Comment 3 for bug 395360

I think there is a set of people who would be well served by a "Beginners Quick Start Guide to Installing Ubuntu", or whatever you will call it. That seems to be roughly what you are aiming for with your new material, having read the Spec and FAQ. That's fine. Inciuding common installation issues that crop up, and how to deal with them, sounds good. Putting some more technical material along with that introductory material should help ensure that all the material related to Ubuntu installation is clear and consistent in its use of terminology, and so would make both parts of the whole more useful.

I suspect that determining what the common installation issues for Karmic will be, before it is released, will be a challenge! That set of issues changes from release to release and as different hardware becomes common. The really simple Ubuntu installs in effect need no documentation, they just work; those which do not "just work" need some understanding of what is going on to resolve the issue being encountered. Providing fuller information for the more difficult installation situations, the ones you did not predict ahead of time, would be one logical and appropriate way to help address this.

Statements like "I'm not interested in producing a massive 200 page treatise..." may well be true. That does not mean what you personally are or are not interested in is the best way to decide what the Ubuntu community as a whole is best served by. I don't think many "non-tech" end users will be printing out this installation documentation anyway, so number of pages is perhaps a poor metric to be using. If the more common use case is browsing on screen, then a good table of contents and a carefully written introduction will ensure that those who only need to read the first two chapters (or whatever it is) will not somehow (accidentally?) waste time reading the later more detailed material they do not require.

Am I really the first and only person in the Ubuntu user community to ever suggest that it would be more appropriate for you to work *with* the existing documentation, combining it (perhaps in updated/revised form) with your proposed new material, rather than insisting that it rename itself for you?

(1) Your spec uses the word "comprehensive" to describe itself several times. How is installation documentation comprehensive, if it in fact limits itself to one segment of those installing one variant of Ubuntu on one subset of machines, and to one method among many of doing so? Your own specification mandates comprehensiveness. Please therefore meet that spec, and deliver a comprehensive installation guide.

(2) You speak of "two very different user groups", yet in reality there is no clear "bright line" test separating these two groups, that I know of. Anyone who installs Ubuntu (onto a machine they will use themselves) ends up with admin priviledges on that machine (whether desktop, laptop, server, embedded controller, or virtual machine!), and so just became a system administrator of that machine. They may not be an expert (or a "tech", to use your terms) yet, but they are also clearly no longer purely an end user (if they were, someone else, the system admin, would have done the operating system install on their behalf, or they would have purchased a machine with Ubuntu pre-installed!). A newcomer end user with an old low-RAM desktop (upgrading from Windows 98, maybe) may need to use an alternate installer -- this choice is not determined solely by personal preference, expertize, or length of experience.

There is clearly a *spectrum* of user experience and expertise regarding installation, and there is one single well-defined task -- installing Ubuntu. I submit that in reality there are *not* actually "two user groups" -- unless you have a clear definition dividing users neatly into these two groups "techs" and "non-techs", which you have accidentally failed to publish in the Spec or the FAQ? There is a wide spectrum of users, each with unique backgrounds, who wish to install Ubuntu.

(3) Desktop or laptop users may in time discover the delights of virtual machines, and so install Ubuntu (possibly Ubuntu server, possibly different releases of Ubuntu, perhaps multiple other OSes too) into those, on their desktop/laptop PC, too. Again, there is no clear and obvious way to decide up front exactly what a particular user will need to know. I suggest that the logical solution is to develop installation documentation for Ubuntu as an integrated and consistent (and comprehensive) whole.

(4) The current Ubuntu Installation Guide got there first (it exists already!), and uses that name. Ubuntu is a community, not a pure dictatorship, so it makes sense to work *with* it rather than *against* it. Please join the existing work in the general area you are interested in, improve and add to that work, rather than railing against it as not being quite what you are personally "interested in producing" and so striking out on your own -- much less also demanding that the existing documentation rename itself to get out of your way!

Bottom line: The Ubuntu Installation Guide being named "Ubuntu Installation Guide" is not, IMO, a bug.
Please develop updated installation documentation as a logically consistent, comprehensive and integrated whole, and please do not require that existing installation documentation rename itself so you can focus exclusively on one part of the user community at the expense of another.

Jonathan