Fedora's intended target audience?

Hans de Goede j.w.r.degoede at hhs.nl
Thu Jul 27 12:44:26 UTC 2006


Hi all,

I've been following the AIGLX repository discussion from the sideline.
And I'm a bit shocked by what I'm reading there. There seems to be
strong support for releasing Xorg 7.1 as an update for FC-5 even though
that will break both NVidea and Ati binary drivers. For the records all
my computers have a radeon 9200 running OSS drivers.

I'm a bit surprised about this, since I find this very end-user
unfriendly. The possible dropping of these drivers was what triggered me
to write this mail, but the question asked in this mail has be on my
mind for a while. When replying please focus on the asked question and
if you want to discuss the Xorg 7.1 update for FC-5, please do that in
the AIGLX thread and not here, thank you!

I've been putting much of my spare time into Fedora, because I believe
in opensource and want to help and because I believe Fedora is a good
distribution. I've got friends, my wife, my parent and here parents all
running Fedora.

I think in our effort to make the best opensource OS we're loosing sight
of one very important aspect: the people for who we make that OS.

Lately I've heard saying that Fedora is a testbed for new RH technology
(which IMHO is partly true and partly is what makes it great!) and that
its a distro by developers for developers. Know I'm very much hoping
that the statement by developers for developers isn't true, because then
I've been spending my time working on the wrong distro, as I want to
work on a distro targeting a larger audience then just developers.

So lets see what our officially state goals are, the frontpage of
http://fedoraproject.org says:
Fedora Core is an operating system and platform, based on Linux, that is
always free for anyone to use, modify and distribute, now and forever.
It is developed by a large community of people who strive to provide and
maintain the very best in free, open source software and standards.

Then on http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Overview there is some more about
our goals in much the same line. So Fedora is all about opensource,
freedom and choice. Good!

But Fedora as an OS is meant to be used by people, right? I mean what
good is it to create "the very best in free, open source software and
standards." OS, if almost noone is using it?

So I'm assuming that we are making Fedora to be used by people, lets
call these people our target audience. I've been searching the wiki for
a definition of this target audience but I have failed to find it. So
I'm asking it here, what is Fedora's intended target audience?

Regards,

Hans




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