On Wed, 2013-11-27 at 19:39 +0000, Matthew Garrett wrote: > On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 02:34:16PM -0500, Máirín Duffy wrote: > > > See my other post to you. Didn't you experience how, even though there > > weren't nearly as many software titles available for Mac and how much > > more popular PCs were, the Mac people were rabidly fanatical about Macs? > > I mean, it was hard to find a lukewarm / apathetic Mac user. The people > > who used it loved it. They broadened from that base. > > To do that we need an audience who's able to evangelise to a wider base. > Are developers going to do that? And if they are, how do we attract them > in the first place? So I've been reading this thread, and I don't have all the answers, but one observation to throw in: I'm not sure there's that much of a difference between targeting developers and targeting 'casual' users. In my experience, what a 'developer' wants and what a 'casual user' wants are often quite similar. Often, they both seem principally to want a system that's functional, reliable and stable (in both senses of that overloaded term). I'd say 'developers' and 'casual users' have more in common with each other than either has in common with the 'power user', who wants to install three OSes with five desktops each onto a complex partition layout, be able to pick any of those at the drop of a hat, and change all their configuration settings every Wednesday. If the elephant in this room is the 'why don't more people use Fedora?' debate, then I think some of the major reasons for that aren't really things we're answering in this discussion at all. My impression is not based on rigorous scientific data, it's based on observation of list/forum/comment thread/irc/etc etc discussions. But if I can be allowed to be a bit immodest I'd say I've done quite a _lot_ of that observation, possibly more than most. I'd summarize the Hive Mind's Opinion Of Fedora as this: "Fedora? Hey, I like Fedora. They're good guys. We like Red Hat because they're the Good F/OSS Company and Fedora is basically like a beta for Red Hat, right? I wouldn't run it, though. It changes too quickly and breaks things too often and it's kind of a pain to install proprietary stuff on, so why wouldn't I just use Mint or Ubuntu?" People generally don't have a negative impression of Fedora. They think we're good folks doing good work. But they often don't run Fedora, and the reasons why really do always seem to boil down to the above: too unstable - both in terms of changing things fast and without great documentation, and in terms of our quality bar - and our F/OSS principles are a barrier for pragmatists. I don't think we could do a lot about the second point; I'm not in favour of compromising our principles, I think there has to be a major distro which doesn't compromise but pushes for proper solutions and I think it's Fedora's natural role to be that distro. But I think Fedora could potentially do more about the first point, and I'm not sure the three product proposal and the discussion this WG is having at the moment really touches on it. To point out some practical examples of what I'm talking about: * We migrated to PulseAudio and systemd very early and without anything much in terms of hand-holding for users. We didn't publish a systemd Survival Guide or anything, we just threw it at users and let them figure it out. * We decided to use GPT disklabels for BIOS system installs for a whole release cycle, pushed the change out despite knowing it caused quite a lot of problems, and then eventually backed it back out again with the next release. * We replaced the method that's been used for doing Fedora upgrades since Fedora *first existed* with a completely new and incomplete system which was completed sometime after the last possible minute (fedup), with minimal notice to users. * We've had one or more major change to how we configure how you input characters into the operating system in _every single release_ from Fedora 18 through Fedora 20. This mail would be way too long if I went into the details, but suffice it to say, if you're a Russian or Japanese Fedora user, you probably had a heck of a rollercoaster ride trying to type for the last year and a half. * We never really make a concerted effort to define baseline functionalities of our OS and consider how they're changing from release to release. This is something a mature, grown-up, 'proper' OS would do. We wouldn't ship two releases in a row with system-config-keyboard not actually working at all, for instance. We would be checking that our OS actually still conforms to our documentation on how to deploy it and how to use it, at each release. There are individual superstars doing their best to keep up with the firehose of changes in these areas, but is it an organized effort that the distro buys into? Does the entity called 'Fedora' consider it important to make sure that, if you download Fedora XX and read the Fedora XX manual about how to do things in Fedora XX, it's actually correct, and we haven't lost or massively changed whole areas of functionality without fixing the documentation and making sure we're not dropping important capabilities? I'm not sure we do. * Our quality bar is pretty damn low for a 'real' operating system. This is something I think I have a decent feel for as I'm heavily involved in the release validation process. As a QA guy I try to push for the quality bar to be as high as possible, but you get a feel for what 'Fedora' as a whole has as its expectations and you can't really push much higher than that, and what we have is pretty damn low. The installer in Fedora 18 is not something that a project with high standards of quality would ever have released. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F19_bugs#Installer_screens_sometimes_do_not_appear_at_full_screen_width . It took two releases for us to have a consistent story about how updates are supposed to happen, after the partial introduction of offline updates in Fedora 18, F18 and F19 were confusing messes in this area. Our graphical package manager was an acknowledged weak area of the distribution for 10+ releases: to a rough approximation, no-one likes gnome-packagekit, but we're only doing something about it in Fedora 20 (and GNOME Software is a classic Fedora feature: in F20, it's there and it just about manages the most basic functions. But there are all sorts of features it's missing compared to what even gnome-packagekit had. You can't tell how big a package is. You can't configure repositories. There is no longer any graphical configuration of settings like 'should updates be downloaded in the background or not?' This stuff is coming back...in Fedora 21 or 22. Probably.) And so on, and so on. I can pull out as many examples as you like. When people ask me to describe Fedora's niche, I tend to say that we make a prototype of something that could be a really great operating system a year later. But we never stop and turn it into a really great operating system: instead we introduce another dozen shiny things that aren't quite finished yet and turn out another prototype. We never build a Toyota Corolla, we're perpetually building motor show prototypes - something with all sorts of shiny amazing features that isn't really intended to work satisfactorily in the real world. We're not interested in doing the last 20% of boring work to turn our super-exciting prototype into something Joe Normal will drive to work every day: we just want to keep building more super-exciting prototypes. This kind of stuff is the reason more people don't use Fedora. If we slowed down our pace of development and improved our documentation and our quality standards, we would likely build something that more people wanted to use...and we wouldn't necessarily need the three-product proposal or the WGs to achieve that. It's something that we could theoretically do under that new model, _or_ under our old model. It's not really a part of the current proposals. *but*, I'm not saying that's actually what we should do. I quite like building exciting prototypes. Building Corollas probably ain't as much fun. Still, there is an obvious corollary; I think it's vitally important that in any debate which touches on this question, we bear the above in mind. No matter how we re-arrange our deliverables or talk about 'target audiences' and the like, as long as we maintain our current focus on building lots of shiny new things and landing them as soon as we possibly can and releasing often and not sweating the small stuff, we are building prototypes, and we're not going to get a mass user base. So I think it would be a mistake to make decisions as a part of this process based on the idea that we're trying to make Fedora a credible operating system for 'regular folks' *or* for 'developers' who want a stable, reliable operating system more than they want the latest shiny version of absolutely everything, *without* addressing the more fundamental stuff I'm talking about above. -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net http://www.happyassassin.net -- desktop mailing list desktop@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
