Fedora's intended target audience?

Hans de Goede j.w.r.degoede at hhs.nl
Thu Jul 27 15:35:29 UTC 2006



Arjan van de Ven wrote:
> On Thu, 2006-07-27 at 16:55 +0200, Hans de Goede wrote:
>> Rahul wrote:
>>> Hans de Goede wrote:
>>>> Anyways I explicitly asked not to discuss this in this thread this
>>>> belongs in a seperate thread.
>>>>
>>> Your whole discussion is tied to the argument that since we are
>>> potentially breaking non-free drivers, noone would use Fedora. I can't
>>> see how we can have the discussion now without considering the premise.
>> No, this was the proverbial drop of water that made the bucket flow over
>> (Dutch proverb). The thing I want to discuss is the general impression
>> that Fedora Developers (both RH and Community ones) are loosing sight of
>> end users and are doing things purely on their technical merits even if
>> this hurts the end users.
> 
> arguably some other people lose sight of all users but themselves...
> 
> the 7.1 update adds a lot better support for radeon and for Intel video
> and even 2D nvidia... Intel video has a market share of about 50%,
> radeon of about 20%.... that's not numbers you can ignore in the "you
> ignore the users" comment. To some degree NOT doing this update is
> ignoring the users. 
> 

As said before I only own radeon 9200 cards, so do all the people who I
give Linux support around me. So this is not about all user but me at
all. Wasn't it Linus who said that regressions where not acceptable,
even if the patch causing the regression was a big boon for other users?
I agree with Linus on this, breaking things for a group of users,
because this helps other users is IMO not the way forward.

And here we still are hammering on the Xorg 7.1 example, which is just
that an example!

Here is another one, why ooo why, does inserting a ptp camera still not
work as non root? We had a big rouse about this on the list around
FC5testX or was it around FC4 release. I don't remember. Still this is
not fixed, which is very user unfriendly.

That is what this thread is supposed to be about userfriendly ness, not
about to Xorg 7.1 or not to Xorg 7.1 .

Currently there seems to be an attitude that breaking stuff while going
forward is ok, which is very user unfriendly and scares away users ( ==
future contributers) to other Distro's and even to other OS's

I'm a University CS Teacher as my paid job and I'm always trying to get
my students to use Linux, in general they are enthousiatic, but it is
things like this that drives them straight to ubuntu or back to windows.
Since I do not believe driving users away is what we want I'm making
noise about this. unfortunatly most people on this list don't seem to
give a damn about driving users away, they think "Then they shouldn't
have bought an NVidea card" which is really really helpfull (NOT).


Regards,

Hans




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