Feedback on installation and target audience

[pucciclaudio]

Hi,

I am a new user (or wanna be, since still have not found a good way to get things running as I need) of Amahi and I would like to leave some feedback on this great project.

1. https://wiki.amahi.org/index.php/Amahi_8_Install is not clear enough which are the differences between minimal and complete install.
2. it is still unclear which is the general target for Amahi, IT specialists or everybody with a computer. From many answers on this forum (thanks bigfoot) and the way the wiki is written, it looks like the target is a small group of people with advanced IT skills (like IT specialists). If you want to target the general public, you should not assume that a normal person wants a minimal install of Fedora, unless you have data (a survey, a case study, ...) proving the opposite.
3. if you wanna people to contribute to the wiki, you should make it easier to register to it (I tried and got rejected, not sure why). Until it remains managed by IT specialists, it will be a resource for IT specialists only, and this project will remain in its niche.

You can disregard all the above and keep your line of thinking, but I hope you will embrace my constructive criticisms.

Best

[cpg]

Thanks for taking the time to share your feedback. Much appreciated.

I think an analogy to an Amahi server would be getting a car.

We do not aim it to IT specialists, we aim it to regular people with a minimal amount of technical knowledge to set it up.

However, we like and support and benefit from using open source technologies and would like to be open to the users about what's "under the hood". In many cases, some people decided to write about how to do things, tweak things, fix things under the hood in the wiki (or the bug tracker).

In some other cases, like the case up until recently to add a drive, users had to go to the command line and do technical stuff. We addressed that because it was clearly something that help us aim in the right direction of going more mainstream for more non-specialist users.

We're pretty far still, but we've been smoothing things out for a while and would like to continue doing that in next releases. If you look, see for example when we first announced one-click apps ... it's been 8+ years (more since we started working on it and it took a long time).

Maybe you should join the team as product manager

[pucciclaudio]

Thanks cpg for your reply and sorry for the lag in my response.

I understand that the business plan for the development of the product aims to "regular people with a minimal amount of technical knowledge". Great to hear I was very positively surprised by the one click apps, I happily paid the few bucks for IPsec VPN install and now I can easily access my HDA from work. Love it!

I am not sure to understand the links you draw between 1) supporting users who want to tweak and put hands "under the hood" 2) open source technologies and 3) the default procedures to install Amahi. IMHO the first two points are completely independent from the third, which is where you hook regular people up. I believe that if the target is regular people, then you need to make things easy for them first. Again, this does not exclude supporting IT specialists and advanced users.

Please let me make a real example. Looks like one needs to go to the command line to add disks. Can you avoid that by performing a complete install? Today an old PC is way above the minimal hardware requirements for Amahi, which is good because with more hardware resources one can afford some GUI.

Regarding your offer to join the team as product manager, I would be honored to consider it

Best,

[cpg]

In Amahi 8, we eliminated the need for CLI for adding drives by designing the Disk Wizard -- does everything in the web interface, from formatting to mounting new drives.

As for taking a role about product management, the next step would be to meet via IRC to agree on what are the areas of interest and how to plot cooperation to move the needle in the right direction!