Why Fedora is for experts only?

[Mikkel L. Ellertson]

gilpel at altern.org wrote:
> Mikkel L. Ellertson wrote:
> 
>> While it is important to you, and important to companies like
>> Red Hat,
> 
> So, it's important for Red Hat and until now, your point was that it is
> irrelevant to Fedora because Fedora is for experts. So you expect RHEL to
> acquire a user base by people getting use to it through CentOS, I suppose.
> 
I guess you do not understand the difference between Red Hat and
Fedora. The two are not interchangeable. I expect Red Hat to acquire
a user base through Red Hat Enterprise Linux. CentOS and Scientific
Linux are two clones of RH Enterprise Linux, without the support.

> I've never used CentOS but, getting stuck with the likes of GIMP 2,2 does
> sound very appealing to me as a desktop user.
> 
I don't know - it probably appeals to the corporate users because of
the support available from Red Hat.

> OTOH, I've tried Mint, Knoppix, Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Debian, PCLinuxOS,
> Slackware and quite a few others, I suppose.
> 
> So far, Fedora is the one that worked best for me. I'm sure, with a 3 page
> list of do and don't, most Windows users could get it running. The
> question is "Would they go through a 3 page list?" Knowing that there will
> be a whole lot more to get accustomed to, wouldn't they wonder why things
> aren't done right without the do and don't?
> 
Take a look at Mandriva - it is a lot like Fedora, but without most
of the things that bother you. It started as a i686 fork of Red Hat
when the i686 machines were state of the art.

You keep thinking that Fedora is aimed at people coming over from
Windows. If they were a "geek", they might feel at home here. But
for a user that wants things to "just work" and is only interesting
in getting office work done, or browsing the web, there are better
off with another distribution. Fedora getting a large market share
would go a long way to drop Linux's overall market share.

Let me try this a different way. You are pushing for changes in the
direction of Fedora that most of the Fedora community do not want it
to take. We do not want a distribution aimed at the average
computer. I can just picture the results when an update breaks
things. We want people that try to solve the problem, or at lease
report it, and do not act like it is the end of the world because
they can not do x, y, or z while the problem is worked out. These
are the type of people that we encourage to stick around help work
out the bugs. This is the group Fedora is targeted at. Not the
average user. Most of the things you are complaining about are
because of who the distribution is targeted at.

When we fix problems, the fixes go back upstream, so hopefully other
distributions do not run into the same problem. Sometimes we write
the documentation that gets included in later Fedora and other
distributions.

Mikkel
-- 

  Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons,
for thou art crunchy and taste good with Ketchup!

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