Developers responsibillity to Fedora Users

[Wade Hampton]

[snip long rants]

The "customers" of Fedora are the users.  If you
irritate or frustrate your users, especially if the
cost is $0 to move to something else, you WILL lose
market share and hence mind share.

Additional data points that might add to the flames:

1)  I have a co-worker new to Linux.  He tried F15 and hated it,
     then went back to F14.  I believe WinXP/Vista/7 users
     trying Linux for the first time ARE confused by F15/Gnome3.

2)  Other friends/co-workers have moved to Ubuntu for their
     desktop and only use RHEL/CentOS for servers (No Fedora).

3)  It took me hours to get my F15 laptop sane including
     finding obscure settings to turn on the minimize in
     windows, and a working printer configuration application.

These are the reasons why only one of my Linux-based
laptops/netbooks/desktops is F15 and the rest are F14
or Ubuntu.

I hope to try Fedora 16 alpha soon.  I hope that most
of the major objections to Gnome 3 in F15 have been
addressed and that developers have listened to the complaints.
I plan to remain a loyal Fedora user as I have used RHL &
Fedora since about RHL 2 or 3 circa 1995 (and Slackware
before that).

Open source is GREAT, but developers must remember
that the cost (time and $) to move from one version to another
is very low....

Cheers,
--
Wade Hampton