Hi everyone, First of all apologize for this taking so long, I ended up traveling non-stop for some time visiting some of Red Hats desktop customers. While not directly tied to the work of this working group I do hope to take some of the lessons learned from those meetings with me into the future work of the working group.
Anyway I tried editing the PRD a bit based on the feedback we got on the first draft. I tried to make a few items a bit clearer and also to include spelling fixes contributed and so on.
We probably want to do another WG meeting soon to discuss next steps.
Feel free to let me know if I forgot to include some important feedback or if further clarifications are needed.
Christian
On Mon, 2013-11-25 at 13:59 +0100, Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller wrote:
Hi everyone, First of all apologize for this taking so long, I ended up traveling non-stop for some time visiting some of Red Hats desktop customers. While not directly tied to the work of this working group I do hope to take some of the lessons learned from those meetings with me into the future work of the working group.
Anyway I tried editing the PRD a bit based on the feedback we got on the first draft. I tried to make a few items a bit clearer and also to include spelling fixes contributed and so on.
We probably want to do another WG meeting soon to discuss next steps.
Feel free to let me know if I forgot to include some important feedback or if further clarifications are needed.
"Upgrading the system multiple times through the upgrade process should give a result that is the same as an original install of Fedora Workstation."
Based on my experience (>10 years of it, with multiple distributions and OSes), this is an incredibly ambitious goal. It may in fact be entirely unachievable as written. I'm not aware of a single operating system in existence which actually achieves this. Even cellphone manufacturers - who have a very clearly-defined single piece of hardware to deal with, and a much smaller set of software and use cases to worry about than we have - don't achieve this. I'm really not sure it should be front and centre in a foundational document without some really convincing evidence that it's even vaguely achievable.
On Mon, 25.11.13 09:23, Adam Williamson (awilliam@redhat.com) wrote:
On Mon, 2013-11-25 at 13:59 +0100, Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller wrote:
Hi everyone, First of all apologize for this taking so long, I ended up traveling non-stop for some time visiting some of Red Hats desktop customers. While not directly tied to the work of this working group I do hope to take some of the lessons learned from those meetings with me into the future work of the working group.
Anyway I tried editing the PRD a bit based on the feedback we got on the first draft. I tried to make a few items a bit clearer and also to include spelling fixes contributed and so on.
We probably want to do another WG meeting soon to discuss next steps.
Feel free to let me know if I forgot to include some important feedback or if further clarifications are needed.
"Upgrading the system multiple times through the upgrade process should give a result that is the same as an original install of Fedora Workstation."
Based on my experience (>10 years of it, with multiple distributions and OSes), this is an incredibly ambitious goal. It may in fact be entirely unachievable as written. I'm not aware of a single operating system in existence which actually achieves this. Even cellphone manufacturers - who have a very clearly-defined single piece of hardware to deal with, and a much smaller set of software and use cases to worry about than we have - don't achieve this. I'm really not sure it should be front and centre in a foundational document without some really convincing evidence that it's even vaguely achievable.
Oh, you can certainly achieve this. You just need to depart from the holy grail of RPM upgrading and updated the OS as one image, and detach the apps from the OS instead of considering them part of the OS.
Lennart
On Mon, 2013-11-25 at 22:42 +0100, Lennart Poettering wrote:
On Mon, 25.11.13 09:23, Adam Williamson (awilliam@redhat.com) wrote:
On Mon, 2013-11-25 at 13:59 +0100, Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller wrote:
Hi everyone, First of all apologize for this taking so long, I ended up traveling non-stop for some time visiting some of Red Hats desktop customers. While not directly tied to the work of this working group I do hope to take some of the lessons learned from those meetings with me into the future work of the working group.
Anyway I tried editing the PRD a bit based on the feedback we got on the first draft. I tried to make a few items a bit clearer and also to include spelling fixes contributed and so on.
We probably want to do another WG meeting soon to discuss next steps.
Feel free to let me know if I forgot to include some important feedback or if further clarifications are needed.
"Upgrading the system multiple times through the upgrade process should give a result that is the same as an original install of Fedora Workstation."
Based on my experience (>10 years of it, with multiple distributions and OSes), this is an incredibly ambitious goal. It may in fact be entirely unachievable as written. I'm not aware of a single operating system in existence which actually achieves this. Even cellphone manufacturers - who have a very clearly-defined single piece of hardware to deal with, and a much smaller set of software and use cases to worry about than we have - don't achieve this. I'm really not sure it should be front and centre in a foundational document without some really convincing evidence that it's even vaguely achievable.
Oh, you can certainly achieve this. You just need to depart from the holy grail of RPM upgrading and updated the OS as one image, and detach the apps from the OS instead of considering them part of the OS.
It must be lots of fun to live in a world where there are Apps and there is an OS and a nice simple line we can draw and ne'er the twain shall meet, but I don't think Fedora is ever going to be such a world, and even if it was, I'm not sure it achieves the objective stated in the text. You still have to deal with configuration updates, for instance.
On Mon, 2013-11-25 at 09:23 -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
On Mon, 2013-11-25 at 13:59 +0100, Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller wrote:
Hi everyone, First of all apologize for this taking so long, I ended up traveling non-stop for some time visiting some of Red Hats desktop customers. While not directly tied to the work of this working group I do hope to take some of the lessons learned from those meetings with me into the future work of the working group.
Anyway I tried editing the PRD a bit based on the feedback we got on the first draft. I tried to make a few items a bit clearer and also to include spelling fixes contributed and so on.
We probably want to do another WG meeting soon to discuss next steps.
Feel free to let me know if I forgot to include some important feedback or if further clarifications are needed.
"Upgrading the system multiple times through the upgrade process should give a result that is the same as an original install of Fedora Workstation."
Based on my experience (>10 years of it, with multiple distributions and OSes), this is an incredibly ambitious goal. It may in fact be entirely unachievable as written. I'm not aware of a single operating system in existence which actually achieves this. Even cellphone manufacturers - who have a very clearly-defined single piece of hardware to deal with, and a much smaller set of software and use cases to worry about than we have - don't achieve this. I'm really not sure it should be front and centre in a foundational document without some really convincing evidence that it's even vaguely achievable.
Yes, this is an ambitious goal. I hope we can have ambitious goals for Fedora workstation. But it's also a really important goal. Currently we put Fedora users into an impossible situation:
* Fedora releases frequently * Fedora has a short supported release lifetime * Every upgrade of a Fedora system is somewhat hazardous * If you serially upgrade a Fedora system many times, even if there is no out-right breakage, there is degradation.
The main target of Fedora workstation is a technical user of some sort, but we can't just assume that they'll know how to fix their system or have an inclination to do so - most technical users are not operating system engineers.
If we don't want to support Fedora workstation releases for the lifetime of the user's hardware (5-7 years), then we need to figure out how to make upgrades non-events.
An image-based approach to operating system installation and upgrades is an efficient technical means to this end - but not the only way to get there. The starting point is a system definition - if any possible combination of packages from the Fedora package universe with any arbitrarily changed set of config files is a valid Fedora workstation configuration, then upgrading can never work.
- Owen
Hi Adam,
On Mon, 2013-11-25 at 09:23 -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
On Mon, 2013-11-25 at 13:59 +0100, Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller wrote:
Hi everyone, First of all apologize for this taking so long, I ended up traveling non-stop for some time visiting some of Red Hats desktop customers. While not directly tied to the work of this working group I do hope to take some of the lessons learned from those meetings with me into the future work of the working group.
Anyway I tried editing the PRD a bit based on the feedback we got on the first draft. I tried to make a few items a bit clearer and also to include spelling fixes contributed and so on.
We probably want to do another WG meeting soon to discuss next steps.
Feel free to let me know if I forgot to include some important feedback or if further clarifications are needed.
"Upgrading the system multiple times through the upgrade process should give a result that is the same as an original install of Fedora Workstation."
Based on my experience (>10 years of it, with multiple distributions and OSes), this is an incredibly ambitious goal. It may in fact be entirely unachievable as written. I'm not aware of a single operating system in existence which actually achieves this.
Citation needed? Windows Mobile, Android, iOS, PlayStation 3, XBox... I never heard any users of these OSes complaining about how upgrades broke their system in an ongoing basis. Yes, maybe from time to time, somebody hits a problem there, but the upgrade process in those systems is pretty robust due to several design decisions.
Even cellphone manufacturers - who have a very clearly-defined single piece of hardware to deal with, and a much smaller set of software and use cases to worry about than we have - don't achieve this. I'm really not sure it should be front and centre in a foundational document without some really convincing evidence that it's even vaguely achievable.
Again, I've never had an issue upgrading my PS3, Android phone or my iPad, and I don't know of anyone who had major issues with upgrades other than having to get used to UI changes (not even with Cyanogenmod which is community driven).
