ARM as a primary architecture

[Adam Williamson]

On Thu, 2012-03-22 at 01:57 -0600, Chris Murphy wrote:

> Desktop computers are used overwhelmingly for email and web browsing.
> It's total overkill. The desktop computer is a super computer that no
> consumer really needs. It's a dying market. 

I think you may be, to some extent, over-stating your case here, Chris.
It's a compelling case but not as cut-and-dried as all that, I don't
think.

The mitigating factors are:

a) the desktop market could be considered unlikely to literally _die_.
What may happen instead is it could become much more of a niche - in
fact, very similar to what it was in the 1980s and early 1990s. There
could always be a small amount of people who actually need or want a
desktop computer, and these people could be rather close to the
self-same ones they were in the 1980s and 1990s: people whose use cases
intrinsically depend on large screens, keyboards, and significant whacks
of power.

b) Fedora has never done very well at targeting the kinds of people who
are now using tablets instead of desktop computers. We've actually
always been much stronger among the kinds of people described in a), and
we are to a large extent a project geared towards accommodating the
kinds of people described in a) (let's not kid ourselves, here).

I'm just saying that broad sweeping generalizations about The Market are
well and good, but it's probably a good idea before deploying them to
stop and think about whether they're exactly applicable to the Fedora
project, or if maybe they could use a little modification first.
-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | identi.ca: adamwfedora
http://www.happyassassin.net