Re: The case for FreeBSD

> I know of someone, a "general user", who specifically gave up on FreeBSD
> because of the Installer, and jumped over to one of the Linuxes which was
> "much easier to install". I have had to help a couple of others through
> the Installer because they had "gotten lost".

It would be good to know why.

IMHO using sysinstall and choosing the standard installation is more or
less straight forward. It never happened that I've got lost..

(BTW: I also liked the Debian way to show a linear list of the next steps
where you can skip one or going back again if you like)

Anyway, a good installer is not a matter of fancy graphics in a first
place, it is the menu structure. A text based installer may look
old-fashioned but it can provide the same functionality.

It should not be too hard to use the same menu structure for text and GUI
installer.

For several years now I am using FreeBSD servers but only recently I tried
to install a well-configured desktop system. A well-defined metaport to
get a typical office/home user desktop (e.g. including OpenOffice, maybe
asking for alternatives during the installation) would be nice, and
integration of new installed ports into a limited number of desktop
environments (e.g. that they appear in the desktop menus and folders).
Maybe for KDE, Gnome and something a little bit more lightwight (to me it
seems xfce is the most popular one)

So it may be helpful to give (at the end of the base system installation
before browsing through the packages) a short list of typical desktop
application sets using these metaports.

Regards
Peter