Banners?

[garrett]

Considering that hard drives have become faster, SSDs are quite common now, and most people install from things that are not optical media, there might not be enough time to display banners.

Way back in the day, we did banners in Anaconda primarily because installs were slow. We're talking half-an-hour-or-so slow... sometimes even more, if people did custom package selections or had a slow CD-ROM drive or painfully slow network connection. Now, USB drives, SSDs, and super-fast Internet are all pretty typical.

As banners are static and not interactive, and speed is not as much of a concern as it once was, do banners make sense today? If so, then we should then ask, "Do rotating banners make sense?"

Do we have stats on how long a normal, typical Workstation install is on modern-enough (anything in the past couple of years) hardware? Like, say, how long does it take to install Fedora Workstation on an X230, for example? (I'm not going to reinstall my laptop just to check 😉)

[garrett]

The current "ransom notes" are:

1. A plug for ask.fedoraproject.org
2. Sharing a CD or DVD with a friend
3. Installing LibreOffice for editing documents, spreadsheets, and more
4. "Want to make Fedora better?" fedoraproject.org/join-fedora
5. Rhythmbox, syncing music w/ media players & smartphones (does smartphone syncing still work?)

They're all a part of the fedora-logos RPM, are in SVG, and are located in /usr/share/anaconda/pixmaps/rnotes/en/.

[garrett]

(JFWIW, in Boxes, which would be slower than a native system, it took about 9 minutes for a standard Workstation install.)

[pypingou]

With SSD or without ?

[garrett]

It's with SSD, but via VM FS emulation, which makes it take a huge hit. It would be interesting to know the actual times on bare metal, and know if there's any way we could speed up the install a bit more.

[garrett]

If it still makes sense to show "ads" in the installer, we should be choosy about what's highlighted there. Here's a quick mockup with the dancing hotdog pleading for the person installing to join Fedora, as a revised "ransom note":

...and here's another version with the installation progress grouped and prioritized, and the ad space at the bottom. It's so large here that I think we could have just 1 graphic here highlighting the best of Fedora.

[garrett]

I do think that most of what goes into the installer ransom notes should probably instead go in the browser's default starting page.

[pypingou]

From these two proposals I like the first one better, after all the idea is to distract you while you want for the install to progress, and having it above the progress bar does so :)

[garrett]

I still think that it probably shouldn't have ransom notes overall. They're problematic as:

• There's no way to reference them after the installation
• Any "link" included is, by necessitity, a dead link, as one must remember it (unlikely) after the installation
• The highlighted material should be handled in a different way
  • People looking to edit documents should see the app in the software center
  • Document files should automatically prompt to install software if there's nothing installed to support them
  • The Fedora website should be the place to show off the software, not pictures in the installer (see my comment above about the browser's default starting page)
  • It's an odd selection of software (for example: rhythmbox? — I don't think it even works seamlessly with many modern phones anymore, and very few people use stand-alone music players these days)
  • Few people use CDs/DVDs to install Fedora; most people use USB sticks
  • Carosels are bad for a number of reasons (see https://gist.github.com/garrett/021dfb17b0bea4b476e2 & http://shouldiuseacarousel.com/)

[garrett]

It turns out LibreOffice (Writer, Impress, Calc) is installed by default in Fedora Workstation. Why does the banner say to install it? Files will open by default, and you can start the app even when searching for "word" or "excel". In fact, Gnumeric and Sheets show up as apps that could be installed as well — but LibreOffice is already installed and its components have the spotlight in a desktop search.

Rhythmbox is empty by default. It's not obvious how to start using it. Its UI is also ugly and broken, yet it's being pushed in the installer for some reason. Here's a screenshot:

(Note: I didn't do anything at all. I did not resize it nor did I add any media. Yes, the UI has no padding and is even cropped off in parts by default.)

Of course, the banners with links are not useful outside a browser. (Mentioned above.)

(…And I already mentioned the CD/DVD thing.)

...So if we really want to have ads in the installer, they should be implemented better than they have been. Hence my suggestion to ditch them entirely or have a single static one that highlights Fedora itself...and make the ransom notes relevant and useful, but move them out of the installer and to the default web page in the browser.

[mairin]

So Garrett and I had a chat about this today and came up with the following conclusions -

Banner Principles

• We'll keep the banners. We want to keep the banners since they keep an element of fun and also are a good way to help brand new users become aware of the various resources available to them to help them use fedora and join the end user community.
• Banners won't feature software in Fedora anymore. When these banners were created, we had no way of featuring software available in Fedora. Now we do - the software center - it has functionality to feature/highlight different apps, so we don't need to feature apps in the banners anymore (we then get out of the business of having to worry about whether the feature info and screenshots are out of date.)
• Banners shouldn't rely on users to remember URLs. As Garrett pointed out in this ticket, any URLs we pass on to the user are going to have to be remembered bc there isn't a way go back and reaccess the banners post-install (well, not a way that's real obvious/easy.) So no banners displayed should rely on the user going to a URL.
• We should integrate banner content with start.fpo. Start.fpo targets Fedora users and new Fedora users so it does seem a natural place. It has updated streams of user-focused content. So for example, if we want to point new husers to fedora magazine or ask.fpo, we can mention it, talk about why it's useful, and tell them to open their browser to learn more - and have the link on start.fpo so they'll see it as soona s they open their browser. No URL memorizing needing.

List of banner ideas

Note we focused on things that would not need updating and things that would be useful to new-to-Fedora users:

• Fedora Magazine
• Common Bugs (per release)
• Ask.FPO
• A banner introducing users to software freedom (no nitty gritty licensing stuff. Just, "Fedora is free, you can share it with your friends, blah blah blah" kind of stuff.

Maybe a couple more ideas and we'd be set.

[garrett]

While working on the mockups, I have added placeholders for the above ideas (except for the common bugs, as I don't think that's really so practical — is it?).

As we don't want to have to make multiple banners in different sizes, my idea is to split the screen into fourths, where in one mode (default GNOME desktop install, for installer + Live Workstation) there's ¼ dedicated to the progress bar and ¾ dedicated to 3 different ads.

In the Spins, alternate desktops, or anything else that might need additional spokes (RHEL? CentOS?), it can either be ¼ for progress + 2/4 UI + ¼ ad (single, but rotating on delay). If more room is needed for the UI, or if it's for enterprise usage, then the ads can be completely disabled and it could be ¼ for progress UI + ¾ for additional spokes UI.

The advantage of this method is that it should:

• meet requirements you mentioned
• provide adequate space for anything important
• only require 1 "ad" style to be made (unless we want to plan for both 4:3 and 16:9 — but then it's only 2 instead of even more types)
• with only 3 ad banners, we can ensure they're good ones

This probably all makes more sense when looking at the mockup.

Also, it's worth noting that in the mockup, one "ad" is split in half to have 2 things communicated at once. It makes things look a little more interesting and allows us to highlight 4 important things. (I wouldn't recommend splitting more than 1 visually — and it should probably be the middle one that's split.)

And, again, I would like for us to make sure we take advantage of the browser start page for anything that might otherwise be considered to be in the ad space. 😄

[garrett]

Okay, I've pulled apart 2 screens from the big mockup SVG.

Normal workstation installation (with a firstboot initial setup)

Installation with additional UI (for when it's needed or when there's no firstboot initial setup)