Also, upgrades were never much of an issue for the Ubuntu user (disclaimer: I used to work for Canonical), whereas this is a common complaint about Fedora (I had many issues on every single upgrade of Fedora I've performed).
The fact that we may not achieve this goal in a 100% flawless fashion doesn't mean we have to give up on it altogether, the room for improvement here is huge, and anything we can do to make this better is worth every line of code. This problem is a major scare-away for many users.
On 11/26/2013 05:58 AM, Alberto Ruiz wrote:
Again, I've never had an issue upgrading my PS3, Android phone or my iPad, and I don't know of anyone who had major issues with upgrades other than having to get used to UI changes (not even with Cyanogenmod which is community driven).
To be fair, that statement can't be entirely true. For example, there have been at least two upgrades to the PS3 OS that bricked hardware pretty widely:
http://www.techhive.com/article/2042402/sony-pulls-ps3-update-after-complain...
http://www.sticktwiddlers.com/2011/05/18/news-ps3-firmware-update-causing-co... <= this is the one that killed my first PS3
I also don't think 'UI changes' are the only things users have to get used to after an upgrade. There are always bugs introduced, no? For example, I have an issue with my new PS3 after a recent upgrade, that the Hulu app causes the console to lock up and reboot. My GalaxyS4 isn't without flaw either. A recent OTA update seems to have affected the GPS in a negative way, so it takes several minutes to lock on to my location now and it didn't before.
Updating Cyanogenmod is also a 'block off your entire weekend' kind of task, not something done lightly - almost bricked my Evo4G when I went from CM7 to CM9. Maybe Cyanogenmod is a poor example though since the manufacturers aren't really on board there - then again maybe a good example as they aren't really on board for us, either. Maybe it's improved since then though?
~m
On 11/26/2013 10:35 AM, Máirín Duffy wrote:
On 11/26/2013 05:58 AM, Alberto Ruiz wrote:
Again, I've never had an issue upgrading my PS3, Android phone or my iPad, and I don't know of anyone who had major issues with upgrades other than having to get used to UI changes (not even with Cyanogenmod which is community driven).
To be fair, that statement can't be entirely true. For example, there have been at least two upgrades to the PS3 OS that bricked hardware pretty widely:
Ugh, sorry I misread, thought you were making a more general statement than just your specific case. Maybe I've just had worse luck. That being said, not all of the given examples are flawless for everyone.
~m
On Tue, 2013-11-26 at 10:48 -0500, Máirín Duffy wrote:
On 11/26/2013 10:35 AM, Máirín Duffy wrote:
On 11/26/2013 05:58 AM, Alberto Ruiz wrote:
Again, I've never had an issue upgrading my PS3, Android phone or my iPad, and I don't know of anyone who had major issues with upgrades other than having to get used to UI changes (not even with Cyanogenmod which is community driven).
To be fair, that statement can't be entirely true. For example, there have been at least two upgrades to the PS3 OS that bricked hardware pretty widely:
Ugh, sorry I misread, thought you were making a more general statement than just your specific case. Maybe I've just had worse luck. That being said, not all of the given examples are flawless for everyone.
Yup, there are always issues here and there of course I was not implying that those OSes are perfect just saying that most users don't brick their phones/PS3s/tablets when upgrading. Some do of course, but software is never flawless.
The trick here is to figure out how much we can improve things with our current resources and whether we can perform certain design decisions in the stack/OS design to make things more robust. Saying 'too hard we shouldn't bother' is not a wise move IMHO, specially with one of the most common complaints about Fedora.
In a previous job I did design and partially implemented an image based upgrade system for Linux in the embedded space and it is indeed a somewhat hard problem, but it is sovable one if we can manage to make the right compromises (isolating the moving/dynamic parts of the OS from the static ones).
I am pretty much in line with Lennart's line of thought. It is not an easy task, but it is certainly a worthwhile goal that is in the benefit of Fedora users.
On Tue, Nov 26, 2013 at 4:35 PM, Máirín Duffy duffy@fedoraproject.org wrote:
On 11/26/2013 05:58 AM, Alberto Ruiz wrote:
Again, I've never had an issue upgrading my PS3, Android phone or my iPad, and I don't know of anyone who had major issues with upgrades other than having to get used to UI changes (not even with Cyanogenmod which is community driven).
To be fair, that statement can't be entirely true.
Seems like you are mixing stuff up there is a difference between "there are bugs in a newer version" and "bugs only happen because you upgraded but do not happen if you would have re installed from scratch".
On Tue, 2013-11-26 at 11:58 +0100, Alberto Ruiz wrote:
Based on my experience (>10 years of it, with multiple distributions and OSes), this is an incredibly ambitious goal. It may in fact be entirely unachievable as written. I'm not aware of a single operating system in existence which actually achieves this.
Citation needed? Windows Mobile, Android, iOS, PlayStation 3, XBox... I never heard any users of these OSes complaining about how upgrades broke their system in an ongoing basis.
So, two problems with that:
1) you moved the goalposts. The draft doesn't say 'upgrades should mostly avoid breaking people's systems', but you wrote "how upgrades broke their system in an ongoing basis." The draft ties us to a _much_ higher standard than boring old "doesn't break systems".
2) Windows Mobile and Android devices frequently just don't _get_ OS upgrades, or get them very belatedly. I've seen Android upgrades shipped that aren't really 'upgrades': you could only 'upgrade' by flashing clean and starting over. PS3 and Xbox are so different from what we're doing, plus who knows what the hell is in any of those updates? It's all secret sauce, all the way down. The only ones that might be somewhere in the neighbourhood are iOS and Nexus phones, but I don't think even those hold up to the draft's wording when looked at carefully. It really is setting an extremely high bar.
Yes, maybe from time to time, somebody hits a problem there, but the upgrade process in those systems is pretty robust due to several design decisions.
Even cellphone manufacturers - who have a very clearly-defined single piece of hardware to deal with, and a much smaller set of software and use cases to worry about than we have - don't achieve this. I'm really not sure it should be front and centre in a foundational document without some really convincing evidence that it's even vaguely achievable.
Again, I've never had an issue upgrading my PS3, Android phone or my iPad,
Again, 'never had an issue' is not the same thing as 'upgraded system must function precisely like a newly-installed one'.
The fact that we may not achieve this goal in a 100% flawless fashion doesn't mean we have to give up on it altogether, the room for improvement here is huge, and anything we can do to make this better is worth every line of code. This problem is a major scare-away for many users.
I haven't disputed that, I've just raised a concern that the specific aspiration written in the draft is an extremely hard one to meet. I didn't suggest that we should just not care about upgrades, or something.
Adam,
Indeed that what we are set to do is hard, and I all I have to say about that is this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6z1DidldxUo
On Tue, 2013-11-26 at 10:19 -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
On Tue, 2013-11-26 at 11:58 +0100, Alberto Ruiz wrote:
Based on my experience (>10 years of it, with multiple distributions and OSes), this is an incredibly ambitious goal. It may in fact be entirely unachievable as written. I'm not aware of a single operating system in existence which actually achieves this.
Citation needed? Windows Mobile, Android, iOS, PlayStation 3, XBox... I never heard any users of these OSes complaining about how upgrades broke their system in an ongoing basis.
So, two problems with that:
- you moved the goalposts. The draft doesn't say 'upgrades should
mostly avoid breaking people's systems', but you wrote "how upgrades broke their system in an ongoing basis." The draft ties us to a _much_ higher standard than boring old "doesn't break systems".
- Windows Mobile and Android devices frequently just don't _get_ OS
upgrades, or get them very belatedly. I've seen Android upgrades shipped that aren't really 'upgrades': you could only 'upgrade' by flashing clean and starting over. PS3 and Xbox are so different from what we're doing, plus who knows what the hell is in any of those updates? It's all secret sauce, all the way down. The only ones that might be somewhere in the neighbourhood are iOS and Nexus phones, but I don't think even those hold up to the draft's wording when looked at carefully. It really is setting an extremely high bar.
Yes, maybe from time to time, somebody hits a problem there, but the upgrade process in those systems is pretty robust due to several design decisions.
Even cellphone manufacturers - who have a very clearly-defined single piece of hardware to deal with, and a much smaller set of software and use cases to worry about than we have - don't achieve this. I'm really not sure it should be front and centre in a foundational document without some really convincing evidence that it's even vaguely achievable.
Again, I've never had an issue upgrading my PS3, Android phone or my iPad,
Again, 'never had an issue' is not the same thing as 'upgraded system must function precisely like a newly-installed one'.
The fact that we may not achieve this goal in a 100% flawless fashion doesn't mean we have to give up on it altogether, the room for improvement here is huge, and anything we can do to make this better is worth every line of code. This problem is a major scare-away for many users.
