First of all I'd like to introduce myself. You may know me as Erick Brunzell at Launchpad or Lance at iso-testing, and it may help to know that I'm kansasnoob at Ubuntu Forums.
When signing up for "ubuntu-installer" I noticed that Colin Watson is the maintainer and I've worked with both Colin and Evan Dandrea in the past so I hope you take this seriously. While I'm largely impressed with the overall appearance of the new ubiquity and just how quickly you devs pulled this all together during the Maverick dev cycle, I hope to offer some constructive criticism from an end users perspective without ever being disagreeable. I'm going to give you the whole laundry list of complaints beginning with what I see as the most serious, the first I actually filed a bug report on too late to make any changes: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubiquity/+bug/655950 Now, just put your noob-shoes on and imagine selecting the option to install alongside an existing OS. Then you see a screen with up to 8 options: Select drive Allocate drive space by dragging divider Offer to use advanced partitioning tool Use entire partition Use entire disc Quit Back Install now You've already chosen to install alongside rather than using the entire disc so why offer the option to use the entire disc again? And what partition are you being asked to entirely use? That may be exacerbated by this actual bug: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ubiquity/+bug/657397 I'll follow up on that during Natty iso-testing but most importantly we need to think what level of user is going to use the install alongside option! It's largely going to be Windows users that have no idea what partition and disc designations mean. They're used to Drive C, etc. So offering confusing options only increases the risk of wiping out their existing OS and/or data. The second issue is the elimination of the Install to largest continuous space option. It appears that was a popular option from following the forums. And it was very simple. The third issue is not being able to maximize or resize the installer windows. Only minimize and close are available. Being able to maximize windows made things much easier, particularly when using the manual partitioning option. The fourth, last, and most minor thing has to do with grub and it's two pronged: Since the grub install options are now only available if using manual partitioning you can't really just choose the entire disc option for an auto-install to a new internal drive and then choose to install grub to only that drive. And there is no longer an option to NOT install grub. I happen to think it's fine to just install grub to either the root partition or /boot if one's being created, but what do you think? I hope this all makes sense, and I am only trying to provide helpful criticism. I really hope for at least a bit of feedback. Thanks in advance.
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