Updated Fedora Workstation PRD draft

[Matthew Miller]

On Thu, Nov 28, 2013 at 12:01:25AM +0100, drago01 wrote:
> > I don't think we should aim at the general user, because not only is that
> > nebulous, it has all of those same problems.
> That happens to be what every successful desktop (and mobile) OS have
> been doing.
> They built a system that is generally useful, they don't really care
> whether you are a developer, graphics designer, gamer or whatever.
> 
> If the operating system works for the general user case it works for
> pretty much everything else (it is just a matter of installing the
> right applications / tools).
> 
> An operating system designed for a specific user type is doomed to end
> up being a niche OS.

We're always going to be a niche OS, at least on the desktop -- which is,
itself, an increasingly small niche. But, let me restate my initial point.
It's great if we can be totally awesome for everyone, and sure, it's fine to
try for it. *And*, within that subset of everyone, there are some people we
want to make particularly happy.

One subset that I've identified is the one I mentioned -- the sysadmin who
runs RHEL or Fedora server systems and has Fedora on his or her desktop. The
entire LISA conference was _full_ of these people. As I mentioned in the
earlier thread, they don't all use Gnome, but they do use Fedora, and very
well _could_ use Gnome if we tailored the experience to their needs.

I think it's completely fair to say that previously, we've responded to
feedback from this demographic with "well, you're not a general user --
you're a weird special case". What I want is to acknowledge that even after
all these years of that, this is still our loyal base, and to make every one
of those feel like we are actually directly listening to their concerns
(even if they can't all be addressed).

That's what _I_ want out of a Fedora Workstation product. If there are other
classes of user where the same sort of feeling applies as well, let's
include those too. Maybe that *is* developers, although as expressed, I'm
skeptical. Maybe it's the maker/designer market -- at least the Creative
Commons / Free Culture segment of it. Those aren't areas where I have a huge
amount of history, interaction, or feedback from users. I talk about the
sysadmin case because there I *do* have those things and I'm quite sure of
myself.

Is this a matter of just installing the right applications and tools? Maybe.
It also involves being responsive to feedback, and testing changes with that
audience to make sure that they actually make the experience better as
intended, rather than becoming an irritation.
 

-- 
Matthew Miller  ☁☁☁  Fedora Cloud Architect  ☁☁☁  <mattdm at fedoraproject.org>