website mockups, what is fedora?

[Ben Boeckel]

On Saturday 22 August 2009 22:24:56 Simon Birtwistle wrote:
> > 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.
Number toss. KDE has 30% of torrent downloads and since HTTP downloads have no overall metrics, this is what we have. Deviating new from old users is also not done at all.

> 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.
Fedora has a default *desktop environment*; KDE, XFCE, and LXDE on Fedora is still Fedora. They will, I still have that in what I sketched.

> The more experienced users will seek out
> alternatives and/or experiment if they aren't happy with the default.
Alternative edition or alternative distro?

> 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.
Is it obvious *what* they are? Desktop can mean any of GNOME, KDE, etc. and it's "opposite" is Server. The "opposite" of GNOME is KDE, LXDE, or XFCE.

> 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.
That's why I left a big button at the top. Those who are new don't need to deal with "what's a DE?". They never get to the bottom unless they are curious, which I would argue are also the ones more likely to become developers in the end.

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