Bug 103115

Please, provide a better image or close the bug. 

I would propose to use no picture there in the background. Only a grey 
background as in the rest of the yast installation dialog. I attach a screenshot

Created attachment 45465 [details]
screenshot from yast installation dialog

I stumbled over this one in Beta2, too - in addition to the strange background,
I wonder why the language selection box is so small, instead of making use of
the available screen real estate?

Created attachment 46491 [details]
Screen shot of the YaST2 language selection

This is the result of those week- and month-long discussions about how to 
increase usability of the installation.  
 
The alternate proposal had been to have a lot of static text trying to welcome 
the user and the language selection as a combo box (!). That text of course 
would have been in English by default since there is no way of knowing what 
the user is going to select, so the vast majority of all target users would 
not have understood any of it, much less found where on earth change the 
language. 
 
That background image is a compromise to welcome all users - or at least a 
large part of them. A lot more people will feel being welcomed with this. But 
in order to see the image at all, there must be room to see it. 
 
Besides, we were explicitly asked to make that selection box a lot smaller 
than what it used to be. 

Created attachment 46524 [details]
The alternate proposal

Would you have liked this one better?

Imagine not speaking English and then being confronted with this - in English,
of course.

I like the proposal from #7. But a other proposal for the background image: 
please use (if not a grey background) the picture from the current SUSE 10.0 
which you see, if you boot with inserted CD/DVD. It should be the same.

I agree. The proposal from #7 looks much more professional,than the existing 
one. As you have the possibility to choose the language already in the 
bootloader screen (F3 if I remember well), it hasn't to be in english only. 

That thing from comment #7 looks more professional? Are you kidding? 
 
There is a lot of text in English that the great majority of the target 
audience will not understand - because this dialog is about choosing the 
language. Most users will be confronted with a lot of text in a language that 
is foreign to their own, thus they will not understand any of it. 
 
They will not even figure out what to do here, much less how to get this thing 
to a language they understand. 
 
If you get a selection box with several languages you might as well guess that 
this is about languages and begin looking for a language you understand. With 
a combo box that displays only "English" that guess is a lot harder. Many 
people will fail at that point. For them the show is over. 
 
The central purpose of this dialog is to select the language, thus the widget 
that lets you select the language needs to be prominent in the dialog. 
Otherwise this dialog is completely useless. 
 
Since it has been demanded from us to conform to certain standards about what 
a "wizard" should look like (including an introductory "welcome" wizard page 
and a "finished" wizard page), there is that unique dilemma that in our wizard 
the language to be used is undefined at the start, so the "welcome" page also 
needs to be the langage selection page. 
 
But a "welcome" in a foreign language is hardly something that makes people 
feel welcome. So that "welcome" has to be international, i.e. in a lot of 
languages. Even if not all languages are present there, users can tell the 
intention - that they are being welcomed. 
 
This requires that that internationalized "welcome" message is visible (!), so 
it has to get some room. So there has to be less room for the other element on 
that page, the language selection. This is why that selection box became 
smaller than in previous releases. 
 
It would be counterproductive to add lots of meaningless blurb texts to that 
dialog - as in the proposal from comment #7. You can see even from that one 
example there that there is no way to present that in a language more than a 
fraction of all target users will understand, so it is far better to simply 
omit that - even disregarding the fact that it is only meaningless text 
anyway. 

he said it looks more professional, that is all. While I agree with your points as to why we do not want to 
use such a layout I have one question: where did the new layout come from? (and don't say that we did it, 
because what we proposed was completely different)

This was what we had discussed for weeks as a compromise between the proposed 
fallback to the 6.4 installation with 20+ wizard pages that you'd each have to 
answer in sequence. 
 
I showed it around and discussed it with many, many people. IIRC I even posted 
it to [results] (I don't remember when exactly, though). Nobody had come up 
with anything better, so we went with it. 

BTW what makes anybody think the other one looks more professional?  
The amount of (meaningless) text? 
The hyperlinks (which we don't have in static text BTW) to take you to 
unrelated locations? 
The general look like a crowded web page? 
The lack of a navigation aid (the wizard steps that we have in the left side 
panel? 
The lack of any help facility (not only is there no help panel - which we now 
hide in favour of the navigation bar, there is also no help button)? 

it looks more proffesional because the other looks horrible. I do not think that using the idea from #7 is 
right either - that is not my point. If I would have seen this I would have screamed very loudly