Underlying DE for the Workstation product

[Dan Mashal]

Hi,

Please don't take this reply personally, but I found these emails
brought up some really important points to respond to.

I'm not here to say that the workstation should or shouldn't be Gnome
because I'd be wasting my time. I'm just going to bring up some points
that I think are important to think about and should be thought about.

On 01/30/2014 11:16 PM, Kalev Lember wrote:
>I personally feel that a single default offering is a must, if Fedora is
>to be successful in the desktop market. We have been losing market share
>to Ubuntu that has one single default desktop product, and I think this
>is a lesson to learn from.

With all due respect can we stop and just think about this for a second?

Exactly what lessons have we learned?

Has anyone actually thought about exactly why Fedora has lost a
massive amount of market share to Ubuntu? Or forget Ubuntu, any other
distribution for that matter?

What do people look for when choosing a desktop or a distribution for
that matter? Why do people currently choose Fedora? Maybe we should
think about these things first before moving forward.

In general, for a desktop, people want something that "just works" and
is "easy, simple and intuitive" to use.

Overall, can we say that about the current "workstation" offering?

Does anyone really think that taking Fedora, slicing it up in to 3
products called "Workstation", "Cloud", and "Server" is really going
to make any difference in adoption of Fedora itself? In my opinion
it's going to be a case of "the more things change the more they stay
the same".

>When I joined the Workstation WG, I did that to help build a successful
>product. To build a base system system that user can rely on; a base
>system that 3rd party vendors can reliably target with their software.
>Most other WG members I've talked to are also here to help build a
>single product.

Building a reliable product goes FAR deeper than just a working
desktop. I know that you do spend time in #Fedora on the front lines
as I have seen you there before. I hope that you would agree with me
that there is still a lot to be desired from the current "workstation
offering" (which is DE independent).

For example, disaster recovery needs a lot of work. How can we say
Fedora is reliable when it is extremely difficult for a novice user to
recover a broken system?

At this exact moment I am trying to help someone with this. It's a lot
easier just to tell the person (who doesn't even understand how to
boot into single user mode) to reinstall. We don't even have an
updated rescue mode document. The last time it was updated was Fedora
16.

>I do not want to downplay the value of Spins and alternative offerings,
>but I personally do not want to spend my time developing them, and I'd
>rather see if they were developed elsewhere and the Workstation WG was
>limited to putting together one product.

Who says you have to? There are people out there that are doing so already.

On 01/31/2014 8:50 PM, Adam Williamson wrote:
>If I look at it this way, things start looking kind of awesome. For
>instance, it *is* an interesting idea to say "if you meet the rules of
>"running Fedora Workstation", you can expect that third party software
>that complies with (these standards) will work". Looked at as an *extra*
>expectation that we provide via this "Product" space, that starts
>looking like a cool new thing.

I now get the thinking behind your blog which was referenced on the
Phoronix forums after reading this email.

http://phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?94869-Future-Of-Fedora-Spins-Is-Questioned-With-Fedora-Next&p=393932#post393932

3rd parties develop software for things that are popular.
Unfortunately, it has been quite proven that Fedora/Gnome is not one
of them.

I for one really don't think that third parties are going to now jump
at the opportunity to create software because we took Gnome and put a
sticker that says "workstation" on it. I'm sorry but I really just
don't see it happening.



Dan