On Saturday 22 August 2009 22:24:56 Simon Birtwistle wrote: > > The challenge for the adventurous 'all-choice' population is to > > realize that they aren't the lion share of people. > > This is similar to my argument on #fedora-admin last night. The following > is all 'in my experience' and is not to be taken as fact, however. > > People who are new to linux (and Fedora) will 99% of the time download the > default, however big you make the other options. Number toss. KDE has 30% of torrent downloads and since HTTP downloads have no overall metrics, this is what we have. Deviating new from old users is also not done at all. > If you give them 4 equal > choices, they will be confused because they don't have the prerequisite > knowledge to make an informed choice (and no, one paragraph isn't enough, > and no, a bunch of pages with 'Gnome Explained' isn't enough either, because > they won't read it). Confusion is bad in new users. > > People who are not new to linux (or even Fedora) are intelligent/curious > enough about the alternatives to seek out choice. They don't need it > presented to them in 4 equal boxes on the download page. I admit, the other > choices option could be larger or in a button form to be slightly more > obvious, but I honestly think that to attract sort of users who will end up > downloading one of the alternative operating systems you don't need a > complicated download page stuffed full of alternatives. > > While Fedora has a default operating system the users who are new to Linux > will download that default. Fedora has a default *desktop environment*; KDE, XFCE, and LXDE on Fedora is still Fedora. They will, I still have that in what I sketched. > The more experienced users will seek out > alternatives and/or experiment if they aren't happy with the default. Alternative edition or alternative distro? > If > they are seeking out alternatives, the current designs look fine to me - > because if you're looking for other options it's obvious enough where they > are. Is it obvious *what* they are? Desktop can mean any of GNOME, KDE, etc. and it's "opposite" is Server. The "opposite" of GNOME is KDE, LXDE, or XFCE. > In summary: I think making the download page more complex to support > 'fairness' is a mistaken thing to do. That complexity will make life more > difficult for the large majority that just want to download the defaults and > try it. That's why I left a big button at the top. Those who are new don't need to deal with "what's a DE?". They never get to the bottom unless they are curious, which I would argue are also the ones more likely to become developers in the end. > My 2cents (while I'm in NYC anyway). > > > Simon > > _______________________________________________ > fedora-advisory-board mailing list > fedora-advisory-board@xxxxxxxxxx > http://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-advisory-board >
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