UX/LiveEnvironment

From openSUSE

Live Environments demand and offer to do things differently to usual sessions. This is kind of a braindump on how we can make the experience of a live session more pleasant to our users. This is very important as live environment are often used as a risk-free test-drive.

Live installation

Some successful distributions offer the user to run a live cd and install the distribution from within a live session. This section should list the pros and cons of such an approach and how opensuse could adopt it.

Pros

• The user gets a working desktop before installing and does not have to "waste" time while waiting for the installation to finish. This improves the user's first impression of opensuse.
• Most parts of an installation do not require any user interaction, those which do (partitioning) are no issue for running a live cd.
  • As an example: To have a working and useful live session the user needs a Xorg and network, desireable would also be sound and printer. All of these can be set-up without any user-interaction in most cases.
• A working desktop offers a better basis for installation tools including more eye-candy which improves the user's first impression.
• Even if some automatic configuration (except X.org) fails, the user can use the desktop-tools available (YaST) right-away and does not get different GUIs for setting-up the same device, one during install and the "real" one when using the desktop-YaST.

Cons

• Does not work on old machines or for headless installs.
  • This should not be an issue since providing a live cd installation does not affect the possibility to use the installer instead of booting the live environment.
• It might not be possible to set-up X.org
  • In this case the user would have to use te original installer anyway.

Design Mockups

Modified Live-DVD Display-Manager

DESCRIPTION:
Other Live media usually boot into a default environment, which is selected by the distribution. If you want to change, you either have to log out and choose from a sessions menu (on some Live-DVDs) or you have to reboot with another medium (Live-CDs).

The point of this idea is to get rid of this situation by booting into a modified GDM or KDM, which offers a desktop environment selection instead of a login and starts the chosen desktop with the default demo user of the live environment.

NOTES:

• I currently have no idea on whether this is technically feasible, either generally or this specific solution.
• The KDE item is currently highlighted with a mouseover effect.
• The description text below the selection is also triggered by the mouseover-action over the selection items, i.e. when moving the cursor to the GNOME item, the description will change also.