System requirements
Ubuntu is available for PC, 64-Bit and Mac architectures. The Alternate installation CDs require at least 256 MB of RAM (the standard installation CD requires 384MB of RAM). Install requires at least 3 GB of disk space.
But good of you to find it; I would never have thought to look at the Features page. Again, whiny of me.
And even Canonical forgets it's there; now that you pointed it out, some searching reveals a similar page, http://www.ubuntu.com/products/whatisubuntu/desktopedition, which says it requires 4 GB of space.
If you're not a geek, it'll fit (any consumer computer going over the counter for the past 6-7 years, probably more, has at least a 20 GB drive in it. Most likely you'll have 100+ GB).
Or something new, like an SSD on which you're attempting to dual/triple boot.
You fail at UI. Any and all information always adds some cognitive load and confuses the user. Every time you think you should show the user something, you must figure out a very convincing reason why you should not just leave it out. There clearly isn't one for majority of users who are going to install ubuntu, and for the rest, googling for two easy words isn't going to be too much of trouble.
Not only are you wrong, but "You fail at UI" is a particularly abrasive way to be wrong.
I might well be wrong about whether it's worth it to show disk space or not. I have no problem admitting this, because I haven't done any studies about it.
> but "You fail at UI" is a particularly abrasive way to be wrong.
>The additional cognitive load of reading a disk space requirement is negligible
Apparently I was too abrasive, or not abrasive enough.
NO amount of cognitive load is negligible. Ever. When you design a dialog with two buttons that both have to be there, both of those buttons are creating a significant amount of cognitive load. Understanding this is largely why apple makes good UI's. You should never try to justify removing something from the UI -- you must instead always have very good reasons why NOT to remove something, and remove it by default if you can't find enough (not any).
As I said, I have not made any studies of how users install ubuntu or what they expect, but as it's supposed to be installed as the os on the computer, in place of whatever that was before, and as there is no commonly available commodity hardware that it won't install on, I can easily see how there is no longer enough justification to show disk space requirements.
Just the first one.
Apple puts the disk space requirements in every single installer. Disk usage is an important piece of information. I'd agree with you if it were something like "Ubuntu requires a Pentium II or higher".
BTW, since it crashed on install instead of catching that my partitions weren't large enough, that's a fail. But by merely providing the info on the DL page, they might have saved themselves some credibility loss as a "user friendly" distro.
But I do appreciate that you didn't throw a lmgtfy.com link in, which would have been really embarrassing for me.