FESCo meeting summary for 2009-06-26

drago01 drago01 at gmail.com
Sat Jun 27 22:04:01 UTC 2009


On Sat, Jun 27, 2009 at 11:27 PM, Niels Haase<arxs at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> 2009/6/27 Kevin Fenzi <kevin at scrye.com>:
>> I never know where to reply to these sort of threads... but I guess I
>> will pick here. ;)
>>
>> On Fri, 26 Jun 2009 19:44:48 -0500
>> inode0 <inode0 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> ...snip...
>>
>>> When I look at a directory listing and see
>>>
>>> Fedora-11-x86_64-Live.iso
>>> Fedora-11-x86_64-Live-KDE.iso
>>>
>>> it is pretty clear to KDE users which image they want. How about we
>>> give the poor Gnome users the same courtesy and indicate which image
>>> includes what they are looking for? Why should KDE be treated better?
>>
>> Because lots of people who go to download "Fedora" have no idea or
>> desire to know what "Gnome" or "KDE" means.
>>
>> Let me pass along (again) my reasoning on this issue:
>>
>> Currently, a number of folks (myself included) thinks that Fedora
>> should have in their target demographic users who are new to Linux in
>> general and Fedora in particular. The sort of people who read a review
>> in a magazine and decide to try out Fedora/Linux, or who have someone
>> suggest they do so. These people expect to go and "download Fedora" and
>> try it out. If they go to a page that has 20 choices, none of which
>> they understand a high percentage of them will just go do something
>> else, or try one and be upset when they download the wrong arch.
>>
>> If the Board decides that this demographic is NOT what Fedora should be
>> aiming for, then I am all for the re-naming and reorganizing the
>> download page. We could have "Gnome desktop", "KDE Desktop", "Xfce
>> Desktop", "LXDE desktop", "server edition", "bare netinstall", and
>> anything else that has enough people working on it to provide a valid
>> offering.
>>
>> So, to try to bring this back to being constructive:
>>
>> 1. Feel free to appeal this decision to the Board. Ask them to overrule
>> FESCo if you think this is a incorrect decision.
>>
>> 2. Try and gather statistics or other data that does indicate that
>> Fedora isn't popular or used by new linux users, and we should abandon
>> trying to interest these people in fedora. Based on all the time I
>> spend helping new folks in #fedora, I don't see this being the case at
>> all.
>>
>> 3. Try and come up with some magical layout that does not present 20
>> choices to new users, but allows those more experenced users to find
>> the KDE and other installs they want. I really don't know how that
>> would look, but perhaps there is some way.
>
> Magical can be: Shows up a list at the installer where you can chose
> from Gnome or KDE (both on the same line with no default activation)
> and on the next line an alternative environment, here you have thinks
> like E17, XFCE, LXDE ... But you only the them, if you click on
> "alternative".

Why treat XFCE as second class citizen ... ok lets add it to the list.
But what about LXDE ?  .....

You see where this leads too ... a distro should (I would even say
must) provide a default choice.
Its a distro not a bunch of packages that gets shipped.




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