User’s Priorities? Like what? What am I missing? I need details.
Let’s take an example: For a user with a fairly modern laptop or PC, the question of size is probably irrelevant. If you plan to install Linux on a single board computer, not. However, in the latter case, a distribution that doesn’t support ARM architectures, is out of the question anyway.
A user with a solid knowledge about Linux possibly wants to install a specific desktop environment (or not). A new user will not be able to make that decision.
A Linux expert would probably like to choose between Ubuntu, Debian, Arch, RPM or Slackware based distributions. This is again a question, a new user wouldn’t be able to answer. Even presenting this choice could be intimidating.
Your endeavour is definitely not a simple one, that’s why, to my knowledge, there isn’t yet a decent distro finder online (e.g. the one at distrowatch is total crap). That’s why I think, the underlying data model and the method of decision making requires quite a lot of thought.
What you’re actually trying to build is, what in computer science is called an “expert system”.
The corresponding Wikipedia page
has a fair amount of references to useful literature in the field.
I can personally recommend the very readable book from Russel and Norvig:
It’s already from 1995, so it doesn’t include deep learning algorithms, but these are not needed for your project.
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I agree a 100% with Mina’s explanations and recommendations.
The website currently expects an expert knowing what he is doing. However, such expert does not need the website, in the first place.
You need to think as a user, not as a Linux enthusiast. Then, apply this mindset to your website’s user experience.
Additionally, not even I was fully aware of what “large” means until I just guessed that it might be related to disk size. However, such question is absolutely irrelevant and out of scope for a normal non-techy user. Does such user even know how much space they have on their hard drive? Do they know if they are using an SSD? Do they know if they use more than a single storage device?
From my experience, I can tell you, even if you can’t believe it, they do not know any of that.
They also wouldn’t know the implications of such decision. “Smaller” distributions are usually not only slimmer in size, but also harder to use, since the smaller size results in the lack of stuff that might’ve been on that distribution. If you have a “large” distribution, it is highly likely that all the codec support and every day life stuff is already installed, which a user either needs or wouldn’t care for it to be installed, even when they wouldn’t use it , because they wouldn’t even notice that it’s “taking space” on the OS or storage medium. Only a minority of users complain about such property. All others do not even think about an app “taking space” or whatever, except they are forced to by the smallness of the storage medium chosen as a destination.
Therefore, you need to create a model fitting into what normal people think, not people like us think.
Examples
Bad question:
Do you want multimedia support?
Good question:
Do you want to watch videos on YouTube and watch content from physical BluRay discs?
Bad question:
What size may the distribution be?
Good question:
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In one sentence what I was trying to say in many posts.
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One more thing, I want to add:
From my experience in professional software development, I’d say, in almost any case these two statements are true:
People do not know what they want
People know even less what they need
A good software developer knows how to find it out.
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I took everyone’s advice and version 3.0 is up and live. Version 4.0 will be up in a couple weeks
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Version 4.0 is up now.
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I updated it today. Please see if it still looks like it was designed in the '90’s. Remember, I added ssl so it’s link is: Help Choosing A Linux OS