Comment 41 for bug 652852

This is an important issue for me, it caused me to stop recommending 10.10 to inexperienced students. I'm sorry I've not found the time to test some alphas.

So my comment may not be correct, but the feeling I'm getting is that there's unwise effort being put in to make the installer too "smart". What's wrong with having an installer say "I see you have the following partitions and free space, I recommend such and such" and listing all the partitions as candidates. If the punter picks a poor choice, lots of warning, e.g. "You have chosen to overwrite your Windows partition, DO NOT do this if you wish to keep Windows, all your data will be lost, etc etc", lots of 'back' buttons. Ideally by means of a diagram, much as GParted does it, but otherwise a simple text list if that's too ambitious.

Sometimes all this "smart help" just gets in the way. Inexperienced users can make good choices if they're presented in a straightforward and transparent fashion.

[insert cartoon of dancing paperclip: "I see you're writing a suicide note, would you like help with that?"]