Fedora's Userfiendliness (was Re: Leaving?)

Wed Aug 2 17:12:34 UTC 2006

Honestly as hard as i know it is for people to let go of a feeling of 
'vengance', no where in my post did i mention anything related to 'non 
opensource'.

I know some of this thread was about nvidia drivers related to xorg 7.1, 
however please, keep an open mind to what people are trying to say. if 
not the bitterness you feel for one subject will make you blind to other 
wisdoms.

As Hans's thread read "this is *NOT* about the aiglx/nvidia example", 
very few people seemed to grasp this concept, and thought his only 
intrest was to fuel an ever expanding flame war? Not so .. there was a 
very good different point in there, that had nothing to do with the 
'open source vs not open source drivers' debate.

As is the same with this editorial, and discussions on digg/slashdot..

The point i was trying to illustrate (and mentioned before in a few of 
my posts), is that we shouldn't loose focus on the spit-and-polish, 
keeping the end users in mind, not losing our ever important market and 
more importantly, mind share..

Maybe we truly disagree on the goals and target audiance for Fedora.. In 
my mind, i want to help make Fedora great (and contribute to it to for 
this reason) to make it something very pleasant and easy to use for the 
end-users.

While i know Fedora completely dominates in the technical area (how 
could it not with some of the finest developers, lots of glibc and gcc 
developers, and creator of many such great new programs such as the 
'gnome-power-manager', etc), what else is technical goodness then a tool 
to support a different end goal .. making things possible for the end 
users, making things easier, enabling whole generations of people to do 
things, they otherwise would not have been able to do! Grow and develop 
open source development, allow business users to do their thing, allow 
home users to play with video, music, movies and other 'leasure' 
programs as they see fit, allow universities to have hundreds to 
thousands of desktops used for research, without being constrained 
and/or limited by Microsoft (or other) taxes, allowing children to grow 
up being able to hack their first python or c program, and even 
contributing to the OLPC program to allow millions of children access to 
more information and better education. To me thats freedom, not only as 
beer, but also freedom by being enabled, freedom of speech, freedom of 
choice, freedom to develop passions and to excel in this world

For Fedora to feed these possibilities in the world, technical 
superiority is a great starting point, but not the end. To make 
children, new computer users and people who want to switch from other 
systems 'love' fedora and enable all these things in their lives, more 
is needed ... spit and polish, easily usable software, a consistent and 
well thought out platform and applications.

SuSe is definatly trying to move this way with their 'betterdesktop.com' 
initiative, Ubuntu showed us there is a craving and a market for such 
things, OLPC shows us Redhat (and many others) care greatly about such 
things too.

So no this thread was not a necro-digg to try to re-light an old 
discussion, it was send hoping that after a few days of rest people 
might be open to a different discussion.

Clearly by your (and Sean's) reactions, i failed miserably in this, 
however i hope its not to late yet to turn this around

    -- Chris Chabot

seth vidal wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-08-02 at 12:46 -0400, Sean wrote:
>   
>> On Wed, 02 Aug 2006 18:10:04 +0200
>> Chris Chabot <chabotc at xs4all.nl> wrote:
>>
>>     
>>> An interesting editorial on this topic, that might sum up some of the 
>>> feelings that some people have been feeling:
>>>
>>> http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/editorial_13
>>>
>>> Slashdot discussion on this: 
>>> http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/08/02/0238233
>>> Digg discussion: 
>>> http://digg.com/linux_unix/Why_Red_Hat_will_go_bust_because_of_Ubuntu
>>>
>>> All of this isn't necessarily to be taken as gospel, however  it does 
>>> illustrate well the point some of 'us' have been trying to make .. lets 
>>> not forget about the users! :-)
>>>       
>> Agreed, let us not forget about the open source users.  Let's not let the
>> people who want to use binary-only proprietary extension spoil the
>> distribution for those that don't.  On top of which, the first article
>> you cite seems to indicate that the niche you're worried about is
>> already nicely filled by Ubuntu.  There doesn't seem to be much
>> reason for Fedora to become just another Ubuntu.
>>     
>
> I know I'm not the typical user - but I got involved with fedora and
> with linux in general b/c of open source.
>
> I don't want to work on a distribution that isn't sticking to those
> ideals.
>
> The only two distros I can think of that follow that extremely closely
> are fedora and debian.
>
> ubuntu is definitely not one of them.
>
> Thank you for making this point.
>
> -sv
>
>
>   
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