[Whonix-devel] upcoming usability improvements that will hurt, TLS downloads, abolishing torrent downloads

Sun Feb 14 17:36:19 CET 2016

Whonix website, especially downloading and getting started is so super secure that mortal users give up on it. Even friends of mine, who graduated from university and working as engineers are incapable of getting Whonix installed.

My mission to make everyone happy with implementing geeky feature requests like "optional torrent downloads" has failed. Stuff like this really gets small groups of geeks happy, but overall it over complicates the download process.

Whonix downloads were hosted on http mirrors that were are run by volunteers. This came with various issues. All Whonix downloads are now downloadable directly from whonix.org. The download tables have been updated accordingly. So Whonix apt repository might be downloaded over TLS by default in next Whonix version 13.

During the transition, torrent download files were not migrated. There will be no Whonix torrent downloads in foreseeable future. It all adds up to the release maintenance effort that is primarily done by me. I have concluded that the ratio on the negative side with people confused by the big download table and the metal and time effort to have working torrents files is bigger than the positive side of having "optional torrent downloads" implemented.

For the foreseeable future, until funding and man power is not drastically increased, no "geeky" feature requests will be implemented. Also contributions for "geeky" features that add up to my maintenance effort will be rejected. Please briefly explain how your feature would benefit the larger community rather than exotic use cases. The way to contribute should be to relive work load from me rather than adding stuff that adds up work on my plate.

See the following video, which strengthen what I slowly learned during the last months. I recommend watching it. Worth the hour.

Aral Balkan: Superheroes & Villains in Design
https://vimeo.com/70030549

This post has been automatically cross-posted by whonix.org/blog To see the original (including links), go to https://www.whonix.org/blog/upcoming-usability