A rather interesting discussion on our user mailing list about the proper definition of the gigabyte (mirroring a discussion on the kernel mailing list) led to the creation of a bug report regarding the fact that when available disk/RAM equals required{Storage,Ram} in the Calamares welcome module configuration, the installation will not proceed. Furthermore, the upstream bug suggested cleaning up the language so it was unambiguous.
Additionally, the user that started the discussion suggested that we tweak the minimum requirements to be that exactly: the minimum requirements, since the space occupied is nearly half of what we say we need. Based on our new direction post, we said we would get rid of minimum system requirements. However, we enforced them in Cosmic and this was problematic enough that we explained it in the "issues with workarounds" section of the release notes. We've already taken a step in this direction in that we lowered the RAM requirements.
I know that we don't want to make it seem like we're the right distro for the folks with 256MiB of RAM and a 5GiB disk, but we shouldn't be so heavy handed about prohibiting them from playing with it. Instead, it might be good set to set Calamares for minimum requirements.
Maybe an additional improvement would be to have Calamares also provide suggested requirements when device values are between required and recommended. It might help with satisfaction, especially in light of the modern web.
So full list of changes:
- upstream Calamares should check if the device is greater than or equal to the required size
- upstream Calamares should use GiB (or at least only use GB when they mean base 10)
- upstream Calamares should use "more than" instead of "at least" since it's less likely to confuse people
- we should lower required settings in our Calamares welcome module configuration to their minimum values
- we should publish recommended values
- we should work with upstream Calamares to provide an option to show suggested requirements