My Ubuntu installation notes long

You could add a "I don't know what 'parbreastioning' means" button which would bring the user to some documentation explaining how it works, and what the significance and impact of the decisions are.

I can see Sandman's point. I have no idea what "gtk2-engines-mist" is. Do I need it? I don't know. It could be some crucial element of the GUI and if I get rid of it, I won't be able to load the windows manager. Or it might some sort of game that I'll never play.

Technical implementation details aside, I think it's a good idea. UI wise, it could behave like Firefox's extension manager, where you click the "install", and it starts installing in the background, with a bar filling up. You could queue up more packages to install while the first one is still installing. If the current implementation isn't flexible enough to support that, maybe it means we should re-examine the design, rather than dismissing ideas for a more responsive user experience.

Whenever I severely cripple my Linux system via the update manager, I usually get a (cryptic) "warning" first. For example, sound works, but I can't listen to mp3s. So I search for packages with the word "mp3" in their name, and instruct the manager to install them. Then it'll it might say something about downgrading some other package to a less recent version. I'll be like "Fine, do whatever you gotta do." but then it'll come back and tell me that if it downgrades that package, it has to remove these 13 other packages. So I'll say "okay fine do that", and then it tells me I have to quit the windows manager and do this from the text console. Okay, fine, so I do that, and then X windows won't start up anymore.

So now I've been conditioned such that whenever the update manager says it has to downgrade something first, that's a warning that I should absolutely not do whatever it is I'm trying to do. And I've also learned to never download and compile and manually install software, because if equivalent software exists in the update manager, manually compiling and installing it screws up the dependency tracking system.

I don't think this is a fair answer. While "this" might not be OSX, it's still a computer, and users tend to have certain expectations about how computers operate from their usage of previous systems. For example, if I move the mouse to the right, I expect the cursor to also move to the right, and not, for example, to trigger a right-mouse button click. If you're a new computer user, how are you supposed to know which conventions are universal, and which are specific to your previous OS?

Using the exact same term everywhere helps a lot in user interface design. There was a satirical paper enbreastled "'Run', 'Go', 'Execute': How to gain user appreciation via varied terminology and increased vocabulary."

I personally know "Print Screen" takes screenshots on WinXP, but why should I expect it to do the same on Ubuntu? Its label is only vaguely indicative of what the button will actually do.

- Oliver