FESCo meeting summary for 2009-06-26

[Kevin Kofler]

Ricky Zhou wrote:
> We choose one group to target more than the others, and that group is
> new users that don't know what to choose.  We direct those new users at
> the default and most common download instead of throwing choices at
> them.

The thing is, that's exactly the type of design GNOME is using and KDE is
rejecting, so you will never get KDE people to approve of this. And thus
following that policy makes our download page look biased and uninviting to
KDE users.

You seem to also be missing the fact that the default download page is the
first impression EVERYONE will get of Fedora, even people experienced with
GNU/Linux who know very well what KDE and GNOME are.

> People that do know exactly what they want have one extra click to go to
> http://fedoraproject.org/get-fedora-all where they have all of the choices
> listed.

That assumes they actually know what they get when they click on the
mysterious sidebar link. People can be experienced GNU/Linux users without
knowing the sitemap of the Fedora web site by heart.

And as irrelevant as it may be in practice for experienced users, people do
look at how the default download page looks like to judge how much a
distribution supports the various desktop environments. It may sound silly
to you, it might even actually BE silly, but it's something people do, so
it has to be taken into account in your design. Trading our reputation in
the KDE community (i.e. about half of the GNU/Linux user base!) for the
convenience of completely clueless potential users who don't even know what
GNOME and KDE are and can't even be bothered to look them up with a search
engine (who are unlikely to become permanent Fedora users and even more
unlikely to become contributors) is a really bad tradeoff!

> If other DEs were to be moved off of spins.fp.o in the future,

Count on me to fight tooth and nails against declassing KDE in that way!
Turning the KDE spin torrent-only (as the spins.fp.o spins are now) would
be a real catastrophe. Not everyone can use BitTorrent. We really need the
KDE live image to remain mirrored over HTTP/FTP. And it also deserves to be
listed on the official download page!

        Kevin Kofler