I haven't disputed that, I've just raised a concern that the specific aspiration written in the draft is an extremely hard one to meet. I didn't suggest that we should just not care about upgrades, or something. -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net http://www.happyassassin.net
Dne 25.11.2013 13:59, Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller napsal(a):
Hi everyone, First of all apologize for this taking so long, I ended up traveling non-stop for some time visiting some of Red Hats desktop customers. While not directly tied to the work of this working group I do hope to take some of the lessons learned from those meetings with me into the future work of the working group.
Anyway I tried editing the PRD a bit based on the feedback we got on the first draft. I tried to make a few items a bit clearer and also to include spelling fixes contributed and so on.
We probably want to do another WG meeting soon to discuss next steps.
Feel free to let me know if I forgot to include some important feedback or if further clarifications are needed.
Christian
<quote> 3rd party software Fedora Workstation will work with partners and ISVs to ensure that their software can be easily installed on the system after installation. </quote>
"installed ... after installation" sounds a bit clumsy and not entirely clear to me
<quote> Work towards standardizing and unifying the Linux desktop space We want to use and develop technologies that can be widely shared with the rest of the community and we want to allow developers to use the tools they prefer for their application development yet make them all feel like a natural fit into our integrated desktop experience. </quote>
"integrated desktop experience" - again unclear to me, perhaps worth expanding a bit, I can't imagine precisely what this means
<quote> We will try to announce and plan these things well in advance, but putting up a public timeline, but of course resources and changing market conditions might make changes to the plans necessary on an ongoing basis. </quote>
"but putting up a public timeline" shouldn't that be "by putting up"?
<quote> ... but it they will be .. </quote>
remove the "it"
"The system will primarily be aimed at providing a platform for development of server side and client applications that is attractive to a range of developers"
Right now we hand out Fedora at a number of events, including those not aimed at developers. Has there been discussion with marketing to figure out whether workstation is going to satisfy their needs?
Who are 'they' here? developers or the marketing? Have been discussing with product management and the Red Hat developer evangelist to make sure we try to satisfy the needs of developers. As for the needs of marketing we will of course make an ISO image available they can use for making install media to hand out. But maybe I am missing the point of your question here?
Christian
On Mon, 2013-11-25 at 19:56 +0000, Matthew Garrett wrote:
"The system will primarily be aimed at providing a platform for development of server side and client applications that is attractive to a range of developers"
Right now we hand out Fedora at a number of events, including those not aimed at developers. Has there been discussion with marketing to figure out whether workstation is going to satisfy their needs?
-- Matthew Garrett | mjg59@srcf.ucam.org
----- Original Message -----
Who are 'they' here? developers or the marketing? Have been discussing with product management and the Red Hat developer evangelist to make sure we try to satisfy the needs of developers. As for the needs of marketing we will of course make an ISO image available they can use for making install media to hand out. But maybe I am missing the point of your question here?
I expect "they" means Fedora marketing. So far Fedora aims much broader audience (and it's of course questionable, if it's worth to be all purpose system), this PRD limits it to a very small subset of users. And yeah, it means, Ambassadors and Marketing would have to change the strategy. In the last few years we tried to move Fedora to non techies world/events... Does this open possibility of having another product? Workstation product for developers and Desktop product as more users aimed one? But I still think we can catch good portion of users from both worlds by aiming one level up - content creators/makers with developers being one big group, why not only developers in the beginning to speed up development but not to close doors for expanding this audience.
Jaroslav
Christian
On Mon, 2013-11-25 at 19:56 +0000, Matthew Garrett wrote:
"The system will primarily be aimed at providing a platform for development of server side and client applications that is attractive to a range of developers"
Right now we hand out Fedora at a number of events, including those not aimed at developers. Has there been discussion with marketing to figure out whether workstation is going to satisfy their needs?
-- Matthew Garrett | mjg59@srcf.ucam.org
-- desktop mailing list desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
Hi Jaroslav, Well as the PRD already says we do hope and expect the product will be useful to a wider audience, but since the PRD is meant to set a development focus it needs to be focused. But of course we should review the product plan over time to both see if it is working out and achieving the goals we have set for it and to see if we should adjust the overall target/goal for the product.
So hopefully for Fedora marketing having something a bit more targeted should hopefully make their job easier as there is a clearer story that can be told to potential users. Ryan and Mo is currently working on developing the branding for the 3 new products so hopefully we can tie into that effort to help provide a baseline 'sales pitch' for the Fedora marketing team.
Christian
On Tue, 2013-11-26 at 06:26 -0500, Jaroslav Reznik wrote:
----- Original Message -----
Who are 'they' here? developers or the marketing? Have been discussing with product management and the Red Hat developer evangelist to make sure we try to satisfy the needs of developers. As for the needs of marketing we will of course make an ISO image available they can use for making install media to hand out. But maybe I am missing the point of your question here?
I expect "they" means Fedora marketing. So far Fedora aims much broader audience (and it's of course questionable, if it's worth to be all purpose system), this PRD limits it to a very small subset of users. And yeah, it means, Ambassadors and Marketing would have to change the strategy. In the last few years we tried to move Fedora to non techies world/events... Does this open possibility of having another product? Workstation product for developers and Desktop product as more users aimed one? But I still think we can catch good portion of users from both worlds by aiming one level up - content creators/makers with developers being one big group, why not only developers in the beginning to speed up development but not to close doors for expanding this audience.
Jaroslav
Christian
On Mon, 2013-11-25 at 19:56 +0000, Matthew Garrett wrote:
"The system will primarily be aimed at providing a platform for development of server side and client applications that is attractive to a range of developers"
Right now we hand out Fedora at a number of events, including those not aimed at developers. Has there been discussion with marketing to figure out whether workstation is going to satisfy their needs?
-- Matthew Garrett | mjg59@srcf.ucam.org
-- desktop mailing list desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
----- Original Message -----
Hi Jaroslav, Well as the PRD already says we do hope and expect the product will be useful to a wider audience, but since the PRD is meant to set a development focus it needs to be focused.
Then note that in PRD :) And highlight the focus on developers, this way it really sounds like the doors are closed there (and seems like these are not only my feelings from the thread).
But of course we should review the product plan over time to both see if it is working out and achieving the goals we have set for it and to see if we should adjust the overall target/goal for the product.
So hopefully for Fedora marketing having something a bit more targeted should hopefully make their job easier as there is a clearer story that can be told to potential users. Ryan and Mo is currently working on developing the branding for the 3 new products so hopefully we can tie into that effort to help provide a baseline 'sales pitch' for the Fedora marketing team.
For marketing - aiming one group is definitely easier but it also creates barriers for the future. Once you starts marketing Workstation as developers system, it will create an entry barrier for people aka "I'm not developer, it's not a distro for me" and it'd pretty difficult to get rid of this stamp in the future. Same as now we are still fighting that Fedora is not for users but bleeding edge fans.
Don't take this as I'm against the idea, I understand that with our limited resources it's better to aim on the less wider audience and make sure we can support it and provide the best experience. I'm just trying to say - do not limit it too much, it could be pretty hard to step out of the shadow of this decision :).
Jaroslav
Christian
On Tue, 2013-11-26 at 06:26 -0500, Jaroslav Reznik wrote:
----- Original Message -----
Who are 'they' here? developers or the marketing? Have been discussing with product management and the Red Hat developer evangelist to make sure we try to satisfy the needs of developers. As for the needs of marketing we will of course make an ISO image available they can use for making install media to hand out. But maybe I am missing the point of your question here?
I expect "they" means Fedora marketing. So far Fedora aims much broader audience (and it's of course questionable, if it's worth to be all purpose system), this PRD limits it to a very small subset of users. And yeah, it means, Ambassadors and Marketing would have to change the strategy. In the last few years we tried to move Fedora to non techies world/events... Does this open possibility of having another product? Workstation product for developers and Desktop product as more users aimed one? But I still think we can catch good portion of users from both worlds by aiming one level up - content creators/makers with developers being one big group, why not only developers in the beginning to speed up development but not to close doors for expanding this audience.
Jaroslav
Christian
On Mon, 2013-11-25 at 19:56 +0000, Matthew Garrett wrote:
"The system will primarily be aimed at providing a platform for development of server side and client applications that is attractive to a range of developers"
Right now we hand out Fedora at a number of events, including those not aimed at developers. Has there been discussion with marketing to figure out whether workstation is going to satisfy their needs?
-- Matthew Garrett | mjg59@srcf.ucam.org
-- desktop mailing list desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
-- desktop mailing list desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
On Tue, Nov 26, 2013 at 7:40 AM, Jaroslav Reznik jreznik@redhat.com wrote:
----- Original Message -----
Hi Jaroslav, Well as the PRD already says we do hope and expect the product will be useful to a wider audience, but since the PRD is meant to set a development focus it needs to be focused.
Then note that in PRD :) And highlight the focus on developers, this way it really sounds like the doors are closed there (and seems like these are not only my feelings from the thread).
Note what? I'm confused as to what you're saying here, because you say to note it and then say it's bad to note it because it sounds like closed doors.
