[Ambassadors] Raleigh, we have a problem ...

[Joshua Wulf]

Thanks for the observations Dimitrios.

Dimitrios 'sehh' Michelinakis wrote:
> 1) audio and video playback (mp3, divx, mpeg, wma, wmv, etc). I know whoever is controlling Fedora is forcing a no-restricted/patented policy. Which is fine by me, maybe i'm one of those anal people who want everything to be free. Unfortunately thats not how the world works and this issue has really made Fedora a no-go for almost everyone here ("What? it doesn't play mp3's? Go to xyz place and download a plugin? Thats ok, i'll install another linux that plays mp3s")
>   
It depends on what we see as the mission of Fedora. If the mission is 
*just* to get as many people as possible to use it, then we should just 
all go and join Microsoft, because they already have lots of people.

Fedora is about freedom.

Since the mission is to get people to use free, as in libre, software 
then we need to make sure that it *is* free software. Educating people 
about why we need to use unencumbered software and formats is an 
important part of that. If Richard Stallman hadn't "gone cold turkey" on 
proprietary software and formats, arguably we wouldn't have Fedora 
today. We're not going to sell out the revolution now, because if we do 
in another five years we'll have lost everything - and if we're going to 
do that then we might as well save ourselves the time and trouble and go 
join (insert proprietary OS vendor here) right now.

So we have to balance our desire to spread the adoption of Fedora / 
Linux / Open Source with the necessity of maintaining the purity of 
principles that make it distinct from proprietary offerings, and resist 
the temptation to take the "easy path".
> 2) i don't know about other linux distros, but when my users compare Fedora with M$ Windows, all they see is a half-done operating system. For the following reasons:
>   
It depends who the target is. Right now Fedora is aimed at technical 
enthusiasts, not the average home user (grandman / non-tech person). 
Ubuntu is aimed squarely at this market.
> a: The boot process is half-text half-graphics. GRUB loads and has a half-assed low quality graphic and when you select your operating system is prints some text about the boot loader (completely nonsense to non-technical users).
>
>   
Ubuntu's boot is really nice, and we could learn something from them - 
if that's the direction that are headed in. Otherwise, if we're sticking 
to our hardcore tech roots, then "having the case off the computer" is ok.
> b: Moving on, they see a bunch of text (kernel and the INIT process) before going to graphical boot. Again they see it as incomplete software or that something is going wrong.
>   
That's because they're not technical enthusiasts.
> c: Once they boot, there are no "guides". People would like to see a document or wizard (maybe bad choice of words here) that explains how to do the basic operations like "Play music/video", "Share your documents", "Create new documents", "Connect to the internet", etc etc.
>   
The work in progress that Rahul pointed out looks good. I'm going to see 
if I can spare some cycles to contribute to this.


--josh