Experiences installing Puppy for a Newbie

What features/apps/bugfixes needed in a future Puppy
Post Reply
Message
Author
doopdoop

Experiences installing Puppy for a Newbie

#1 Post by doopdoop »

I just installed Puppy on the old Pentium I of my neighbour, and she is really happy about the speed and the simplicity. However, some small things could be better for real newbies:

-i18n: the handling of keymaps, locales etc. needs more work (see bugs forum). We could live without German language messages, but to be able to write on our domestic keyboards is a must
-Desktop Icons - use descriptive names, e.g. "Web Browser (Mozilla)" to give the new user an idea of the content behind it.
- Structured menu - most important applications should be more prominently placed and described, e.g. the many entries for Editors or Network are confusing. You have to invite the user to try out and not be frightened of what may behind it.
- Put a link to the help pages on the Desktop.
- Automatic detection of partitions: my Linux partion /dev/hdd1 is automagically mounted to /mnt/home. Good, but the name "home" is confusing. My other partion /dev/hdd5 is not mounted at all. A newbie would also be happy to find links to their old partitions on the desktop.

User avatar
Flash
Official Dog Handler
Posts: 13071
Joined: Wed 04 May 2005, 16:04
Location: Arizona USA

Re: Experiences installing Puppy for a Newbie

#2 Post by Flash »

doopdoop wrote:I just installed Puppy on the old Pentium I of my neighbour, and she is really happy about the speed and the simplicity. However, some small things could be better for real newbies:

<snip>

-Desktop Icons - use descriptive names, e.g. "Web Browser (Mozilla)" to give the new user an idea of the content behind it.
- Structured menu - most important applications should be more prominently placed and described, e.g. the many entries for Editors or Network are confusing. You have to invite the user to try out and not be frightened of what may behind it.
<snip>
I strongly agree. One of my biggest gripes with Linux is the cryptic names of application programs. Most people don't want to play around with computers, they just want to use a computer to do a certain job, and they don't want to have to go on an easter egg hunt to find out if there is a Linux program which can do it. Why can't the various programs in Puppy be given labels which give some kind of clue to the program's intended use?

On a slightly different but related tack, Program developers want people to try out their stuff and help find the bugs, but they seem to hate that most people who will use their program are not computer geeks. Anyway, they don't make any allowances for that fact.

Post Reply