Some thoughts.
It seems like this is trying to address two separate use cases:
- which spins are appropriate to run on my hardware?
- how do I make a decision between the different spins?
I think that first use case is much more important than the second; and possibly the second could even be a different tool (as in, I wouldn't want to have to start going through hardware detection stuff just in order to find out the difference between the default GNOME and the KDE spin).
Going onto the hardware side, I think again there are two issues here:
- is my hardware generally powerful enough?
- is my hardware supported?
Answering the first question, when we know what the system is, is relatively easy. Answering the second is likely to be pretty tough in many cases, and the wizard would have to be careful to not suggest that it gives authoritative answers about hardware support (e.g. even where a chipset is known to be well supported, there are still odd cards which don't work for whatever reason).
It would be interesting to know whether in-browser tests (framerates for canvas, 3D support, plugins available, etc.) can give enough clues about the hardware being used to be useful.
-- Alexh 07:02, 8 April 2011 (UTC)
I think that first use case is much more important than the second; and possibly the second could even be a different tool (as in, I wouldn't want to have to start going through hardware detection stuff just in order to find out the difference between the default GNOME and the KDE spin).
Each step should be skip-able.
It would be interesting to know whether in-browser tests (framerates for canvas, 3D support, plugins available, etc.) can give enough clues about the hardware being used to be useful.
Non of these can be useful, as:
- Not all browsers supports webGL or canvas.
- The fact that 3D Acceleration works on windows or mac doesn't mean it will work in Fedora without non-free drivers, eg. nVidia cards with NVC0 chipsets are not supported by nouveau without non-free firmware.
- Available plugins doesn't say anything about the hardware.
The only thing that we could find out by simple user-agent or plugin information checks, is 64bit support, and it is not accurate because 64bit users might use 32bit browsers.
I did see some few in-browser hardware analyzers, all were written in Java and worked only on Windows (probably used platform specific API).
Answering the first question, when we know what the system is, is relatively easy. Answering the second is likely to be pretty tough in many cases, and the wizard would have to be careful to not suggest that it gives authoritative answers about hardware support (e.g. even where a chipset is known to be well supported, there are still odd cards which don't work for whatever reason).
smolt integration might help solving this issue.