Pitching Fedora to Desktop users who already want Linux

[Michael DeHaan]

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