Stack OverFlow Developer survey

[Alex G.S.]

Hi,

Very interesting post and it really brings to mind several issues I'm
currently dealing with as Fedora Workstation user that uses it at work (and
at home and everywhere). Recently my organization moved over to Microsoft's
Office 365 from Google Apps.  That means going from Chrome with web apps to
a bunch of desktop apps. Yes, Evolution and Pidgin/Empathy have what I
would call "basic" support for Office 365 but it's not good enough yet
where Fedora Workstation would really cover the majority of enterprise
use-cases.

Most organizations and academic institutions are migrating to Office 365 as
they reduce their in-house physical server count, consolidate licenses and
go "to the cloud".  These same organizations also have a large inventory of
existing Windows desktops that could be turned into Fedora Workstations
instead of taking the expensive route of buying Macs. There's a huge
potential WIN here to provide major cost-savings to organizations and
provide a cutting-edge Linux environment that will beat the poorly
implement UNIX-like environment of Mac OS X.

Current pain points with Office 365 integration are:

1. Users should be able to do a one-step setup of Office 365 using GNOME
Online Accounts and not have to configure Evolution and Pidgin/Empathy
separately, this is too complicated for most users.

2. Empathy currently doesn't support enough features from Lync [1] - the
Microsoft enterprise communication tool - and that's a show stopper.  You
can't do video calls, you can't initiate meetings and you can't do
screen-sharing or file-transfers.

3. OneDrive isn't supported by documents and there's no way to sync
documents or access documents directly from Nautilus.  Seamless OneDrive
support plus LibreOffice would be an awesome combination.

4. Evolution is missing some crucial Office features such as finding
available meeting rooms and setting up Lync meetings.  Also calendar
sharing is a bit broken.  People have shared calendars with me and I still
couldn't access them.

5. OneNote [2] is the note-taking app in Office.  Currently no known Linux
app can edit these documents.  It would be great to have an equivalent
GNOME app that could import things like OneNote documents and then sync
them to OneDrive.

The way I've worked around these problems is to run a Windows 7 VM and I
consider it moving backwards not forwards.

This is why most developers and technology staff gravitate towards
MacBooks, because despite having a rather dysfunctional and poorly hacked
together UNIX environment it can run Microsoft apps and connect to
enterprise services. Also, the problem isn't GNOME 3 and it's UI/UX,
they're solving those problems and have made serious progress and the look
of the desktop impresses most people I've encountered.  The real problem is
integration with enterprise services and that's the big challenge ahead for
Workstation.

Hopefully you can make it a priority in forthcoming development cycles and
overcome those challenges.

Thank you for everything you've done with Workstation thus far, it's great!


[1]
http://products.office.com/en-gb/Lync/lync-2013-video-conferencing-meeting-software
[2] http://www.onenote.com/


On Tue, Apr 7, 2015 at 7:01 PM, Matthew Miller <mattdm at fedoraproject.org>
wrote:

>
> <http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2015>
>
> There's a lot which is of interest here, but this jumped out at me:
>
> http://stackoverflow.com/research/developer-survey-2015#tech-os
>
> Breakdown by OS:
>
> * 58.3% Windows 7 & 8
> * 21.5% OS X
> * 20.5% Linux
>
> Which is awesome and encouraging for desktop Linux. However, the
> breakdown of distros (from 4667 responses) is:
>
>
> * 12.0% Ubuntu
> *  2.2% Debian
> *  1.6% Mint
> *  1.3% Fedora
> *  4.0% Other
>
> So... we've got some Room for Growth there. :)
>
>
> Unfortuantely, Stack Exchange didn't ask distro version in previous
> years, but this'll at least give us a number from here. (For OSes as a
> whole, the shift seems to be entirely from Windows XP and 7 to Windows
> 8 — desktop Linux is basically flat and OS X gains a few percent over
> the past two years.)
>
> I wish they asked about deployment / target OS, too.
>
> You can see some of the demographics further down the study — about a
> third (32%) are full-stack web devs, 14% are students, 10% do back-end
> web devs, 9% mobile, 8% desktop, 6% front-end web, and then enterprise
> developers of various stripes at 2.9%.
>
>
>
>
> --
> Matthew Miller
> <mattdm at fedoraproject.org>
> Fedora Project Leader
> --
> desktop mailing list
> desktop at lists.fedoraproject.org
> https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/desktop/attachments/20150413/8344a70b/attachment.html>