Distrowatch on Fedora this year

[Mukul Dharwadkar]

For a long time I have been contemplating this with no clear thoughts coming
out. Recently some of the thoughts have crystallized. Please bear with me if
they are not very coherent.

I have spent enough time with Linux (Redhat and then Fedora and also Ubuntu)
to find my way. Even though I may not know exactly what to do, I can
generally search it and figure it out.

I was thinking on the lines of splitting the distribution in the middle with
a pure desktop component for end users and a fully loaded one for geeky
types. Really speaking why would a end user need sendmail to be running on
the computer and that's just an example.

I believe we need a plain vanilla kind of a spin with all the essential
tools and goodies needed and one spin where you can customize to your hearts
content (just like the current distro).

If you give too many choices to the user's they often end up making the
wrong choices and screwing up which again will deter the adoption rate. It
is not an excuse to say that we are not organized. If we want Linux to be
accepted and become main stream we have to get organized with clearly
defined roles and responsibilities. And add some chutzpah to the OS while we
are at it. People are attracted to shiny and smooth things no matter how
worthless they might be. While I am not saying Linux is worthless (quite the
contrary) I would say that while developing the new version ease of use
should be the foremost concern with security in mind (though certainly not
Windows Vista style security!!!).

I can go on rambling. But this is in nutshell what I think. They will be
disagreements.


On 12/17/07, John Poelstra <poelstra at redhat.com> wrote:
>
> Christopher Aillon said the following on 12/17/2007 09:27 AM Pacific Time:
> > On 12/17/2007 05:43 PM, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> >> Christopher Aillon wrote:
> >>>
> >>> Then we need people to tell the world.  Our engineers should not have
> >>> to hold this burden.  They are doing an awesome job with coding up
> >>> all the features.
> >>
> >> It wouldn't be a burden to tell the world that we are doing what we
> >> are doing then. One simple way to do this it to just blog more often.
> >> Our engineers do that sometimes but way less than ideal.
> >
> > NURRRRRR.  BZZZZZT.  WRONG WRONG WRONG.
> >
> > If an engineer happens to take time out of their busy lives, and time
> > away from doing awesome feature work for Fedora 9, then consider it a
> > bonus.  Expecting this from any engineer is just insane.
>
> Even if it would be helpful?
>
> > The ideal situation is we have people that care about Fedora that may
> > not necessarily be technical that will create buzz for the engineers who
> > don't necessarily have perfect verbal/hype skills.  These are two
> > completely different skill sets.  Don't confuse them.
> >
>
> This isn't a viable solution.
>
> How will these not-so-technical people get this information without the
> help of a mind-reading module?  If you assert that less technical people
> fill this role it is not reasonable to expect them to read source code
> and change logs.  If you aren't willing to communicate with them, how
> can they get this information?
>
> Many of the developers have done a great job creating feature pages and
> these help a lot... I realize we share a different opinion on the value
> of the feature pages :)
>
> John
>
> --
> Fedora-marketing-list mailing list
> Fedora-marketing-list at redhat.com
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-marketing-list
>



-- 
Smile!!! :) It improves your face value...

Visit me at
http://www.dharwadkar.com
http://www.dharwadkar.org
Sister Site:
http://www.saraswatibhuvan.org
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listman.redhat.com/archives/fedora-marketing-list/attachments/20071217/3081ecb5/attachment.htm>