website mockups, what is fedora?

[Simon Birtwistle]

> The challenge for the adventurous 'all-choice' population is to
> realize that they aren't the lion share of people.

This is similar to my argument on #fedora-admin last night.  The following
is all 'in my experience' and is not to be taken as fact, however.

People who are new to linux (and Fedora) will 99% of the time download the
default, however big you make the other options.  If you give them 4 equal
choices, they will be confused because they don't have the prerequisite
knowledge to make an informed choice (and no, one paragraph isn't enough,
and no, a bunch of pages with 'Gnome Explained' isn't enough either, because
they won't read it).  Confusion is bad in new users.

People who are not new to linux (or even Fedora) are intelligent/curious
enough about the alternatives to seek out choice.  They don't need it
presented to them in 4 equal boxes on the download page.  I admit, the other
choices option could be larger or in a button form to be slightly more
obvious, but I honestly think that to attract sort of users who will end up
downloading one of the alternative operating systems you don't need a
complicated download page stuffed full of alternatives.  

While Fedora has a default operating system the users who are new to Linux
will download that default.  The more experienced users will seek out
alternatives and/or experiment if they aren't happy with the default.  If
they are seeking out alternatives, the current designs look fine to me -
because if you're looking for other options it's obvious enough where they
are.

In summary:  I think making the download page more complex to support
'fairness' is a mistaken thing to do.  That complexity will make life more
difficult for the large majority that just want to download the defaults and
try it.


My 2cents (while I'm in NYC anyway).


Simon