Target Experience, Etc.

[Christopher Aillon]

On 06/19/2010 10:29 AM, Toshio Kuratomi wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 19, 2010 at 03:20:25AM -0400, Máirín Duffy wrote:
>> http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2006-February/msg00174.html
>>
>> This came up somewhere else today and I thought it was a good read.
>>
> Someone pointed this out to me a year back and I found this bit
> interesting:
>
> ""
> If you guys want a specific productive suggestion, I think these are two
> de facto directions that could just be adopted; one is a kind of
> building block platform shared among the GNOME desktop, Maemo, GPE, XFCE
> even [2]; it might benefit from becoming explicitly targeted toward
> multiple projects? Emphasize fd.org more. I don't know. Two is a GNOME
> desktop that is still largely UNIX/shell-user/developer-oriented,
> designed for the customers of today's Linux distributions. Focus on this
> more and do it better.
> """
>
> I think Fedora has the same basic choices for easy directions to pursue.
> Focus on being easily adapted into Sugar for OLPC, Meego for netbooks and
> handsets, RHEL for servers, appliances, developer spins, lab images, etc.

All of these need to have great experiences from top to bottom for them 
to be successful.  Currently we don't provide anything close to that, 
and leave it all up to everyone else to implement.  Eventually, people 
will go to a different source that provides a better experience, such as 
Android.

> Focus on being a great distribution for the unix admins, developers, and
> packagers that are the core of our contributors.

The "customers of today's Linux distrbutions" is not quite the same as 
it was 4.5 years ago.  Times they are a-changing, and if we really care 
about attracting more contributors and making Fedora better, we need to 
rid ourselves of old stigmas that Linux is only for "admins, developers, 
and packagers".  It's not, and wishing hard won't make it so.

For the most part, we don't get to pick and choose who consumes Fedora. 
  We get a single chance to show people that our ideals of freedom and 
openness are good things.  If the experience they receive isn't 
excellent, they will eventually go somewhere else and think "freedom and 
openness sounds good in theory, but sucks in practice".  I hope that 
nobody on this list wants that.

We need a great experience from top to bottom, which includes providing 
a great experience for admins, developers, and packagers, who are very 
important segments of the community.  But they are not the entirety of 
it.  We also need to provide a great experience for everyone else.  If 
they are interested enough in Fedora to give us a try, the least we can 
do is not shove them out the door.  Our website could be easier to 
navigate, the distro could be easier to install, we could not break 
people's machines with updates, provide people an easier path to get 
involved and report feedback or become packagers, etc.

Freedom isn't only for us.  Keeping that in mind will help make Fedora a 
more viable building block for other projects, and will be a huge step 
toward providing a great experience for everyone: developers, admins, 
and packagers; students, teachers, and parents.  If we take the time to 
stop caring only about ourselves and care a little bit about our 
consumers and users, whomever they may be, we can help spread our 
message.  And ponies.