But of course we should review the product plan over time to both see if it is working out and achieving the goals we have set for it and to see if we should adjust the overall target/goal for the product.
So hopefully for Fedora marketing having something a bit more targeted should hopefully make their job easier as there is a clearer story that can be told to potential users. Ryan and Mo is currently working on developing the branding for the 3 new products so hopefully we can tie into that effort to help provide a baseline 'sales pitch' for the Fedora marketing team.
For marketing - aiming one group is definitely easier but it also creates barriers for the future. Once you starts marketing Workstation as developers system, it will create an entry barrier for people aka "I'm not developer, it's not a distro for me" and it'd pretty difficult to get rid of this stamp in the future. Same as now we are still fighting that Fedora is not for users but bleeding edge fans.
Don't take this as I'm against the idea, I understand that with our limited resources it's better to aim on the less wider audience and make sure we can support it and provide the best experience. I'm just trying to say - do not limit it too much, it could be pretty hard to step out of the shadow of this decision :).
I think you're conflating the PRD with a marketing document. It isn't. It's the document the WG uses to focus their development and requirements. It's, at least as far as I know, completely separate from how things are marketed to end users.
If we need a separate PMD (product marketing document), then we can work with Fedora Marketing to do that.
josh
On Tue, 2013-11-26 at 15:00 +0000, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" wrote:
On 11/26/2013 01:47 PM, Josh Boyer wrote:
I think you're conflating the PRD with a marketing document.
When using PRD's you are supposed to first create CRD
Charles River Development ? Council for Resource Development ? Computational Research Division ?
nope, nope, nope.
Comping up empty here...
Dne 26.11.2013 17:26, Matthias Clasen napsal(a):
On Tue, 2013-11-26 at 15:00 +0000, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" wrote:
On 11/26/2013 01:47 PM, Josh Boyer wrote:
I think you're conflating the PRD with a marketing document.
When using PRD's you are supposed to first create CRD
Charles River Development ? Council for Resource Development ? Computational Research Division ?
nope, nope, nope.
Comping up empty here...
Don't even go searching what PRD means in Czech ;) </fridaymode>
----- Original Message -----
Dne 26.11.2013 17:26, Matthias Clasen napsal(a):
On Tue, 2013-11-26 at 15:00 +0000, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" wrote:
On 11/26/2013 01:47 PM, Josh Boyer wrote:
I think you're conflating the PRD with a marketing document.
When using PRD's you are supposed to first create CRD
Charles River Development ? Council for Resource Development ? Computational Research Division ?
nope, nope, nope.
Comping up empty here...
Don't even go searching what PRD means in Czech ;)
And MRD neither ;-).
R.
</fridaymode>
-- Lukáš Tinkl ltinkl@redhat.com Software Engineer - KDE desktop team, Brno KDE developer lukas@kde.org Red Hat Inc. http://cz.redhat.com -- desktop mailing list desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
On 11/26/2013 04:26 PM, Matthias Clasen wrote:
On Tue, 2013-11-26 at 15:00 +0000, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" wrote:
On 11/26/2013 01:47 PM, Josh Boyer wrote:
I think you're conflating the PRD with a marketing document.
When using PRD's you are supposed to first create CRD
Charles River Development ? Council for Resource Development ? Computational Research Division ?
nope, nope, nope.
Comping up empty here...
Sorry slip on the keyboard..
MRD + PRD go hand in hand.
The market requirements document ( MRD ) describe the opportunity or the market need like why the user should chose Fedora Workstation over anything that the other distribution have to offer or are out there on the market, what advantages it will bring him etc.
The product requirements document ( PRD ) describe a product that addresses that opportunity essentially how the output from the workstation WG will proved that added functionality.
So the first step in the process is to complete the MRD the second step is to complete the PRD and I'm not aware of anyone in the marketing community writing MRD for any of the WG's ( or the WG's themselves coming up with one ) and these goes hand in hand.
For this process to effectively work as advertised both steps need to be complete not just the half of it.
In addition to that applying something like PRD's on open community is rather a bold move since it's purpose is very specific.
JBG
On Tue, 2013-11-26 at 17:11 +0000, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" wrote:
The market requirements document ( MRD ) describe the opportunity or the market need like why the user should chose Fedora Workstation over anything that the other distribution have to offer or are out there on the market, what advantages it will bring him etc.
The product requirements document ( PRD ) describe a product that addresses that opportunity essentially how the output from the workstation WG will proved that added functionality.
So the first step in the process is to complete the MRD the second step is to complete the PRD and I'm not aware of anyone in the marketing community writing MRD for any of the WG's ( or the WG's themselves coming up with one ) and these goes hand in hand.
For this process to effectively work as advertised both steps need to be complete not just the half of it.
I don't think anybody has advertised a specific process or methodology that we are following, and I suggest not to get too hung up on product management terminology. Throwing around acronyms is stupid, anyway. We could just talk about 'defining the product'.
On 11/26/2013 05:53 PM, Matthias Clasen wrote:
I don't think anybody has advertised a specific process or methodology that we are following, and I suggest not to get too hung up on product management terminology. Throwing around acronyms is stupid, anyway. We could just talk about 'defining the product'.
In the case of the workstation working group I would think that similar same approach would be needed as I see is needed in the server working group since the workstation working group is also dealing with multiple products since we are shipping multiple desktop environments.
Or if certain people choose to refuse to accept that fact or their existence within the project, we can limit it to multiple application within a single desktop environment so you are not defining a single product you are *always* defining multiple products.
JBG
On Tue, 2013-11-26 at 19:55 +0000, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" wrote:
On 11/26/2013 05:53 PM, Matthias Clasen wrote:
I don't think anybody has advertised a specific process or methodology that we are following, and I suggest not to get too hung up on product management terminology. Throwing around acronyms is stupid, anyway. We could just talk about 'defining the product'.
In the case of the workstation working group I would think that similar same approach would be needed as I see is needed in the server working group since the workstation working group is also dealing with multiple products since we are shipping multiple desktop environments.
No, we are not defining multiple products. We are defining a single workstation product.
It will have a default user experience that is using one desktop environment, GNOME. We will define criteria for other desktop environments to be installable as alternatives. Those criteria will include things such as:
- use logind for session registration - work with gdm as the display manager - does not interfere with the default user experience (cf the recent incident where installing cinnamon broke screen locking in GNOME)
Dne 27.11.2013 15:42, Matthias Clasen napsal(a):
On Tue, 2013-11-26 at 19:55 +0000, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" wrote:
On 11/26/2013 05:53 PM, Matthias Clasen wrote:
I don't think anybody has advertised a specific process or methodology that we are following, and I suggest not to get too hung up on product management terminology. Throwing around acronyms is stupid, anyway. We could just talk about 'defining the product'.
In the case of the workstation working group I would think that similar same approach would be needed as I see is needed in the server working group since the workstation working group is also dealing with multiple products since we are shipping multiple desktop environments.
No, we are not defining multiple products. We are defining a single workstation product.
It will have a default user experience that is using one desktop environment, GNOME. We will define criteria for other desktop environments to be installable as alternatives. Those criteria will include things such as:
Uhm, it was clearly stated before by various WG members this point isn't decided yet
On Wed, 2013-11-27 at 15:51 +0100, Lukáš Tinkl wrote:
No, we are not defining multiple products. We are defining a single workstation product.
It will have a default user experience that is using one desktop environment, GNOME. We will define criteria for other desktop environments to be installable as alternatives. Those criteria will include things such as:
Uhm, it was clearly stated before by various WG members this point isn't decided yet
Take this as my position, then.
On 11/27/2013 02:57 PM, Matthias Clasen wrote:
On Wed, 2013-11-27 at 15:51 +0100, Lukáš Tinkl wrote:
No, we are not defining multiple products. We are defining a single workstation product.
It will have a default user experience that is using one desktop environment, GNOME. We will define criteria for other desktop environments to be installable as alternatives. Those criteria will include things such as:
Uhm, it was clearly stated before by various WG members this point isn't decided yet
Take this as my position, then.
At least it is then something you need to sort out as well as which DE it will be but at least ones chosen we in QA will either adjust the criteria to support just that DE ( if decided it is one ) or more.
JBG
On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 09:42:57 -0500, Matthias Clasen mclasen@redhat.com wrote:
- work with gdm as the display manager
I want to make sure this means that other desktops will work with gdm, but can also work with other login managers? (i.e. gdm will not be mandated as the only login manager.)
Hi Bruno, An end user is of course free to do whatever she/he wants, it is open source after all, but having interchangeable login managers is not something I think should be a officially supported feature as it adds to the test matrix without significant gain. There has been a lot of threads about general usability and stability of Fedora here, and one way of improving on that is reducing the number of moving parts in the system to make life easier for our testers and also make integration work by developers more focused.
