Why people are not switching to Fedora

[Elad Alfassa]

On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 1:37 AM, Ankur Sinha <sanjay.ankur at gmail.com> wrote:
>> It's not the job of an OS to educate people.
>
> But it is the job of a community, and the last time I checked, we were
> more than just an OS. If the goal was just to create an operating
> system that "just works" as you keep putting it, and providing it free
> of charge, we'd just be Korora, not Fedora. The objective is to create
> a system that "just works" while keeping it FOSS - please don't skip
> out that very important clause.

We are still FOSS. I'm not suggesting to just ship these things by
default. I'm suggesting making it easier for users to make informed
decisions on this subject, while making sure they remain safe and not
compromise their computers in the process.
>
> "However, Fedora cannot and does not include MP3 decoders/encoders in
> order to serve the goal of providing and supporting only free and open
> source software that is not restricted by software patents by default."

"by default" is a key phrase here. As well as "include". My suggestion
is not to include these things by default, that's not viable both
legally and philosophically.


>> So you give people a choice here: "either throw away your brand new
>> laptop and buy a different one, or don't use Fedora". That's not a
>> good thing to do. It's safe to assume our target users already have
>> computers, and that a very large percentage of them have broadcom
>> wifi
>> chips. If you're a developer with a laptop supplied to you by your
>> company, you might not have a choice of the type of laptop at all.
>
> Well, it's like saying I'm travelling to the states and haven't the
> right plug point - what should I do? Should I run around asking the
> states to change their electrical system or should I try to figure out
> what converter I need to get my system working?

That's not the same at all, sorry. Getting a plug converter is very
easy, you walk into a store, you pay money, you get a product - end of
story. It's different with drivers. Installing them is not easy and
requires following complicated instructions... and firmware files are
even more of a mess.

>
>>
>> Wireless chips are not usually listed in the specs. This means
>> knowing
>> what you buy requires a lot of research and prior knowledge of which
>> chips are "good"... Sometimes the information is not available at
>> all.
>> Sometimes there are multiple editions of the same laptop with
>> different wifi chips. Sometimes non-broadcom is not an option (if you
>> buy a Mac, for example).
>> If someone tries Fedora, and sees that wifi doesn't work, they won't
>> blame their hardware (they probably don't even know what "broadcom"
>> is), after all, it worked fine on Windows (or on OS X). They'll blame
>> Fedora.
>
> And we come back to awareness.

I'm sure you could explain this to people face to face in conferences,
but this doesn't scale. We can't have a dialog saying "Sorry your wifi
is not working, this is not our fault, blame that hardware vendor
you've never heard of".

And again, you could invest your time in convincing people a certain
vendor is bad and that they need to do extensive research before
buying a laptop, but this doesn't scale and doesn't work for various
reasons that I've explained in my previous message. I'll sum them up:
1) People already have laptops. They are not going to throw them away
just because of Fedora.
2) Some people have no choice of a laptop, they are provided to them
by their IT department and there's only one or two models.
3) The information regarding wifi chips is not listed on formal vendor
specs, it requires extensive research. Sometimes, the information
available online is inaccurate due to model fragmentation, or not
available at all.
4) You can't convey this information to each and every person in your
target audience, so people will keep blaming Fedora.


>> For example, including 3rd party repository definitions is still an
>> option - if I recall correctly the only reason it was veto'd is
>> philosophical, not legal.
>
> Yes, certainly - which is why the alternate suggestion of helping the
> third party repository improve came up. Why has that been discounted?

Again, just having the 3rd party repo out there, even if installing it
is more secure, is not sufficient. People still need a way to find it.
I still think that if people need to go to google to search this, we
are not doing a very good job. Especially since if they try to play an
MP3 file, gnome-software will show up, tell them they couldn't find
anything, and send them to a very confusing page in the Fedora wiki
with not much real useful information.

>
>>
>> Or we could offer the users to purchase the Fluendo codec pack in an
>> integrated and secure way. This is possible, and yes, most users
>> probably won't pay, but at least it's something, and something is
>> better than nothing.
>
> I'm totally on board with this - in fact, I was looking at Fluendo
> myself earlier today. If people aren't willing to pay for a service
> someone else is providing, they won't get the service..

I wonder how complicated it would be (both from a policy perspective
and a technical perspective) to get it integrated in gnome-software in
such a way that users could purchase and install these codec packs
with minimum manual steps. I also wonder if those codecs are getting
security updates, and how.

>
>>
>> We could also have an official-ish page with less vague instructions
>> on how to safely get 3rd party repo to work, with a clear disclaimer
>> that this is community generated content in such a way that would
>> make
>> legal happy.
>
> Like this?
> https://ask.fedoraproject.org/en/question/9111/sticky-what-plugins-do-
> i-need-to-install-to-watch-movies-and-listen-to-music/

Something similar. Would be nice if the wiki page Software throws you
at when there's a codec missing could link to a relevant tag in ask
fedora.
However, this post dives into terminal commands, which I'm not sure is
such a good idea - it would be nice if this installation could be
graphical. I had an idea last year that Software could offer you to
install the codecs immidately after you install the repo
configuration. I think it's still possible to implement, just need to
have a proper way to do this. Maybe we can make this a reality...

>
>>
>> As for wifi, we could implement a pre-install check screen on the
>> live
>> CD, that will warn you before you install if your hardware has known
>> issues. If your only network adapter is not supported, you'd want to
>> know about it *before* you overwrite your main OS. This kind of
>> utility could even provide a shortlink (so you can write it down) for
>> instructions on how to use your other OS to get the right drivers or
>> firmware files and how to install them.
>
> Sounds like a great idea - RFE to anaconda?
Not sure if anaconda is the right component for this, maybe the
welcome dialog you get when you start the live session should perform
this checks, or maybe something else entirely. This also needs design,
and we need to understand if we even have a reliable way to detect
problematic hardware.

>
> Here's another idea:
> - a community contributed list of laptops/workstations in the market
> that are open source friendly - maybe even a link on fp.o that says
> "what system should I buy if I want to run Fedora?"
>
I don't think this scales... there are so many different laptops out
there, and new ones come out faster than you could check them all.
We'd end up with a list of mostly obsolete laptops.

> If we can get a noticeable amount of users to stay away from non FOSS
> vendors, the vendors *may* feel a bit of pressure?
We are way too small right now to make a noticeable difference.
The only pressure we can have is by emailing the vendor (would be a
good idea to tell every user you hear that suffers from this issue to
send a mail to the problematic hardware vendor, maybe enough of these
might move something, but I'm not too optimistic about this)



-- 
-Elad.