Pitching Fedora to Desktop users who already want Linux

[Rahul Sundaram]

Michael DeHaan wrote:
> Sorry for another desktop thread, but I thought this was an interesting 
> data point.  This is an interesting data point because I think it's 
> about message and not so much about technical data.
> 
> I was talking with a user who did not want to look at Fedora or an EL on 
> the desktop where they work for the following reasons, and was looking 
> at using Ubuntu.   Naturally knowing that really there is almost no 
> difference in these (Gnome is Gnome) and they didn't even need the 
> non-free codecs, I figured I would pass on the comments in hopes that 
> this would be useful to someone else.

Just in case, codecs are the issue, I am working on something:

http://lists.rpmfusion.org/pipermail/rpmfusion-developers/2008-August/000894.html

> Their Comments:
> 
> (A)   Fedora is too much of an upgrade process every six months.     
> This is interesting to me because Ubuntu comes out at about the same 
> rate.   I did not think they were talking about LTS releases, but are we 
> pitching the ease of things like preupgrade enough?  

Preupgrade up until recently and perhaps not just yet is not something 
that just works.  It came in late during the Fedora 9 release cycle and 
it had a few bugs in it still. It was slightly different from the 
regular Anaconda upgrade experience. It was also a not easily 
discoverable command line application. All of that is changing

* PackageKit has the ability to notify users when a upgrade is available 
and preupgrade is going to be hooked up to it. The user is something 
like this:

http://www.packagekit.org/img/gpk-distro-upgrade-notify.png

* The whitelist/blacklist magic in Anaconda is split out into yum 
plugins which Preupgrade will use making the experience more consistent

* Number of bugs have been fixed and we should be able to promote this 
feature to non-technical end users more.

In short, I have high hopes that this will resolve one of the classical 
pain points so far.

> 
> (B)   Comments that Red Hat, not Fedora, was disinterested in the 
> desktop -- therefore they were less interested in Fedora as they didn't 
> see an investment.   Clearly not true.   

Well, the Red Hat press on this was easily misquoted and there was some 
amount of dramatization around it.

I don't see this being
> applicable because it's a capable desktop, we invest well in it, and 
> Fedora cares very much about this.   Again, how do we pass on that 
> message?  Again, nothing technical is IMHO required, it's mostly about 
> dispelling those statements.
> 
> In the context of fedora-marketing, I'm wondering how we can deal with 
> this image that -- as far as I can not tell, is not descriptive of the 
> distro.

We recently rewrote our overview to highlight the amount of desktop 
infrastructure we are investing in.

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Overview

Also

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/RedHatContributions

Hope that helps.

Rahul