Christian
----- Original Message ----- From: "Bruno Wolff III" bruno@wolff.to To: "Matthias Clasen" mclasen@redhat.com Cc: "Discussions about development for the Fedora desktop" desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org Sent: Wednesday, November 27, 2013 5:27:15 PM Subject: Re: Updated Fedora Workstation PRD draft
On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 09:42:57 -0500, Matthias Clasen mclasen@redhat.com wrote:
- work with gdm as the display manager
I want to make sure this means that other desktops will work with gdm, but can also work with other login managers? (i.e. gdm will not be mandated as the only login manager.)
On Thu, Nov 28, 2013 at 03:23:47 -0500, Christian Schaller cschalle@redhat.com wrote:
Hi Bruno, An end user is of course free to do whatever she/he wants, it is open source after all, but having interchangeable login managers is not something I think should be a officially supported feature as it adds to the test matrix without significant gain. There has been a lot of threads about general usability and stability of Fedora here, and one way of improving on that is reducing the number of moving parts in the system to make life easier for our testers and also make integration work by developers more focused.
I guess that depends on what you mean by supported. I don't care whether or not they are signed off on for the release, but just that they are packaged in Fedora and work reasonably most of the time. gdm doesn't work on (and won't ever work for them because of graphics requirements) two of my machines and I need to use other login managers (currently kdm). This will turn into three machines if Fedora gets to the point I can run stock Fedora on my XO.
On Fri, Nov 29, 2013 at 7:42 PM, Bruno Wolff III bruno@wolff.to wrote:
On Thu, Nov 28, 2013 at 03:23:47 -0500, Christian Schaller cschalle@redhat.com wrote:
Hi Bruno, An end user is of course free to do whatever she/he wants, it is open source after all, but having interchangeable login managers is not something I think should be a officially supported feature as it adds to the test matrix without significant gain. There has been a lot of threads about general usability and stability of Fedora here, and one way of improving on that is reducing the number of moving parts in the system to make life easier for our testers and also make integration work by developers more focused.
I guess that depends on what you mean by supported. I don't care whether or not they are signed off on for the release, but just that they are packaged in Fedora and work reasonably most of the time. gdm doesn't work on (and won't ever work for them because of graphics requirements) two of my machines and I need to use other login managers (currently kdm). This will turn into three machines if Fedora gets to the point I can run stock Fedora on my XO.
I agree here, I use to use gdm in the SoaS spin but since fallback mode was dropped it doesn't work on a lot of the devices that we actively support and are used. It also has issues on a lot of ARM hardware and given that XOs are some of the largest single deployment of both Fedora and GNOME technologies I think supporting a single display manager will have issues. It might be OK if that display manager actively supported all the HW that Fedora will run on but at the moment that's not the case.
Peter
On Fri, Nov 29, 2013 at 8:50 PM, Peter Robinson pbrobinson@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, Nov 29, 2013 at 7:42 PM, Bruno Wolff III bruno@wolff.to wrote:
On Thu, Nov 28, 2013 at 03:23:47 -0500, Christian Schaller cschalle@redhat.com wrote:
Hi Bruno, An end user is of course free to do whatever she/he wants, it is open source after all, but having interchangeable login managers is not something I think should be a officially supported feature as it adds to the test matrix without significant gain. There has been a lot of threads about general usability and stability of Fedora here, and one way of improving on that is reducing the number of moving parts in the system to make life easier for our testers and also make integration work by developers more focused.
I guess that depends on what you mean by supported. I don't care whether or not they are signed off on for the release, but just that they are packaged in Fedora and work reasonably most of the time. gdm doesn't work on (and won't ever work for them because of graphics requirements) two of my machines and I need to use other login managers (currently kdm). This will turn into three machines if Fedora gets to the point I can run stock Fedora on my XO.
I agree here, I use to use gdm in the SoaS spin but since fallback mode was dropped it doesn't work on a lot of the devices that we actively support and are used. It also has issues on a lot of ARM hardware and given that XOs are some of the largest single deployment of both Fedora and GNOME technologies I think supporting a single display manager will have issues. It might be OK if that display manager actively supported all the HW that Fedora will run on but at the moment that's not the case.
It is not about "the login manager does not support the hardware" but most of the time it is "we don't properly support the hardware" (i.e no working opengl / opengl es drivers etc).
On Fri, Nov 29, 2013 at 21:37:05 +0100, drago01 drago01@gmail.com wrote:
It is not about "the login manager does not support the hardware" but most of the time it is "we don't properly support the hardware" (i.e no working opengl / opengl es drivers etc).
gdm requires a higher OpenGl support than it did in the past. The hardware I am referring to is reasonably supported (3d accelleration works) by Fedora, it just isn't good enough for gdm. So the software renderer is used instead, and that is unusably slow on the cpus typically found on machines with old video cards. kdm works just fine on these machines.
Well if it is unusually slow we need to fix that, in fact we have an in-house discussion with RH QA currently about testing and verification of how the whole system works on old hardware for RHEL, the outcome of that effort should benefit Fedora too. But it actually comes back to my original response, which was that if we are to improve things we need to keep the testing matrix small. The solution is almost never to add more identical components, because you end up just doubling your bug count, adding a new set of bugs related to keeping thing interchangeable and increasing your QA load. So in the end up spend your time fixing less and instead sinking your time into trying to juggle the various parts that people might or might not use. And if you then add even further functionally identical items you will see a exponential growth in issues you need to deal with.
Christian
----- Original Message -----
From: "Bruno Wolff III" bruno@wolff.to To: "drago01" drago01@gmail.com Cc: "Discussions about development for the Fedora desktop" desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org Sent: Friday, November 29, 2013 10:07:15 PM Subject: Re: Updated Fedora Workstation PRD draft
On Fri, Nov 29, 2013 at 21:37:05 +0100, drago01 drago01@gmail.com wrote:
It is not about "the login manager does not support the hardware" but most of the time it is "we don't properly support the hardware" (i.e no working opengl / opengl es drivers etc).
gdm requires a higher OpenGl support than it did in the past. The hardware I am referring to is reasonably supported (3d accelleration works) by Fedora, it just isn't good enough for gdm. So the software renderer is used instead, and that is unusably slow on the cpus typically found on machines with old video cards. kdm works just fine on these machines. -- desktop mailing list desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
Am Mittwoch, den 27.11.2013, 09:42 -0500 schrieb Matthias Clasen:
It will have a default user experience that is using one desktop environment, GNOME. We will define criteria for other desktop environments to be installable as alternatives. Those criteria will include things such as:
- use logind for session registration
- work with gdm as the display manager
- does not interfere with the default user experience (cf the recent
incident where installing cinnamon broke screen locking in GNOME)
Why do you use the term "default user experience" when you in fact are talking about gnome and gdm? Correct me if I'm wrong, but the working group has not made a decision yet.
I think that GNOME is the DE suited best to become the default, but I cannot support your other criteria. If other desktops are not supposed to not interfere with GNOME, can we expect GNOME to not interfere with other desktops?
This would indeed be a great achievement of the working group and I am willing to support any efforts to make it happen.
Best regards, Christoph
Am Montag, den 09.12.2013, 16:21 +0000 schrieb "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson":
On 12/09/2013 04:20 PM, Christoph Wickert wrote:
I think that GNOME is the DE suited best to become the default
why do you think it's a) best for it to become the default and
Because I consider GNOME * fully featured: It offers everything a user needs and has a large ecosystem of applications you can install if you really miss something. When it comes to features, only KDE can compete with GNOME. * simple to use: The default user experience is straight forward. KDE offers more configuration option, but configuration is ten times harder. * tightly integrated: GNOME developers are trying to design a user experience, that is not only a desktop but a whole system.
And last but not least we need manpower for it's development and maintenance. And this is where no other desktop can beat GNOME.
b) we continue to have a single default to begin with?
The word "default" implies that we need to make a choice and it there can only be a single default. "The Fedora workstation" is supposed to be a unique, consistent user experience.
For me the discussion is not if we need a default or not, I think we hav ea consensus in the working group. And I don't care if the default is GNOME or something else, I care about having integrating all desktops into Fedora without getting in each others way.
Best regards, Christoph
On 12/10/2013 07:59 PM, Christoph Wickert wrote:
And last but not least we need manpower for it's development and maintenance. And this is where no other desktop can beat GNOME.
Step right back how the community is working and reread the statement you just made...
Gnome developers within the project as well as many other upstream maintainers we have handle their development upstream and Gnome developers within our project as well as many other upstream developers we have prefer getting their reports filed upstream so what kind of downstream development are you seeing here that would be specific for Fedora only and to the workstation product that specifically requires their full time present here within the project and which application developers have agreed to devote their free time developing those that applications ?
When you make this statement "last but not least we need manpower for it's development and maintenance." with the exception of the kernel as far as I know the general rule of thumb for developers within the project is to fix in upstream first then backport fix downstream so what exactly is the benefit of your statement?
