The big What-Why-How

[Toshio Kuratomi]

On Thu, 2005-09-08 at 13:21 +0200, Alex Maier wrote:
> Hello gang,
> 
> >From the discussion a few weeks earlier it became evident that the
> landing page of FP.org (and possibly F.R.c) needs to be re-worked to
> answer three questions:
> 
> What is Fedora?
> Why use Fedora?
> How to get Fedora?
> 
> Stuart Ellis, Paul Frields, and I have discussed these questions and
> here are the results.
> 
> What is Fedora?
> ---------------
> 
> What do we want to achieve? To put it in as few words as possible, we
> want world domination for Fedora and Open Source software. If we want
> more people all over the world to adopt Fedora, we need to focus on
> the distro and not on the project when answering this question.
[snip]

> While discussing the "Why?", we agreed that the overall desktop
> experience is far better this side of the fence for people who just
> want to use the computer. So our objective is to make this argument
> strongly in order to convince the people who don't want to spend time
> fixing stuff that should just run to try out Fedora--and we might
> become more popular than we dare to dream  now :)
> 
From reading through this I am afraid of seeing Fedora oversold.  Here's
an ongoing thread at fedora-devel to illustrate:
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2005-September/msg00120.html

We are currently _not_ the ideal distro for Mom and Pop desktop users.
(Whether we're the best even if we're not ideal, I do not know.  I have
too little experience with other distros to say for sure.)  Our
development model isn't "fix what's broken" but "upgrade what's broken".
This fixes problems but introduces new bugs somewhere else.  Moreover,
instead of downloading small fixes to repair problems, users have to
download a whole new release in order to get the upgrade to their
specific problems.

If we are targetting Mom and Pop I think our development model will have
to adjust.

> Most folks are tied to Windows by only very few applications, and a
> comparative overview like this will help them see that they will not
> have to miss their apps if they switched to Fedora.
> 
> OO.o <--> MS Office
> Evince <--> Acrobat
> Inkscape <--> CorelDRAW, Freehand, Illustrator
> xchat2 <--> mIRC
> GIMP <--> Photoshop, Fireworks
> Scribus <--> PageMaker
> Archive Manager <--> WinZip
> GnuCash <--> Quicken
> 
[snip]
> Usually, if a regular home user like your Mom switches from MS to
> Linux, they do it because someone they know (let's call him Johnny)
> has recommended Linux to them. If we want Fedora to spread, we need to
> reach this guy Johnny who will then make his Mom and Pop finally ditch
> M$.
> 
As a "Johnny", I realized that this list is often incomplete.  It is
often possible to analyze initial needs and convince Mom and Pop to
convert based on this.  But they soon decide they want to use a new
Windows-only application which may not have an analog in free software
(or must be a specific program to match with work requirements.)

[snip]
> When we come to media and hardware support, we should make a lot of
> positive statements, especially in the media area--say something along
> the lines of "We support a number of open media standards and fedora
> has media player XYZ in a standard installation. Convert your CDs to
> playable media formats such as OGG and WAV all you want with provided
> Sound Juicer application!"
> 
If our target is Mom and Pop or Johnny, then we should say we support
OGG out of the box.  Proprietary codecs are available from third
parties.

-Toshio
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
Url : http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/marketing/attachments/20050908/acf334c3/attachment.bin