Updated Fedora Workstation PRD draft

[Lynn Dixon]

This a thousand times.  Thanks Adam.

Why are we targeting developers and home users for a product called
Workstation?  Workstations are where work gets done,  as in the sys admin
use can originally prescribed.

Why  let the standard Fedora release appeal to developers and home users
whom want a fast moving distro and let workstation appeal to those folks
wanting something that's not always breaking so they can with confidence
deploy it for use in their work environments where work is getting done,
like sys admins and the like.
On Nov 27, 2013 4:28 PM, "Adam Williamson" <awilliam at redhat.com> wrote:

> On Wed, 2013-11-27 at 19:39 +0000, Matthew Garrett wrote:
> > On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 02:34:16PM -0500, Máirín Duffy wrote:
> >
> > > See my other post to you. Didn't you experience how, even though there
> > > weren't nearly as many software titles available for Mac and how much
> > > more popular PCs were, the Mac people were rabidly fanatical about
> Macs?
> > > I mean, it was hard to find a lukewarm / apathetic Mac user. The people
> > > who used it loved it. They broadened from that base.
> >
> > To do that we need an audience who's able to evangelise to a wider base.
> > Are developers going to do that? And if they are, how do we attract them
> > in the first place?
>
> So I've been reading this thread, and I don't have all the answers, but
> one observation to throw in:
>
> I'm not sure there's that much of a difference between targeting
> developers and targeting 'casual' users.
>
> In my experience, what a 'developer' wants and what a 'casual user'
> wants are often quite similar. Often, they both seem principally to want
> a system that's functional, reliable and stable (in both senses of that
> overloaded term). I'd say 'developers' and 'casual users' have more in
> common with each other than either has in common with the 'power user',
> who wants to install three OSes with five desktops each onto a complex
> partition layout, be able to pick any of those at the drop of a hat, and
> change all their configuration settings every Wednesday.
>
> If the elephant in this room is the 'why don't more people use Fedora?'
> debate, then I think some of the major reasons for that aren't really
> things we're answering in this discussion at all. My impression is not
> based on rigorous scientific data, it's based on observation of
> list/forum/comment thread/irc/etc etc discussions. But if I can be
> allowed to be a bit immodest I'd say I've done quite a _lot_ of that
> observation, possibly more than most. I'd summarize the Hive Mind's
> Opinion Of Fedora as this:
>
> "Fedora? Hey, I like Fedora. They're good guys. We like Red Hat because
> they're the Good F/OSS Company and Fedora is basically like a beta for
> Red Hat, right? I wouldn't run it, though. It changes too quickly and
> breaks things too often and it's kind of a pain to install proprietary
> stuff on, so why wouldn't I just use Mint or Ubuntu?"
>
> People generally don't have a negative impression of Fedora. They think
> we're good folks doing good work. But they often don't run Fedora, and
> the reasons why really do always seem to boil down to the above: too
> unstable - both in terms of changing things fast and without great
> documentation, and in terms of our quality bar - and our F/OSS
> principles are a barrier for pragmatists.
>
> I don't think we could do a lot about the second point; I'm not in
> favour of compromising our principles, I think there has to be a major
> distro which doesn't compromise but pushes for proper solutions and I
> think it's Fedora's natural role to be that distro. But I think Fedora
> could potentially do more about the first point, and I'm not sure the
> three product proposal and the discussion this WG is having at the
> moment really touches on it.
>
> To point out some practical examples of what I'm talking about:
>
> * We migrated to PulseAudio and systemd very early and without anything
> much in terms of hand-holding for users. We didn't publish a systemd
> Survival Guide or anything, we just threw it at users and let them
> figure it out.
>
> * We decided to use GPT disklabels for BIOS system installs for a whole
> release cycle, pushed the change out despite knowing it caused quite a
> lot of problems, and then eventually backed it back out again with the
> next release.
>
> * We replaced the method that's been used for doing Fedora upgrades
> since Fedora *first existed* with a completely new and incomplete system
> which was completed sometime after the last possible minute (fedup),
> with minimal notice to users.
>
> * We've had one or more major change to how we configure how you input
> characters into the operating system in _every single release_ from
> Fedora 18 through Fedora 20. This mail would be way too long if I went
> into the details, but suffice it to say, if you're a Russian or Japanese
> Fedora user, you probably had a heck of a rollercoaster ride trying to
> type for the last year and a half.
>
> * We never really make a concerted effort to define baseline