Would it not be better use of developers time to have packagers handle the primary downstream packaging ( with developers themselves only acting as co-maintainers and overseeing the distribution implementation ) so they have more time dealing with bugfixes and implementing features upstream?
Now with my QA hat on I must say that I prefer that we as well start looking into reporting where the developers are actually listening since that will in turn increase the likely hood that bug will be seen as well as being fixed which benefits everybody not only us here within Fedora and *improve* overall end user experience with Fedora.
Now if that happens to be in bugzilla.redhat we use bugzilla.redhat if that happens to be in bugzilla.gnome we use bugzilla.gnome...
JBG
Am Dienstag, den 10.12.2013, 20:51 +0000 schrieb "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson":
On 12/10/2013 07:59 PM, Christoph Wickert wrote:
And last but not least we need manpower for it's development and maintenance. And this is where no other desktop can beat GNOME.
Step right back how the community is working and reread the statement you just made...
Gnome developers within the project as well as many other upstream maintainers we have handle their development upstream and Gnome developers within our project as well as many other upstream developers we have prefer getting their reports filed upstream so what kind of downstream development are you seeing here that would be specific for Fedora only and to the workstation product that specifically requires their full time present here within the project and which application developers have agreed to devote their free time developing those that applications ?
I never said I want any distro-specific downstream development, but Fedora's mission is to lead, not to follow. We not only consume development, we drive it. Whatever becomes our workstation product, we want it to set new standards - not only for us but for the overall Linux ecosystem. It would be a shame if all our efforts are limited to Fedora or if we focus on simply integrating upstream bits into Fedora nicely.
Therefor we need manpower - that's all I said.
When you make this statement "last but not least we need manpower for it's development and maintenance." with the exception of the kernel as far as I know the general rule of thumb for developers within the project is to fix in upstream first then backport fix downstream so what exactly is the benefit of your statement?
No matter how well we collaborate with upstream, we may find ourselves in situations where we need a fix ASAP and cannot wait for upstream. When we are to release the workstation product, and find it has a bug or does not work well with something else in Fedora, we need a fix and cannot wait until upstream has time for us. of course we can - and should still upstream it later.
It's funny you take the kernel as example. Just look how many changes we have in there that are not yet upstreamed. It's not like we submit all our patches, wait for the next merge window and then ship a vanilla kernel for our stable releases, so this is actually a good example of what I was trying to say.
Would it not be better use of developers time to have packagers handle the primary downstream packaging ( with developers themselves only acting as co-maintainers and overseeing the distribution implementation ) so they have more time dealing with bugfixes and implementing features upstream?
Sure, I would love to see this, especially for the GNOME desktop, but this is a completely different story. Actually the decision about what DE makes the workstation product is already a different story. Let's not make the 2nd or 3rd step before the first, so let's first agree on criteria and then see what DE matches them best.
Now with my QA hat on I must say that I prefer that we as well start looking into reporting where the developers are actually listening since that will in turn increase the likely hood that bug will be seen as well as being fixed which benefits everybody not only us here within Fedora and *improve* overall end user experience with Fedora.
Now if that happens to be in bugzilla.redhat we use bugzilla.redhat if that happens to be in bugzilla.gnome we use bugzilla.gnome...
It's not like I disagree, but when I write something, please don't jump to your own conclusions. When I say we need manpower for our product, I am not saying we should become a cookie-cutter distro.
And last but not least: If you jump to your conclusions, please don't sell them as my views in public on Google+. If you write I "used to stand for his believes" and then present your answer (but not my initial statement), you imply that I had somehow changed and no longer stand for my believes. Please try to stick what I actually wrote.
Best regards, Christoph
On Mon, Dec 16, 2013 at 1:17 PM, Christoph Wickert christoph.wickert@gmail.com wrote:
Am Dienstag, den 10.12.2013, 20:51 +0000 schrieb "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson":
On 12/10/2013 07:59 PM, Christoph Wickert wrote:
And last but not least we need manpower for it's development and maintenance. And this is where no other desktop can beat GNOME.
Step right back how the community is working and reread the statement you just made...
Gnome developers within the project as well as many other upstream maintainers we have handle their development upstream and Gnome developers within our project as well as many other upstream developers we have prefer getting their reports filed upstream so what kind of downstream development are you seeing here that would be specific for Fedora only and to the workstation product that specifically requires their full time present here within the project and which application developers have agreed to devote their free time developing those that applications ?
I never said I want any distro-specific downstream development, but Fedora's mission is to lead, not to follow. We not only consume development, we drive it. Whatever becomes our workstation product, we want it to set new standards - not only for us but for the overall Linux ecosystem. It would be a shame if all our efforts are limited to Fedora or if we focus on simply integrating upstream bits into Fedora nicely.
Therefor we need manpower - that's all I said.
When you make this statement "last but not least we need manpower for it's development and maintenance." with the exception of the kernel as far as I know the general rule of thumb for developers within the project is to fix in upstream first then backport fix downstream so what exactly is the benefit of your statement?
No matter how well we collaborate with upstream, we may find ourselves in situations where we need a fix ASAP and cannot wait for upstream. When we are to release the workstation product, and find it has a bug or does not work well with something else in Fedora, we need a fix and cannot wait until upstream has time for us. of course we can - and should still upstream it later.
It's funny you take the kernel as example. Just look how many changes we have in there that are not yet upstreamed. It's not like we submit all our patches, wait for the next merge window and then ship a vanilla kernel for our stable releases, so this is actually a good example of what I was trying to say.
Not to stray too far here, but the kernel policy is already "upstream first, then backport" for the vast majority of things. There are a few exceptions, but those tend to be rather trivial patches to shut up warnings or change defaults. We're also working on reducing those as well. The glaring exception is secure boot support, and that has a rather long and complicated history. It's also not something I'd care to repeat.
So please refrain from holding up the kernel as some kind of special example of anything.
josh
On mán 16.des 2013 18:17, Christoph Wickert wrote:
Am Dienstag, den 10.12.2013, 20:51 +0000 schrieb "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson":
On 12/10/2013 07:59 PM, Christoph Wickert wrote:
And last but not least we need manpower for it's development and maintenance. And this is where no other desktop can beat GNOME.
Step right back how the community is working and reread the statement you just made...
Gnome developers within the project as well as many other upstream maintainers we have handle their development upstream and Gnome developers within our project as well as many other upstream developers we have prefer getting their reports filed upstream so what kind of downstream development are you seeing here that would be specific for Fedora only and to the workstation product that specifically requires their full time present here within the project and which application developers have agreed to devote their free time developing those that applications ?
I never said I want any distro-specific downstream development,
Then why make that statement?
but Fedora's mission is to lead, not to follow.
We are in no position to lead anything these days and we will certanly not do that with the WG/Next proposal in play
We not only consume development, we drive it.
No we dont and never have upstream has always driven their own development.
The only thing we did was to implement upstream first which we are incapable of doing these days.
Whatever becomes our workstation product, we want it to set new standards - not only for us but for the overall Linux ecosystem. It would be a shame if all our efforts are limited to Fedora or if we focus on simply integrating upstream bits into Fedora nicely.
Which is what we have always done.
Therefor we need manpower - that's all I said.
The place we need manpower is in the service sub-communities and always have.
When you make this statement "last but not least we need manpower for it's development and maintenance." with the exception of the kernel as far as I know the general rule of thumb for developers within the project is to fix in upstream first then backport fix downstream so what exactly is the benefit of your statement?
No matter how well we collaborate with upstream, we may find ourselves in situations where we need a fix ASAP and cannot wait for upstream.
We are not Ubuntu and apply hack to work around proper fixes and we all know proper fixes can and do take time thus we have more often then not have to wait for upstream ( which we more often then not do rather then apply short hot fixes ).
When we are to release the workstation product, and find it has a bug or does not work well with something else in Fedora, we need a fix and cannot wait until upstream has time for us. of course we can - and should still upstream it later.
The reality is as Adam has pointed out we release anyway but sure if you think so.
So here's an thing regarding the desktop environments, encase you have missed it the era of traditional desktop is slowly coming to an end so the desktop environments are entering the phase of self preservation.
Everything that the Gnome community is doing ( and to a certain extent is influencing us in the process you know the whole installment of application outside the distribution ) is leading up to them releasing their own GnomeOS which makes Fedora entirely irrelevant in the process.
Now if Gnome community is serious about preserving themselves, they have essentially be given second chance doing so as I see ( after being to late for the mobile/tablet space ) , and they should be a) entering dialog with valve and b) pushing faster then ever for that inevitable future and release GnomeOS with collaboration with valve and have steamOS be entirely based on that ( and maybe for the first time actually have HW platform(s) to tie themselves with and be sold out of stores directly in the hands of end users ).
