Who's the Fedora user?

Jeff Spaleta jspaleta at gmail.com
Wed Aug 24 20:27:42 UTC 2005


On 8/24/05, Stuart Ellis <stuart at elsn.org> wrote:
> I think this is a model worth looking at - CodeWeavers' "Truth in
> Advertising: Real Dirt":
> 
> http://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxoffice/truth_in_advertising/the_real_dirt/
> 
> They say straight out in a simple language "What works well" *and* "What
> sort of works" and "What doesn't work"

I like the differentiation of tangible and intangible benefits as well
as the split between instant benefits and long term benefits on the
url.  For me, and thus I would assume for other techno-socio-liberal
geeks, a lot of the decision making as to when and if to jump to linux
ends up weighing some of the grander intangibles concerning long-term
equitable access to digital information heavily. As a result I am
willing to make the dauntingly large sacrifice of no longer being able
to play my dusty old copy of X-wing verses Tie-fighter or The
Incredible Machine.

I drank the Kool-aid, there is no going back for me, I'm quite sure I
look like a raving lunatic to most people.  My wife on the other hand,
uses a computer much more pragmatically. We negotiated a dual-boot
arrangement.  The machine stays booted into Fedora most of the time.
She boots into windows to play a few freebie games (though I've
introduced her to wesnoth so thats probably going to change), work
with sheet music composition software (the primary reason why a dual
boot was needed.. i couldn't find anything adequate as an open source
project in this area, I think she's using a cut-down version of
Finale), listening to the 30-second clips in itunes pretending she's
going to actually purchase something from the store, and on occasion
do some photo editting with Picasa (if only Google cranked out useful
cross-platform applications). As for the applications she's using the
most right now on linux (determined by what is on her screen everytime
i pass her computer), the obvious email and web browsing dominate like
90% of her computer usage.  Beside that, leading applications include
gourmet, alexandria, gnucash and openoffice followed by gweled. She'd
probably be doing more photo organizing in either operating system if
I didn't have a gallery solution up and running. We are in fact
talking about doing something different in terms of archiving photos
since the space photos are taking up is now a significant amount of
space.

But she clearly has an advantage compared to other typical computer
users because she has a stark raving lunatic linux nut to ask when she
needs to do something new and needs to find an application that works.
Actually she has more than that, I'm proactively telling her about
'cool' new projects that I think might interest her. How do we expose
that to the general userbase at large? Can we collect 'personal
interests' and as things get added to Extras we fire off emails to
users who's personal interests overlap with the focus of the new
application package?

-jef 
-jef




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