installer usability problem

[David Woolley]

Behringer Behringer wrote:

> Ordinary people (non progammers) will not understand why pidgin does not work and will give up, please make it easy for people to install and use pidgin so that more people can enjoy the best IM software.

A lot of people who are incapable of writing a useful software support 
request seem to manage to install Pidgin on Windows.  I'd suggest that 
GTK_ is only a minor problem. Otherwise, if most mass market users are 
currently failing to install Pidgin, this is list is going to be 
overwhelmed by such unanswerable support requests, once they become able 
  to install it.

In that case you need to first address:

- failure to understand the nature of open source software support, and, 
in particular, public mailing lists;
- failure to understand the difference between a client and a service, 
and in particular, that there are no Pidgin accounts;
- failure to understand that not everyone uses Windows 7, and that other 
version information is actually important;
- failure to understand that business often block unapproved software;
- failure to understand that the best place to get support for private 
IM services run by an employer/employment agency, is their IT department 
(this partly relates to client/account confusion), etc.

Most people actually never reply when asked for relevant material.   I'm 
not sure how much this is due to realising they are dealing with a 
public list (some never understand this) and how much it is because they 
are basically unsupportable.  Most of those that do reply reply 
personally, showing they don't understand the first point above.

-- 
David Woolley
Emails are not formal business letters, whatever businesses may want.
RFC1855 says there should be an address here, but, in a world of spam,
that is no longer good advice, as archive address hiding may not work.