If I lived and worked in the RH ivory tower I would be pushing for this as well so a) the company investment in Gnome all those years would not be going down the drain and b) getting return of investment by providing knowledge and the means to valve as well as providing it with long time support for the steamOS ( to/for the parts of it needs ) .
But I dont work for RH nor am I a part of upstream Gnome so meh what do I know what would be the right thing for either party to do...
Would it not be better use of developers time to have packagers handle the primary downstream packaging ( with developers themselves only acting as co-maintainers and overseeing the distribution implementation ) so they have more time dealing with bugfixes and implementing features upstream?
Sure, I would love to see this, especially for the GNOME desktop, but this is a completely different story. Actually the decision about what DE makes the workstation product is already a different story. Let's not make the 2nd or 3rd step before the first, so let's first agree on criteria and then see what DE matches them best.
Now with my QA hat on I must say that I prefer that we as well start looking into reporting where the developers are actually listening since that will in turn increase the likely hood that bug will be seen as well as being fixed which benefits everybody not only us here within Fedora and *improve* overall end user experience with Fedora.
Now if that happens to be in bugzilla.redhat we use bugzilla.redhat if that happens to be in bugzilla.gnome we use bugzilla.gnome...
It's not like I disagree, but when I write something, please don't jump to your own conclusions. When I say we need manpower for our product, I am not saying we should become a cookie-cutter distro.
You are the one that put manpower and Gnome together in the same sentence trying to justify why it should be the default desktop product I'm not seeing how I jump to any conclusion I perceived what you wrote as you wrote it.
To me that justification is does not hold water and for the sake of Gnome if anything Fedora is holding it's progress back if they are tying themselves to us.
We as an distribution currently cannot move on the pace they need to be moving at, to keep themselves relevant but we can adapt to that *without* forcing everybody in the community doing so in the process.
The WG process however is not providing the distribution with those means nor working towards doing so.
And last but not least: If you jump to your conclusions, please don't sell them as my views in public on Google+. If you write I "used to stand for his believes" and then present your answer (but not my initial statement), you imply that I had somehow changed and no longer stand for my believes. Please try to stick what I actually wrote.
You may have the perception of yourself that you have not change but I perceive you different now then when you where fighting for the community equality with for example the live dvd so stand by what I said on that my G+ post and I suggest you take a look at yourself back then and now.
JBG
On Mon, 2013-12-16 at 21:30 +0000, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" wrote:
Everything that the Gnome community is doing ( and to a certain extent is influencing us in the process you know the whole installment of application outside the distribution ) is leading up to them releasing their own GnomeOS which makes Fedora entirely irrelevant in the process.
GNOME OS is definitely not a product intended to replace mainstream distributions like Fedora. To the extent that I understand the concept, it either refers to (a) the vision of a core set of system components with generic names ("Videos," "Web," "Document Viewer") that are identifiable components of the operating system, in contrast to normal apps, or else (b) a mini distribution for GNOME developers to work on GNOME development.
On mán 16.des 2013 23:17, Michael Catanzaro wrote:
On Mon, 2013-12-16 at 21:30 +0000, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" wrote:
Everything that the Gnome community is doing ( and to a certain extent is influencing us in the process you know the whole installment of application outside the distribution ) is leading up to them releasing their own GnomeOS which makes Fedora entirely irrelevant in the process.
GNOME OS is definitely not a product intended to replace mainstream distributions like Fedora.
For the time being...
JBG
Stop throwing the GnomeOS moniker around like it means something. The people originally proposing it probably had some ideas about where they wanted to go, but over time it has become a million different things for a million different people and thus mostly lost any real meaning.
Sure some people see it as creating a new distro, some see it as defining some standard APIs, some see it as a collection of core applications, some see it as a development model and so on.
Lets focus on what we are trying to do here with Fedora instead of tilting at the GnomeOS windmill.
Christian
On Tue, 2013-12-17 at 07:29 +0000, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" wrote:
On mán 16.des 2013 23:17, Michael Catanzaro wrote:
On Mon, 2013-12-16 at 21:30 +0000, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" wrote:
Everything that the Gnome community is doing ( and to a certain extent is influencing us in the process you know the whole installment of application outside the distribution ) is leading up to them releasing their own GnomeOS which makes Fedora entirely irrelevant in the process.
GNOME OS is definitely not a product intended to replace mainstream distributions like Fedora.
For the time being...
JBG
Christoph Wickert writes:
Am Montag, den 09.12.2013, 16:21 +0000 schrieb "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson":
On 12/09/2013 04:20 PM, Christoph Wickert wrote:
I think that GNOME is the DE suited best to become the default
why do you think it's a) best for it to become the default and
Because I consider GNOME * fully featured: It offers everything a user needs and has a large ecosystem of applications you can install if you really miss something. When it comes to features, only KDE can compete with GNOME. * simple to use: The default user experience is straight forward. KDE offers more configuration option, but configuration is ten times harder.
In principle I agree with your sentiment. I am personally biased toward Gnome's cleaner and more minimalistic interface. BUT:
For the better or worse, Gnome has forked itself into two user facing desktops, Gnome and Gnome classic (my suspicion is that the hard split is more politically than technically motivated, but that's not the point here).
To summarize an earlier post of mine in this thread: Gnome "modern" has ambitious, in parts even refreshing concepts, but fails to support certain workflows (I think this is undisputed) which I believe fall into the category "workstation usage" (this is up for necessary debate).
Gnome "classic" is modeled on the old Gnome 2, but feels like a bit like the unloved stepchild. It's certainly not as polished as Gnome 2 was in its late incarnations with still significant usability regressions in direct comparison with old Gnome 2 or modern competition Cinnamon (which has its own set of stability problems, so I am not advocating it here as a default, but as something to look at for good ideas).
So, unfortunately, when saying "default to Gnome" you have to say which one. The underlying infrastructure may be the same, but user-facing it makes a big difference.
* tightly integrated: GNOME developers are trying to design a user experience, that is not only a desktop but a whole system.
While I do not dispute this as a worthy goal, when it comes to usability vs. uniformity/integration, I'd always go with the first. Unfortunately Gnome applications do not always shine in this respect (Most of them do, but there are outliers: I mentioned evince in an earlier post, another example is simplescan with persistent stability problems and wierd seemingly stateless cropping behavior). Anyway, the only point I want make here is that a "workstation" product can, when in doubt, err more easily in the direction of the more capable alternative than in a product aimed at the novice user where tight integration is a more urgent goal.
And last but not least we need manpower for it's development and maintenance. And this is where no other desktop can beat GNOME.
b) we continue to have a single default to begin with?
The word "default" implies that we need to make a choice and it there can only be a single default. "The Fedora workstation" is supposed to be a unique, consistent user experience.
For me the discussion is not if we need a default or not, I think we hav ea consensus in the working group. And I don't care if the default is GNOME or something else, I care about having integrating all desktops into Fedora without getting in each others way.
I take it as a given that there must be a default, and that this default must be based on Gnome as this is the default on stock Fedora and RHEL. Everything else would be a maintenance nightmare. Giving the option to install and use multiple desktops without nasty side effects is also a good idea, but that goes already for Fedora as a whole.
What is currently missing is a debate what desktop requirements for workstation use exist, and what could/should be retrofitted into the DEFAULT install (via extensions/patches/addons...) to make the best possible workstation product BEYOND what is currently available. Not as endless menus of configuration options, but as thought-through workflow support which covers as wide base as possible without being arbitrary.
I thought about workstation desktop issues a bit more, and here are some probably crazy ideas which are come from looking at the bottlenecks of day-to-day work:
* Right-click launching of applications from the desktop. Early versions of Gnome 2 could launch terminal windows via right click, which is obviously inconsistent, so it got removed years ago, but it was so incredibly convenient that it still gives me phantom pains to this day. So one needs something better, possibly the taskbar shortcuts (or equivalently the applications for which Gnome "modern" has special launchers on the left hand side of the application screen) could be there, frequently used applications, or frequently used documents. The point is that on systems with multiple screens ("workstation"), one really wants to control where to place newly launched applications and have the pointer right there to start doing work. Minimizing pointer travel distance is also very useful for laptops with high resolution screens and trackpad.
* Confluence of terminal and file browser. Old nautilus had the "spatial" mode which apparently fell out of favor. I quite liked it, although I would not put it on my grandma, for the reason that it gave a similar feel to file browsing as it has when using different terminal windows when doing CLI interaction on different directories or even machines. So maybe the concept can be brought back coming from the terminal side: I usually find CLI work much more efficient than visual file browsing, but sometimes the previews offered by the latter are incredibly useful. So what if I could switch from the shell to the visual file browser in the same window (and back) on pressing a key (or on a mouse click). So I could switch from file browsing to a full-window CLI and back seamlessly, and launched applications would behave exactly the same whether they are launched from the shell or from the browser - see next point.
