On Fri, 24 July 2015, at 3:35 pm, J.Rutkowski <[email protected]> wrote: > On Fri, Jul 24, 2015, at 07:56 AM, James wrote: >> >> >> Rich, I'll be practical. Gentoo needs an installer program, like most >> other distros if you want your rank_n_file users to entice new users. >> … > > I absolutely think that an installer is necessary to attract > newcomers and keep them.
I recall similar discussions back around 2004. Gentoo was fashionable for a while then, and we had plenty of new users. It wasn't for the lack of installer that they went away - fashions change, but at the end of the day it's only a certain kind of niche user who finds Gentoo suits them long term. If you create a slick GUI installer, then users will only be disappointed with they finish installing their KDE-Gentoo desktop and are told "oh, package installs and system upgrades must be done in a terminal, and sometimes you have to do stuff to work around these Portage blocks". "Why doesn't Gentoo have a nice graphical package manager?" the n00bs will cry, "just like all the other distros!" What will happen when you meet that request? Complaints that, after clicking the button in the GUI package manager, Gentoo takes much longer to install Firefox that Ubuntu does. If you want to attract to Gentoo the kind of people for whom a graphical installer is important, then IMO these are the first things you need to address. Stroller.
