[Ambassadors] Raleigh, we have a problem ...

[Michael J. Knox]

Hi,

I have some ideas at why Fedora might be loosing favor with users.

* Note this is my opinion on what I see in my local LUGs *

New Zealand is, generally speaking, very much a debian/ubuntu user base.

>From what I can see there are at least 3 main reasons.

1) Stability. People are often recommending or relating their experience,
with debian (proper) for things like servers or workstations. I, for one,
can agree. debian sarge has proven to be very stable for at least one
server installation I admin.

Not much can be done here, since Fedora aims to be leading edge.

2) Apt. For some reason or another, people can not see that ap-get install
foo, smart install foo and yum install foo are all pretty much the same.
"apt-get" it is one of the first things I hear when I ask "Why
debian/Ubuntu?"

Perhaps some effort could be made to provide education, both technical and
user interaction, comparisons in an unbias fashion on these different
package dependency tools. It should be an honest and be fair.

3) non-free. Yes, I know this is very much a double edge sword for Fedora.
However, the fact remains, Joe user wants his MP3, DVD, Flash, Java etc.
Yes, I know Fedora has been doing some very impressive work on gcj and
gnash etc.. but when the FOSS alternatives are not up to scratch, people
are left out to dry.

IMHO Fedora shouldn't go out of its way to make adding perfectly legal
packages, to its distribution, a black-art, undocumented nightmare for a
new user...  Advising users on how to get MP3 support should not be
considered a cardinal sin. Heck, Fedora pushing xorg 7.1 was halted as to
not break Nvida and Ati driver users! Talk about mixed messages.

Fedora does not need to compromise its values in order to help users.
Fedora should consider helping users instead of restricting.

* Note this is my opinion on what I see in my local LUGs *

I am a firm believer in FOSS and only use FOSS where ever I can. I do have
to use closed source, non-free software, but I am at least technically
inclined to install this myself ;-)

Michael


Gerold Kassube wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> as you all can see and read in
> http://desktoplinux.com/articles/AT5816278551.html we are ranged behind
> all other ...
>
> What should / can / must we do, to get more acceptance on the user-side?
> Do we need a strengh marketing concept?
>
> --
> Regards
>
> Gerold Kassube
> Fedora Ambassador
>
> Deutschland / Germany
> Schweiz / Switzerland
> Email: GeroldKa at fedoraproject.org
>
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