Updated Fedora Workstation PRD draft

[Lennart Poettering]

On Wed, 27.11.13 19:18, Matthew Miller (mattdm at fedoraproject.org) wrote:

> 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).

This is just well disguised anti-GNOME FUD. I don't think this is useful at
all. You are just trying to turn GNOME into what you personally think
that GNOME should be, suggesting it was in some way accepted truth that
GNOME would be awful in its current state for admin and technical
folks. But that's not accepted truth, that's just your personal
opinion. And I certainly disagree with it, and so do many others.

> 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.

Giving up the goal of creating a desktop product that somewhat
comprehensively covers the desktop usecase is just going to make
everything worse for everybody. If we do desktop stuff we should do
desktop stuff, as in the desktop space the lines where one application
area ends and another one starts are much more fluent than on other
areas.

You are ignoring the fact that GNOME is in a major way different from
other technologies: it is and always has been one of the biggest drivers
of Linux infrastructure. Wherever you look, if it's udev, or dbus or, or
systemd, or NM, or all the other infrastructure that the GNOME guys or
people connected to the GNOME community have created: it's the desktop
that drove them, and specifically the GNOME project, way more than other
desktop environments.

Without GNOME you wouldn't have standardized IPC on Linux (I mean,
seriously fuck it, which other general purpose OS has no sane
standardized IPC to start with?), there wouldn't be sane device
management, nothing. The "base OS" people of Linux couldn't get here shit
together to get this infrastructure in place, so the GNOME guys had to
do it instead.

And because that is this way, because GNOME and the desktop are major
drivers, of what a Linux system is, and what infrastructure we have on
it, we should promote what GNOME is doing, and not try to intervene in
your "Matthew-knows-best-how-to-design-a-good-desktop" way.

I mean, seriously, show some respect to the GNOME project from time to
time. It gave you more than you might want to acknowledge. Don't try to
fuck it up with your attempts to reign into what the desktop guys think
a desktop should be like. If Fedora wants to continue to drive
technology, then you need to do your best to promote GNOME, not to work
against it, and try to rule into what its design decisions are.

And yupp, I might not be in the RH desktop group anymore, and we strive
for universiality with systemd, but heck, tht mind set the GNOME guys
always had, which is to fix the problems where there are and create the
infrastructure where its missing, that's certainly the same mindset that
created systemd and hence much of the core of what Fedora now is. I for
one am proudly a member of the GNOME community, and yes, I trust their
desktop designs a lot more than I would trust yours.

Matthew, stay out of my desktop please, it's not your turf.

Lennart

-- 
Lennart Poettering, Red Hat