I had a great conversation with the team about helping new users to better navigate the Dappnode buying and use process.
The important questions are:
What dappnode should I buy? (This information should be aligned around the intended use case. I learned there is a wizard but I missed it. Maybe a comparison table provided on the sales page would help).
What package should I install (I just learned for example that openethereum is a lower resource package than geth) to optimize hard disk space? This is important because users aren’t always going to know about the most resource-efficient package to install. So some advice from the team would be helpful here.
How do I troubleshoot the device? (OOM crashes, etc.)?
Right now it’s hard to figure out why the device crashes, why the hotspot stops working, etc.
What’s the expected lifetime of the device? (How long until I need to think about external storage and how do I use external storage with the device?) This can be tips on using the device in a way that allows it to be in service for years, especially with people needing to run full eth nodes, plus the beacon chain, plus multiple validators to participate in ETH 2.0 staking.
These questions are all designed to help new buyers and users who are looking for a plug and play, easy experience to get moving quickly and to reduce concerns.
This is great. Definitely worth working towards that.
I particularly like the idea of a comparison table - it’s a nice, easy solution to give more information to potential buyers.
The “what packages should I install” part is a bit trickier:
Geth and OE have their own development, optimizations, pros and cons. Just a few months ago - Parity (which is now called Open Ethereum due to the change of development team) would jam in the middle of the syncing for apparently no reason and we shifted to recommending Geth. Now the issue is that Geth is growing too fast in comparison to OE…
The point is it’s hard to know which client is “leading the race” at any particular point and what will users value - stability? disk usage? It will depend on what the use case is, what are the specs and the disks of the machine, etc. I feel like it would be reductionist to put a wizard at the start of your DAppNode saying “Install Geth for FAT GBs but stability / OE for lighter but potentially new team in charge of it” (please note these characterisations are not a reflection of my own thoughts - just an example to show how difficult would it be to convey the information to the user in a way that he can take a less than 3 seconds to read decision when going through the initial configuration wizard).
For the troubleshooting… you do have a “Support” tab on your menu, with an auto-diagnose tool. What else do you have in mind?
Expected lifetime? Ouh, tricky question! I understand that from the mentality of buying a “machine that does things” you get an expected lifetime, but here we are dealing with beta software (DAppNode being used to run alpha software (testnets) at the moment… it is impossible to predict how anything will evolve except for the fact that it’s going to be extremely fast! It also involves many variables like what do you want to use it for, how many chains do you want to run… since this varies GREATLY from person to person, I would suggest that this might be the perfect topic for a post in this forum with inputs from community members running a variety of packages in diverse machines, rather than a fixed recommendation given by us.