mouse or a sound card to work, or know what a crontab or resolv.conf is.
Score:2