Hi, I’ve just installed /e/ on my new fairphone using the easy installer. I got to say, some good work has been done, but there really is some work to be done to make things easier. With that in mind, here’s some brief feedback about my experience:
First, there were some things worded differently in the installer than on the phone. Judging by some other topics, this may cause some confusion.
When searching “debug” as prompted, nothing showed up.
I was told to activate “Android debugging”; I assume this should be “USB debugging” instead.
I was told to select a MTP USB file transfer protocol. No such protocol was listed, but the “transferring files” on the screenshot was close enough to be able to tell what I should do.
Then I got to downloading the image. It would have been nice if I could have done this before my phone arrived in the mail (or maybe I could, I just didn’t know). Small point, I know.
Then, during the fastboot stage, I got a bit confused with things. I am not sure what happened to be honest. I followed the instructions. But then I thought missed a step where I had five seconds to select something. I thought I had messed something up and restarted the phone. I guess something was installing after all, but my reboot messed that up, so I got a screen telling me to do a factory reset. Did the whole thing again, and now the installer quickly skipped the part where I had five seconds to select the thing. I was confused because my my phone was displaying the fastboot “start” menu, giving the impression that nothing was going on. The installation was, in fact, happening.
Other than these minor things, this was pretty easy!
The /e/asy installer is definitely the “gateway drug” to the /e/OS universe. It was most assuredly mine.
And while there are always pressing concerns in trying to balance needs with development resources, I borrow a thought from a much larger mind than mine who posited that the value of a network is directly tied to the number of its nodes.
In other words, the more people have a solid tool that helps them make the conversion/transfer out of the “Big G” world in a relatively painless fashion, the more “valuable” the /e/OS eco-system becomes for all of us.
/e/ developers and testers start with the “test” channel, manual installations with downloadable images are on the “dev” channel, and last but not least the pre-installed /e/ phones from the shop as well as installations via the Easy Installer are on the “stable” channel.
OS updates take a few days to trickle down from test to dev to stable, so that there’s always a bit of additional testing going on before the next channel gets an update.
Stable channel install images can not “officially” be downloaded currently, so you can’t download them yourself before using the Easy Installer (unless you know unofficial ways to access them, which of course nobody will encourage).
Thanks for the feedback @freetambo …have passed it on to the developer. We will be working on making the screens better and easier to understand especially when some background process is running.
Cheers. Like i said, it really was quite easy. A lot easier than flashing a ROM yourself, thats for sure! I guess the flip side of that is that the user (me) doesn’t quite know what’s going on and gets confused easily.
It would be a very nice tool, but it still does not work, so what should I say. Solve it or forget it.
In the biggest newspaper in Germany was an article about efoundation, very nice so i tried to test it, but is not working.
The beta version of the easy-installer is not yet fully functional in some configurations, and only works for a few models, i can help you with the direct method if you are decided to try /e/…
What is your model ?
How long did you wait when searching for “debug”? I just tried on my phone and it took maybe 5s before results appeared.
The second point will be clarified in the next release of the installer.
The third point is a similar issue and can be handled the same way by the translation team.
I’m not really familiar with the translation workflow of /e/, but in general anyone could join the translation team and suggest text improvements at https://i18n.e.foundation/projects/e/easy-installer/
Nice approach.
So I propose as a solution for the Easy Installer to catch any error (so it hopefully wouldn’t hang or crash somewhere) and then in every case simply display to the user
“Unfortunately there’s something wrong on your computer which is not the Easy Installer’s fault. Solve it or forget it … or feed something back to the developers more precise than ‘it does not work’.”
i tried it it with 3 computers and I am not the only one who has this problem. If you are interested in that normal people want to use a google free mobile, you should solve the problems. If it is just a fun for experts, it makes no sense, thats the difference good product or something what could run or not.
