website mockups, what is fedora?

[Rahul Sundaram]

On 08/23/2009 10:16 PM, Thomas Janssen wrote:

> Nobody, absolutely nobody said you shouldn't pick a default. Of course
> pick it, but show the rest as well in the same manner.

Since you agree that there should be a default, this is exactly what my
point was about openSUSE's current decision of having a default instead
of leaving it all open to end users but I don't agree that we need to
put all the other desktop environments at the same level in the front
page. There are just too many. This would clutter the download page and
confuse users. The users who would get confused about it is always going
to be the majority and unless we want to ignore that audience (which
would be a valid option as well), our design should cater to them.  I
also recommend listening to

http://www.ted.com/talks/barry_schwartz_on_the_paradox_of_choice.html

> So what is listen to the community for you? And it has nothing to do
> with fanboyism what i wrote. It's just the example with KDE.

"“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster
horses.” - Henry Ford.

That is a often repeated quote on relying on the consequence of relying
on the wisdom of the masses. Your example of listening to the community
is a popularity contest. I don't think popularity contest is the right
way to make every decision. A vote on Fedora theme from end users would
never really consider factors such as copyright, usability testing,
contrast against desktop icons and so on yet these are critically
important to us in making the right choices.

Users will often look for short term gratification and the votes often
reflect this. In several decisions, users are not going to able to
determine the technical nuances of the decision well enough to make a
informed choice. A vote for SELinux enabled by default would have never
come from users directly especially around the time we did make that
choice. I would argue that, Fedora and Linux on the whole benefited from
that decision nevertheless. There is no silver bullet solution to this.
We can take a vote into account on occasions but blindly following it is
a disaster.

Rahul