PROPOSAL: Fedora user survey

[Simo Sorce]

On Wed, 10 Mar 2010 10:46:54 -0500 (EST)
Seth Vidal <skvidal at fedoraproject.org> wrote:

> 
> 
> On Wed, 10 Mar 2010, drago01 wrote:
> 
> > On Tue, Mar 9, 2010 at 2:51 PM, Seth Vidal
> > <skvidal at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >> On Tue, 9 Mar 2010, Jaroslav Reznik wrote:
> >>
> >>>
> >>> Another question - how many broken things we shipped in release
> >>> that could be fixed by updates? We shipped lot of unfinished,
> >>> feature incomplete stuff in history...
> >>>
> >>> Nobody can't say I'm for shipping broken stuff - for release,
> >>> updates etc... I'm usually the one who says no for
> >>> incomplete/broken stuff ;-)
> >>>
> >>> But please stop this. What I wanted to point out is that there
> >>> ARE users out there and we should know, WHO are our users. Or we
> >>> can take a risk and set target audience so we would know it or we
> >>> can be all-catch distro but then we have to behave like we are
> >>> all-catch... In this case you know - we need compromise...
> >>>
> >>
> >> We get the users we aim for.
> >>
> >> The issue at hand is the type of users we want to aim for.
> >>
> >> Here's the camps I see:
> >>
> >> 1. One group wants us to aim for mom/pop/grandma/desktop users -
> >> the apple market or what ubuntu aims for.
> >>
> >> 2. one group wants us to aim exclusively for the bleeding edge open
> >> source developer market.
> >>
> >> 3. one group wants us to aim for the admin/experienced user who
> >> wants newer things but doesn't have time nor interest to fight
> >> with lots of broken things.
> >
> > Mind telling why those are mutually exclusive ?
> > Why does an operation system that is easy to use (1.) have to be
> > broken (3.) or only contain outdated stuff (3., 2.).
> >
> > Even if people disagree with this we do NOT need a specific target
> > audience, selecting a specific group of users and telling others "go
> > away" is nothing but failure on our side.
> 
> I think the essential problem is you cannot please everyone all the
> time.
> 
> Since we have finite resources we should think in that regard. Who
> are the users we want the most?

What I don't get, seriously, is why people in 2. can't use rawhide or
the latest updates-testing and instead pretend to inflict "almost
rawhide" on everybody else.

Maybe it was said in the sea of emails of the last week, and I lost it.
But this is what I am wondering.

Simo.

-- 
Simo Sorce * Red Hat, Inc * New York