Why people are not switching to Fedora

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 11:34 AM, Christian Schaller <cschalle at redhat.com> wrote:
> Hi, so a couple of weeks ago I blogged** about who Fedora Workstation is an integrated system, but also asking for
> feedback for why people are not migrating to Fedora Workstation, especially asking about why people would be using
> GNOME 3 on another distro. So I got about 140 comments on that post so I thought I should write up a summary and
> post here. There was of course a lot of things mentioned, but I will try to keep this summary to what I picked up
> as the recurring topics.
>
> So while this of course is a poll consisting of self selected commentators I still think the sample is big enough that we
> should take the feedback into serious consideration for our plans going forward. Some of them I even think are already
> handled by underway efforts.

If the actual question was, "Why aren't you migrating to Fedora
Workstation?", I wonder what their current environment was. I migrated
to Fedora a few years ago from openSUSE for two reasons:

1. They switched from a six-month cycle to an eight-month cycle and
still had problems meeting deadlines, and
2. The Planet CCRMA computer music tools are built on Fedora.

So now I'm perfectly happy with Fedora Workstation. I'd like a rolling
release but I'm not going back to openSUSE just to get Tumbleweed, or,
for that matter, NVidia or ATI drivers or Flash or codecs. But if
someone were to ask me, "Why aren't you migrating to openSUSE (or
Ubuntu or Arch or Debian or Mint or Mageia or Gentoo)?" I'd simply
say, "Because they have no *compelling* advantage and I'd have to
spend a couple of weeks getting up to speed on the way *they* do
things."

They're all fine distros, they all have wonderful communities, they
all do a good job of tracking upstream, I can compile unpackaged
software on them, I can remix them as long as I don't infringe on
trademarks, etc. But they aren't "better" than Fedora and Fedora's not
really "better" than they are.

So if you want to take users away from Ubuntu, you need a *compelling*
advantage. Fedora Workstation has to make users badass at something
meaningful in a way that Ubuntu doesn't.