> functionalities of our OS and consider how they're changing from release
> to release. This is something a mature, grown-up, 'proper' OS would do.
> We wouldn't ship two releases in a row with system-config-keyboard not
> actually working at all, for instance. We would be checking that our OS
> actually still conforms to our documentation on how to deploy it and how
> to use it, at each release. There are individual superstars doing their
> best to keep up with the firehose of changes in these areas, but is it
> an organized effort that the distro buys into? Does the entity called
> 'Fedora' consider it important to make sure that, if you download Fedora
> XX and read the Fedora XX manual about how to do things in Fedora XX,
> it's actually correct, and we haven't lost or massively changed whole
> areas of functionality without fixing the documentation and making sure
> we're not dropping important capabilities? I'm not sure we do.
>
> * Our quality bar is pretty damn low for a 'real' operating system. This
> is something I think I have a decent feel for as I'm heavily involved in
> the release validation process. As a QA guy I try to push for the
> quality bar to be as high as possible, but you get a feel for what
> 'Fedora' as a whole has as its expectations and you can't really push
> much higher than that, and what we have is pretty damn low. The
> installer in Fedora 18 is not something that a project with high
> standards of quality would ever have released.
>
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F19_bugs#Installer_screens_sometimes_do_not_appear_at_full_screen_width. It took two releases for us to have a consistent story about how updates
> are supposed to happen, after the partial introduction of offline updates
> in Fedora 18, F18 and F19 were confusing messes in this area. Our graphical
> package manager was an acknowledged weak area of the distribution for 10+
> releases: to a rough approximation, no-one likes gnome-packagekit, but
> we're only doing something about it in Fedora 20 (and GNOME Software is a
> classic Fedora feature: in F20, it's there and it just about manages the
> most basic functions. But there are all sorts of features it's missing
> compared to what even gnome-packagekit had. You can't tell how big a
> package is. You can't configure repositories. There is no longer any
> graphical configuration of settings like 'should updates be downloaded in
> the background or not?' This stuff is coming back...in Fedora 21 or 22.
> Probably.) And so on, and so on. I can pull out as many examples as you
> like.
>
> When people ask me to describe Fedora's niche, I tend to say that we
> make a prototype of something that could be a really great operating
> system a year later. But we never stop and turn it into a really great
> operating system: instead we introduce another dozen shiny things that
> aren't quite finished yet and turn out another prototype. We never build
> a Toyota Corolla, we're perpetually building motor show prototypes -
> something with all sorts of shiny amazing features that isn't really
> intended to work satisfactorily in the real world. We're not interested
> in doing the last 20% of boring work to turn our super-exciting
> prototype into something Joe Normal will drive to work every day: we
> just want to keep building more super-exciting prototypes.
>
> This kind of stuff is the reason more people don't use Fedora. If we
> slowed down our pace of development and improved our documentation and
> our quality standards, we would likely build something that more people
> wanted to use...and we wouldn't necessarily need the three-product
> proposal or the WGs to achieve that. It's something that we could
> theoretically do under that new model, _or_ under our old model. It's
> not really a part of the current proposals.
>
> *but*, I'm not saying that's actually what we should do. I quite like
> building exciting prototypes. Building Corollas probably ain't as much
> fun. Still, there is an obvious corollary; I think it's vitally
> important that in any debate which touches on this question, we bear the
> above in mind. No matter how we re-arrange our deliverables or talk
> about 'target audiences' and the like, as long as we maintain our
> current focus on building lots of shiny new things and landing them as
> soon as we possibly can and releasing often and not sweating the small
> stuff, we are building prototypes, and we're not going to get a mass
> user base. So I think it would be a mistake to make decisions as a part
> of this process based on the idea that we're trying to make Fedora a
> credible operating system for 'regular folks' *or* for 'developers' who
> want a stable, reliable operating system more than they want the latest
> shiny version of absolutely everything, *without* addressing the more
> fundamental stuff I'm talking about above.
> --
> Adam Williamson
> Fedora QA Community Monkey
> IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net
> http://www.happyassassin.net
>
> --
> desktop mailing list
> desktop at lists.fedoraproject.org
> https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
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