Pitching Fedora to Desktop users who already want Linux
Michael DeHaan
mdehaan at redhat.com
Thu Sep 11 21:07:40 UTC 2008
Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> Michael DeHaan wrote:
>> Sorry for another desktop thread, but I thought this was an
>> interesting data point. This is an interesting data point because I
>> think it's about message and not so much about technical data.
>>
>> I was talking with a user who did not want to look at Fedora or an EL
>> on the desktop where they work for the following reasons, and was
>> looking at using Ubuntu. Naturally knowing that really there is
>> almost no difference in these (Gnome is Gnome) and they didn't even
>> need the non-free codecs, I figured I would pass on the comments in
>> hopes that this would be useful to someone else.
>
> Just in case, codecs are the issue, I am working on something:
>
> http://lists.rpmfusion.org/pipermail/rpmfusion-developers/2008-August/000894.html
>
>
>> Their Comments:
>>
>> (A) Fedora is too much of an upgrade process every six months.
>> This is interesting to me because Ubuntu comes out at about the same
>> rate. I did not think they were talking about LTS releases, but are
>> we pitching the ease of things like preupgrade enough?
>
> Preupgrade up until recently and perhaps not just yet is not something
> that just works. It came in late during the Fedora 9 release cycle
> and it had a few bugs in it still. It was slightly different from the
> regular Anaconda upgrade experience. It was also a not easily
> discoverable command line application. All of that is changing
>
> * PackageKit has the ability to notify users when a upgrade is
> available and preupgrade is going to be hooked up to it. The user is
> something like this:
>
> http://www.packagekit.org/img/gpk-distro-upgrade-notify.png
>
> * The whitelist/blacklist magic in Anaconda is split out into yum
> plugins which Preupgrade will use making the experience more consistent
>
> * Number of bugs have been fixed and we should be able to promote this
> feature to non-technical end users more.
>
> In short, I have high hopes that this will resolve one of the
> classical pain points so far.
>
>>
>> (B) Comments that Red Hat, not Fedora, was disinterested in the
>> desktop -- therefore they were less interested in Fedora as they
>> didn't see an investment. Clearly not true.
>
> Well, the Red Hat press on this was easily misquoted and there was
> some amount of dramatization around it.
>
> I don't see this being
>> applicable because it's a capable desktop, we invest well in it, and
>> Fedora cares very much about this. Again, how do we pass on that
>> message? Again, nothing technical is IMHO required, it's mostly
>> about dispelling those statements.
>>
>> In the context of fedora-marketing, I'm wondering how we can deal
>> with this image that -- as far as I can not tell, is not descriptive
>> of the distro.
>
> We recently rewrote our overview to highlight the amount of desktop
> infrastructure we are investing in.
>
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Overview
>
> Also
>
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/RedHatContributions
>
> Hope that helps.
>
> Rahul
>
All true, I am definitely aware of the Red Hat Contributions page
(https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/RedHatContributions#Emerging_Technologies).
and we were misquoted somewhat on the desktop front.
The ultimate question is what else can be done regarding that /message/
(not features) that we are not already doing.
--Michael
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