Trends - how to save Fedora ?

[Thomas Cameron]

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On 11/13/2011 02:42 PM, inode0 wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 13, 2011 at 12:32 PM, Rahul Sundaram <metherid at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On 11/13/2011 11:57 PM, inode0 wrote:
>>> They are affected by many of the changes. That is why.
>>
>> How is a desktop user affected by new clustering technology?  You aren't
>> making any sense to me now
> 
> Let's start over.
> 
> User #1 says "Fedora is getting worse each release."
> User #2 says "You are nuts, Fedora is great. Look at all this
> innovation - virtualization, clustering, etc."
> 
> I was pointing out that one problem we have that this demonstrates is
> two big user communities. Sure they overlap but they are different.
> Both of the above views of Fedora make perfect sense at the same time.
> 
> User #1 is from the user base professed by the project to be its
> target audience. 

Is he? I don't see anything at http://fedoraproject.org/en/about-fedora
that says it's specifically targeted at consumer-class users. In fact,
if you look at
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Overview#User_base_.28also_known_as_target_audience.29
it makes pretty clear that there is no one class of users.

> User #2 is more from the enterprise consumer side of
> Fedora's community. My suggestion was to be more open about the
> importance of both of these user bases to help resolve the bad
> communication between them if nothing else.

I think it's pretty clearly pointed out already - Fedora is not a one
size fits all, and that's what some people expect it to be. Fedora
targets many (or maybe one very wide) audiences. I think the real beauty
of Fedora is the ability to customize the heck out of it. I run it on
everything from my 4- and 8-year old daughter's laptops to a lab cluster
with iSCSI storage and virtual machines as clustered resources. It's
*incredibly* flexible. Of course, the builds are radically different
between those laptops and the cluster, but the install media is
identical. That's the strength and beauty of this distribution. If I
expected it to be a one size fits all, I bet I'd be disappointed, too.

Now, I absolutely understand the OP's and others' echoed concerns and
frustrations. I don't like bugs any more than the next guy. But I feel
like maybe there's some round hole/square peg going on here. Fedora,
almost by definition, will be bleeding edge and therefore, somewhat
buggy. But, really, our version of "buggy" is *so* much better than I
deal with as regards most closed source commercial code, it's not even
funny.

> Sometimes innovation is driven by enterprise use cases. Sometimes that
> innovation affects Fedora users generally, even the ones that don't
> care about enterprise use cases. While those in our expressed target
> audience 

See above - I think there are some assumption mismatches here.

> need to understand that sometimes they will be subjected to
> some things that they really don't care about for the good of the
> larger Fedora user community. And those driving that innovation need
> to keep in mind the effect it has on our target base 

...

> so they aren't
> overwhelmed by what they see as needless change that is just making
> their use of Fedora unpleasant to the point they stop.

I *think* we're actually agreeing here in many ways, John. My perception
of what the target audience is may very well be wrong, but it seems to
me that it's been very clearly defined as "damn near everyone," with an
expectation that you're going to mod the installation to your needs. If
I wanted a "click next, next, next, take what we damned well tell you
to, and like it" installation, I would run closed source.

- -- 
Thomas
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