On Fri, Feb 5, 2010 at 9:57 PM, Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier
<xonker@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 03, 2010 at 05:57:38PM -0700, Robyn Bergeron wrote:
>> Note: Fedora isn't listed for any of the above.
>>
>> Would have been interesting to see something like "Best Distro for
>> Community Participation" or "Best Distro for Engineers".....
Ah, but the best community participation distro isn't very interesting
for anybody who's not participating. :-) Unfortunately, it's the
finished product that users (and typically reviewers) care about.
+1 Spot on.
Well, actually, not "unfortunately" -- having a great community is
wonderful, but if the finished product is lacking, that's a problem.
Not saying that Fedora is lacking, just saying that "community
participation" is not likely to be interesting to readers who aren't
going to be participating.
+1
> Since I get different answers for each of these categories, depending
> on whose article I'm reading today, are any of these articles truly
> useful? Maybe not. But more importantly, why isn't Fedora chosen for
> any of these categories? Does the author disclose on what basis each
> distro was rated? Were some distros not considered? I have more
> questions than answers after reading the article, although at the same
> time, I'd be happy to see us more often mentioned in these articles.
Depends on what you consider useful. Obviously, it at least has
sparked discussion about the relative merits of the distros amongst
some in the Fedora community, and probably in other distros as well,
and raised awareness of the differences between distros with some
percentage of users... so probably a bit useful.
Having been on all sides of these kinds of reviews (writing them,
assigning/editing them, reading them, and being on the distro end as
well) it's clear that they do have some impact and while it'd be nice
if there were more objective measures that's usually not the case.
These often depend on the very subjective view of the writer and
sometimes personal and political biases as well. If you have a writer
who doesn't like the company or persons involved with a distro, that
sometimes influences things just as much as any technical merits.
Yes, we are all humans and to be 100% unbiased is impossible.
But I doubt that's going on here, as I know Brian and he tends to be
as fair and even-handed as they come. It just doesn't look like
Fedora's strengths are in the categories that were chosen for this
piece.
> I'm thinking about changing distros on my main workstation for a week
> or so just to experience what other people think is a clear
> differentiation between them.
A very good idea. I've been using some of this week to test drive
distros other than openSUSE, including Fedora, on bare metal and in
VMs. It's not something I had a lot of time to do previously, and
wanted to see how other distros had evolved over the last two years.
+1 I think this should be something that all concerned parties should do. From a marketing point of view, you need to know the strengths and weaknesses of your product in relation to your "competitor's"
One thing that the Fedora Marketing team, as well as, other Fedora community members can do is to devise a "distro test' when we form a methodology and criteria for how these distro's are tested. We should be able to identify Fedora's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats in comparison to other distro's we use for this pilot test.
Overall most community members seem to be locked in to one distribution and take a blind eye and even refuse to hear that any other distro than theirs is of use. I personally have taken the time to try out all of the major distro's and see weakness and strengths for all that I have tried.
A lot of the times these articles posted are written as a general guide to users that have the interest in trying and possibly switching to linux as their primary os. In addition, from a non-technical standpoint Fedora is a very developer oriented distro and I have continually tried to explain to many of those technical people who are heavily involved with Fedora that sometimes they forget that one has to be a user first before they can be a contributer/developer.
My 2 cents
--
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier
http://www.dissociatedpress.net/about/
http://twitter.com/jzb