Pitching Fedora to Desktop users who already want Linux
Rahul Sundaram
sundaram at fedoraproject.org
Thu Sep 11 20:39:01 UTC 2008
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
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