FESCo meeting summary for 2009-06-26

[Kevin Fenzi]

I never know where to reply to these sort of threads... but I guess I
will pick here. ;) 

On Fri, 26 Jun 2009 19:44:48 -0500
inode0 <inode0 at gmail.com> wrote:

...snip...

> When I look at a directory listing and see
> 
> Fedora-11-x86_64-Live.iso
> Fedora-11-x86_64-Live-KDE.iso
> 
> it is pretty clear to KDE users which image they want. How about we
> give the poor Gnome users the same courtesy and indicate which image
> includes what they are looking for? Why should KDE be treated better?

Because lots of people who go to download "Fedora" have no idea or
desire to know what "Gnome" or "KDE" means. 

Let me pass along (again) my reasoning on this issue: 

Currently, a number of folks (myself included) thinks that Fedora
should have in their target demographic users who are new to Linux in
general and Fedora in particular. The sort of people who read a review
in a magazine and decide to try out Fedora/Linux, or who have someone
suggest they do so. These people expect to go and "download Fedora" and
try it out. If they go to a page that has 20 choices, none of which
they understand a high percentage of them will just go do something
else, or try one and be upset when they download the wrong arch. 

If the Board decides that this demographic is NOT what Fedora should be
aiming for, then I am all for the re-naming and reorganizing the
download page. We could have "Gnome desktop", "KDE Desktop", "Xfce
Desktop", "LXDE desktop", "server edition", "bare netinstall", and
anything else that has enough people working on it to provide a valid
offering. 

So, to try to bring this back to being constructive: 

1. Feel free to appeal this decision to the Board. Ask them to overrule
FESCo if you think this is a incorrect decision. 

2. Try and gather statistics or other data that does indicate that
Fedora isn't popular or used by new linux users, and we should abandon
trying to interest these people in fedora. Based on all the time I
spend helping new folks in #fedora, I don't see this being the case at
all. 

3. Try and come up with some magical layout that does not present 20
choices to new users, but allows those more experenced users to find
the KDE and other installs they want. I really don't know how that
would look, but perhaps there is some way. 

kevin
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