Fedora's intended target audience?

[Chris Chabot]

I have to go and agree with this point as if it came from my own lips.

With a clear picture of the 'end users' in a developers mind (I play one at
work too), you end up making far better end-user software then when you
assume you know whats best for them.. often you can be right, but never stop
to listen to those pesky users, because even though they don't know what the
best solution is for their problems, they do take time out of their day to
tell you of their problems.

The negativity I taste in replies to the AIGLX thread, and in response to
Hans's post make me have this underbelly type feeling that some strong
advocates of pure open source solutions (a lofty goal as it is!) might
sometimes forget the 'users of today's software'.

Fedora Core has been called a 'incredibly fun technological playground' by
some, and I think it sums up one of the things that make it so great;
However one should always be open as well to accepting ones weakness, and I
think 'userfriendliness' (in the widest meaning of the word) might be one of
'our' weak points, even more so if we allow our selves to say 'Its their
problem, let them deal with it!', it shows a complete hostility to what in
the end amount to the reason why we are in this, the users, the choice and
the freedom.

If all we want to focus on is technological development, and all users be
dammed, then a majority of the world will often read about our latest and
greatest achievements in the Ubuntu release notes.

	-- Chris Chabot


-----Original Message-----
From: fedora-devel-list-bounces at redhat.com
[mailto:fedora-devel-list-bounces at redhat.com] On Behalf Of Hans de Goede
Sent: Thursday, July 27, 2006 14:44
To: Development discussions related to Fedora Core
Subject: Fedora's intended target audience?

Hi all,

I've been following the AIGLX repository discussion from the sideline.
And I'm a bit shocked by what I'm reading there. There seems to be
strong support for releasing Xorg 7.1 as an update for FC-5 even though
that will break both NVidea and Ati binary drivers. For the records all
my computers have a radeon 9200 running OSS drivers.

I'm a bit surprised about this, since I find this very end-user
unfriendly. The possible dropping of these drivers was what triggered me
to write this mail, but the question asked in this mail has be on my
mind for a while. When replying please focus on the asked question and
if you want to discuss the Xorg 7.1 update for FC-5, please do that in
the AIGLX thread and not here, thank you!

I've been putting much of my spare time into Fedora, because I believe
in opensource and want to help and because I believe Fedora is a good
distribution. I've got friends, my wife, my parent and here parents all
running Fedora.

I think in our effort to make the best opensource OS we're loosing sight
of one very important aspect: the people for who we make that OS.

Lately I've heard saying that Fedora is a testbed for new RH technology
(which IMHO is partly true and partly is what makes it great!) and that
its a distro by developers for developers. Know I'm very much hoping
that the statement by developers for developers isn't true, because then
I've been spending my time working on the wrong distro, as I want to
work on a distro targeting a larger audience then just developers.

So lets see what our officially state goals are, the frontpage of
http://fedoraproject.org says:
Fedora Core is an operating system and platform, based on Linux, that is
always free for anyone to use, modify and distribute, now and forever.
It is developed by a large community of people who strive to provide and
maintain the very best in free, open source software and standards.

Then on http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Overview there is some more about
our goals in much the same line. So Fedora is all about opensource,
freedom and choice. Good!

But Fedora as an OS is meant to be used by people, right? I mean what
good is it to create "the very best in free, open source software and
standards." OS, if almost noone is using it?

So I'm assuming that we are making Fedora to be used by people, lets
call these people our target audience. I've been searching the wiki for
a definition of this target audience but I have failed to find it. So
I'm asking it here, what is Fedora's intended target audience?

Regards,

Hans

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