On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 08:35:28PM -0500, Matthew Miller wrote: > On Thu, Nov 28, 2013 at 01:08:34AM +0000, Matthew Garrett wrote: > > > I don't think we should aim at the general user, because not only is > > > that nebulous, it has all of those same problems. We should be more > > > specific, but we should also choose a segment where those things aren't > > > serious handicaps. > > Remember that we not only need to attract users, we need to attract > > contributors. Aiming to be a big fish in a small pond won't do that. > > I agree with the first part. I don't think the analogy helps very much, > though. Are you suggesting that we should try to tackle the general desktop > market with no particular focus at all? No, I'm suggesting that focusing purely on niche groups is unlikely to attract a sufficient number of contributors to allow us to ever expand beyond that niche. I'm not a sysadmin. I've got no interest in developing an OS that's aimed at sysadmins to the exclusion of others. If I have a limited amount of time, why should I spend it contributing to Fedora rather than a project that's more closely aligned with my interests? > For the goal of attracting contributors, students, developers, and sysadmins > seem like good target groups. As does the "maker" segment. Those > collectively aren't a cohesive group with exactly the same needs, but the > idea that people have been expressing that _all_ users really need a good > solid all-around environment (rather than something über-specialized) > answers that. I don't think we need to (or should) narrow the interface so > much that it's _limited_ to these users (whatever that would look like), but > we should specifically make sure we do testing with and outreach to these > groups. And, for that matter, to existing contributors. The one thing in common between all these groups is that they use a desktop operating system. We're going to need to provide a good one of those in order to satisfy them all. -- Matthew Garrett | mjg59@xxxxxxxxxxxxx -- desktop mailing list desktop@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
