On Tue, Apr 2 2024 at 06:18:31 PM -07:00:00, Adam Williamson
<adamwill@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I mean, we really don't need to speculate about this much. We did an
entire overhaul of the project - Fedora.next - which was explicitly
based around making it much more focused and less of a
choose-your-own-
adventure, specifically including making the download page much more
opinionated. AFAIR, the numbers Matthew tracks strongly indicate this
was associated with a very significant immediate bump in Fedora usage.
Yes, promoting Fedora Workstation over all the other desktops has been
key to the success of Fedora over the past 10 years. I suspect it was
the right choice, because Fedora has grown considerably from our
unrelenting focus on attracting so many GNOME desktop users to the
Fedora edition that receives the most investment. But there is a
continuum of strategies we can use to promote our default desktop over
other options, and I wonder if we've erred too far in favor of Fedora
Workstation and against Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop here. The Plasma spin
is much "bigger" than the other spins, it's of comparable quality to
Fedora Workstation, and it is release blocking. It just seems strange
to relegate it to a secondary downloads page regardless of how popular
it is, while the non-desktop editions (some of which are frankly
relatively niche) get featured very prominently.
I'm not sure what the solution is here. Kevin's suggestion of featuring
all spins equally risks overloading users with difficult choices and
diluting our focus on what we do well, and I hesitate to open the doors
for all spins to request a place on the main download page. I suppose I
think of KDE Plasma as "special" relative to all the others due to its
relatively large upstream developer community and user base, so I guess
I'd like to see some way to elevate the status of Plasma in Fedora
without also jeopardizing the special status of Fedora Workstation. We
should have a very compelling reason if we're going to continue hiding
one of our strongest products, and I don't think we do anymore. Our
reputation as a quality GNOME distro has become so strong that it's not
going to be damaged by other Fedora desktop offerings.
So here are three brainstorming proposals:
(a) Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop becomes a Fedora edition. We'd need to
be careful about how we do it. I would still promote Fedora Workstation
as the main/recommended "leading" desktop, would call Plasma an
"alternative desktop option," and would strongly caution against use of
the word "Workstation" anywhere in the branding for the Plasma version.
That is, let's continue to steer undecided users towards Fedora
Workstation, while making Plasma easier to find and presenting it more
prominently than it is today.
(b) Alternatively, elevate the positioning of all spins on the
fedoraproject.org homepage. Place the link to the spins right next to
the link to Fedora Workstation, above the atomic desktops (which are
sadly still experimental), above the Fedora labs and ALT downloads, and
honestly probably above the non-desktop Fedora editions. Nobody is
going to be confused as to which one is the primary product.
(c) Do both of the above, because they aren't mutually exclusive
proposals.
Michael
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