Distrowatch on Fedora this year

Christopher Aillon caillon at redhat.com
Mon Dec 17 16:39:42 UTC 2007


On 12/17/2007 05:14 PM, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> Christopher Aillon wrote:
>> On 12/17/2007 03:24 PM, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
>>> Critique
>>>
>>> "But despite all these positives, the distribution still fails to 
>>> attract first-time Linux users
>>
>> Really?  I don't think this is true at all.
> 
> Even a lot of long time Fedora users don't seem to be thinking of Fedora 
> as a newbie friendly distribution though and this is to some extend 
> because our focus on the desktop has not been immediately evident.

Then we need people to tell the world.  Our engineers should not have to 
hold this burden.  They are doing an awesome job with coding up all the 
features.  If other distros are getting credit for it, we need a better 
marketing effort.  (For starters, the -marketing list is more of a 
-news-monitor list).  I'm not saying anyone is specifically to blame, 
just stating the problem we have.  I'd like to fix it.


>>  who sometimes complain about the lack of
>>> a central configuration utility 
> 
> I have heard this as a complaint fairly often and Oracle even recently 
> ported Yast from SUSE to RHEL (for "Unbreakable Linux") so there does 
> seem to be some demand for it.
> 
>> Awesome!  (Seriously.)  Configuration is evil.  With few exceptions, 
>> things should "Just Work" without needing configuration.  See 
>> NetworkManager, gnome-power-manager, work we're doing with bluetooth, 
>> killing off xorg.conf, etc. etc.
> 
> You are looking at this from the desktop perspective where you are 
> right.

I am looking from the perspective the review touched on.  If they are 
going to say first time linux newbies don't like the lack of 
configuration, chances are they just want a desktop and NOT 
configuration crap.  You can't compare people that want a config utility 
for apache, etc. in the same sentence as linux newbies that just want 
things to work.




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