"expected gains in market share"

Bogdan Mustiata bogdan.mustiata at gmail.com
Thu Apr 6 07:58:33 UTC 2006


Cam wrote:
> Eric,
>
> Do you really think that a substantial population of adopters are 
> ready and waiting but held back because mp3 isn't in Fedora?
> ...
> -Cam
Yes. And not only MP3 itself is the problem, there are also movies and 
games that don't fit *any* distribution into a *real* competitor for M$.

Yes, OpenOffice it's cool, and yes I love all of the KDE, GNOME, k3b, 
amarok, banshee, gimp, kdevelop, inkscape ... and all the other best 
written application in the OpenSource world and even all this bleeding 
edge technology incorporated in Fedora like SELinux or Xen, but the most 
users don't care about all that. They want to see a movie, play a game 
or install software (for that, they even pay money for) _easy_. This 
_easy_ component is a crucial one, because as it was stated in another 
post you *can not* tell a user to edit some /etc/ file to get his 
drivers working, you *can not* tell a user he has dependencies problems 
simply because in his mind they don't exist, you *can not* put a user 
who has spent thousands of dollars on a multimedia system to configure 
it from console or worse his system doesn't work because it was build 
from the ground only with M$ products in mind, etc. etc. I could go on 
and on about that. My point is this one: There _is a substantial 
population of adopters ready and waiting but held back because 
multimedia isn't in Fedora_, and I am really sorry for that... but I 
simply LOVE RedHat because they didn't include that support, because the 
are fighting to the root of the problem, and that's software patents. 
Sooner or later some M$ users will wake up and see they are in fact in 
slavery and decide to take action.

I know at least several ways how can people be encouraged to switch to 
Linux.
- Better desktop experience. Cool themes and gDesklets or superKaramba 
don't stay unnoticed. 3D stuff is also Ok :)
- Better OpenSource cross-platform applications. If someone uses all the 
day only gimp & OpenOffice it won't be a drama for him to use his 
applications on Linux and not on Windows. Presentation of other "hot" 
*NIX only application at LUGs (e.g. kdevelop, amarok, quanta, bluefish, 
etc. etc.)
- _Easy_ (graphically wold do) to install missing multimedia from Internet.
- Graphical configuration of most of the things.

I think at least those are some reasons of the huge GNOME/Ubuntu success 
and I respect that.

Anyway I use Fedora/KDE for my Desktop and also Fedora for my servers 
and I want to tell you: RedHat and Fedora community did a great job. 
Thank you.

Bogdan




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