directions in Fedora desktop project

[Rahul Sundaram]

Thilo Pfennig wrote:
> Rahul Sundaram schrieb:
>> Impressions based on arbitrary numbers and random hunches are not very
>> useful. We are looking at collecting more concrete stats instead.
>>
>> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Statistics
>> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Infrastructure/Metrics
> Well absolute numbers are not very useful, especially when counted
> worldwide. You get a better sense of  a distribution if you know what
> people think. 

Counting users, collecting hardware information etc is *very useful* 
exercise in itself that is different from surveys etc. Basic information 
that we collect currently is purely anonymous server side 
infrastructure. Analysis of these  metrics can almost be completely 
automated.

We have also thoought about those problems at GNOME
> marketing list http://live.gnome.org/CountingUsers The problems is the
> quality of the data. 

Yes, the metrics page discusses the pros and cons of different 
approaches in detail.

I think it would make much more sense if this would
> be a combined effort that would be led by freedesktop.org, because
> anyway we need measures that mist distributions or desktops accept. If
> all do it differently you wil not have any relations you can count on.
> 
> So I would rather recommend to discuss such things on freedesktop-promo
> ( http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/FreedesktopMarketing).

Our current efforts on collecting metrics is not limited to the desktop 
and is not just a marketing effort. The particular list seems to be all 
about coordination between promoting desktop environments like GNOME, 
KDE etc which is important but doesnt seem very related to what we are 
trying to do here.

Rahul