* Hierarchical taskbar/window hierarchy. Both the taskbar and Gnome overview mode come to their limits with too many open windows (as noted earlier, I find the taskbar somewhat more robust in this scenario, but still...). Windows 7 seems to group windows in the taskbar by application - I am not sure about the details because I have never really used it, but I have watched people use it. That seems to be somewhat counterintuitive. I would like windows to be logically hierarchical, i.e., windows launched from a terminal should be visually the children of that terminal (after all, in Unix they die when I close the terminal, so the task would be to make this relationship explicit). In the same way, windows launched from a file manager directory view should become the children of that directory view. In this way, one could structure the workflow in more than a linear way, send a whole working set of windows to another workspace, close a particular project view, etc. There would be many details to be discussed here, but the goal would be to improve scalability to workflows involving a large number of windows. (Workspaces address this only partly as it imposes either an atomic switch in the visible working set or a joint taskbar which does not address the too-many-open windows limitations.)
I am not saying that these concepts must be implemented as described or as soon as possible. These are rough ideas which may or may not be workable, but I would like to draw attention to the need to discuss "modern desktop trends" driven by the advent of large and multiple screens, of continuing importance of the CLI and ways to better integrate it with the rest of the desktop, and of supporting "big" and "complex" tasks. It is certainly fashionable to discuss convergence between desktop and mobile these days, but one needs to include the "big" end in the discussion as well...
--Marcel
On Mon, 2013-12-09 at 17:20 +0100, Christoph Wickert wrote:
Am Mittwoch, den 27.11.2013, 09:42 -0500 schrieb Matthias Clasen:
It will have a default user experience that is using one desktop environment, GNOME. We will define criteria for other desktop environments to be installable as alternatives. Those criteria will include things such as:
- use logind for session registration
- work with gdm as the display manager
- does not interfere with the default user experience (cf the recent
incident where installing cinnamon broke screen locking in GNOME)
Why do you use the term "default user experience" when you in fact are talking about gnome and gdm? Correct me if I'm wrong, but the working group has not made a decision yet.
I think that GNOME is the DE suited best to become the default, but I cannot support your other criteria. If other desktops are not supposed to not interfere with GNOME, can we expect GNOME to not interfere with other desktops?
I would expect that clear rules about expected integration points would help avoiding interference both ways. Do you have any concrete example in mind where GNOME trampled other desktops ?
Am Montag, den 09.12.2013, 12:33 -0500 schrieb Matthias Clasen:
On Mon, 2013-12-09 at 17:20 +0100, Christoph Wickert wrote:
Am Mittwoch, den 27.11.2013, 09:42 -0500 schrieb Matthias Clasen:
It will have a default user experience that is using one desktop environment, GNOME. We will define criteria for other desktop environments to be installable as alternatives. Those criteria will include things such as:
- use logind for session registration
- work with gdm as the display manager
- does not interfere with the default user experience (cf the recent
incident where installing cinnamon broke screen locking in GNOME)
Why do you use the term "default user experience" when you in fact are talking about gnome and gdm? Correct me if I'm wrong, but the working group has not made a decision yet.
I think that GNOME is the DE suited best to become the default, but I cannot support your other criteria. If other desktops are not supposed to not interfere with GNOME, can we expect GNOME to not interfere with other desktops?
I would expect that clear rules about expected integration points would help avoiding interference both ways.
If the rules are fair, then yes, but if one of the rules is "Other desktops have to use GNOME's login manager" then not.
Making the login manager the starting point for any integration efforts locks in all other desktops into then user's session. In fact, it can break things inside the session and thus the integration. AFAIR KDE has some features that only work with KDM. So GNOME would in fact violate teh "must not inter with other user experiences" rule.
Do you have any concrete example in mind where GNOME trampled other desktops ?
* libnotify 0.7 API changes * the GTK 2.24.7 update broke xfce4-keyboard-shortcuts as it changed handling of the CTRL keys. Even with a patched Xfce lost all their configured shortcuts with CTRL in F15 * network-manager 0.9 was rushed into F15 just two days before beta-freeze and broke knetworkmanager, even in compatibility mode * Packaging changes for GNOME's polkit agent (moving the desktop file to launch the gnome-session package). * GNOME people requested the removal of tray icons from desktop agnostic programs simply because it was no longer usable in GNOME, while it still is very useful in all other desktops * default GTK themes (icons and window decorations) * icon naming changes in gnome-icon-theme (removal of the -legacy names).
If I thought longer or searched by bugzilla mail, I would probably find more examples.
Best regards, Christoph
On Tue, 26 Nov 2013 12:12:16 +0100 Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller cschalle@redhat.com wrote:
Who are 'they' here? developers or the marketing?
Am taking "they" as end users their needs
He might be wondering how many users are going to be lost as a result of a developer only system?
It is not going to be developer only, we are just going to use the developers usecase as our focus. To be 110% clear we are not going to add a dialog upon login which asks if people are developers and if they click 'no' they get logged out again :)
Christian
On Tue, 2013-11-26 at 11:33 +0000, Frank Murphy wrote:
On Tue, 26 Nov 2013 12:12:16 +0100 Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller cschalle@redhat.com wrote:
Who are 'they' here? developers or the marketing?
Am taking "they" as end users their needs
He might be wondering how many users are going to be lost as a result of a developer only system?
-- Regards, Frank www.frankly3d.com
On Tue, 2013-11-26 at 11:33 +0000, Frank Murphy wrote:
On Tue, 26 Nov 2013 12:12:16 +0100 Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller cschalle@redhat.com wrote:
Who are 'they' here? developers or the marketing?
Am taking "they" as end users their needs
He might be wondering how many users are going to be lost as a result of a developer only system?
We're not aiming for a developer-only system. That wouldn't make much sense, and I wouldn't even know how to do that.
A developer is very much a user too, so a 'developer workstation' must be a general-purpose OS, with particular attention payed to particular needs that arise when using the system for development tasks.
At least that is my understanding of what we're aiming for.
Matthias
On Tue, Nov 26, 2013 at 12:12:16PM +0100, Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller wrote:
Who are 'they' here? developers or the marketing?
Marketing.
Have been discussing with product management and the Red Hat developer evangelist to make sure we try to satisfy the needs of developers. As for the needs of marketing we will of course make an ISO image available they can use for making install media to hand out. But maybe I am missing the point of your question here?
We currently hand out Fedora install media to people who aren't developers. Are we going to continue doing that? If so, what are we going to give them?
On 11/25/2013 07:59 AM, Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller wrote:
Hi everyone, First of all apologize for this taking so long, I ended up traveling non-stop for some time visiting some of Red Hats desktop customers. While not directly tied to the work of this working group I do hope to take some of the lessons learned from those meetings with me into the future work of the working group.
Anyway I tried editing the PRD a bit based on the feedback we got on the first draft. I tried to make a few items a bit clearer and also to include spelling fixes contributed and so on.
We probably want to do another WG meeting soon to discuss next steps.
Feel free to let me know if I forgot to include some important feedback or if further clarifications are needed.
Christian
The " Overall plans and policies for the product" section contains a mixture of high-level goals (e.g. "Robust Upgrades" ) and implementation suggestions (e.g. "Container Based Application Install"). Would it be better to spilt this section up, defining the high-level goals, and then listing the potential implementation suggestions and how they could possibly contribute to achieving the goal(s)?
cheers, ryanlerch
<cite> work on the the possibility of a system where </cite>
Remove one "the"
2013/11/25 Ryan Lerch rlerch@redhat.com
On 11/25/2013 07:59 AM, Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller wrote:
Hi everyone, First of all apologize for this taking so long, I ended up traveling non-stop for some time visiting some of Red Hats desktop customers. While not directly tied to the work of this working group I do hope to take some of the lessons learned from those meetings with me into the future work of the working group.
Anyway I tried editing the PRD a bit based on the feedback we got on the first draft. I tried to make a few items a bit clearer and also to include spelling fixes contributed and so on.
We probably want to do another WG meeting soon to discuss next steps.
Feel free to let me know if I forgot to include some important feedback or if further clarifications are needed.
Christian
The " Overall plans and policies for the product" section contains a mixture of high-level goals (e.g. "Robust Upgrades" ) and implementation suggestions (e.g. "Container Based Application Install"). Would it be better to spilt this section up, defining the high-level goals, and then listing the potential implementation suggestions and how they could possibly contribute to achieving the goal(s)?
cheers, ryanlerch
-- desktop mailing list desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
On Mon, Nov 25, 2013 at 01:59:06PM +0100, Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller wrote:
Hi everyone, First of all apologize for this taking so long, I ended up traveling non-stop for some time visiting some of Red Hats desktop customers. While not directly tied to the work of this working group I do hope to take some of the lessons learned from those meetings with me into the future work of the working group. Anyway I tried editing the PRD a bit based on the feedback we got on the first draft. I tried to make a few items a bit clearer and also to include spelling fixes contributed and so on. We probably want to do another WG meeting soon to discuss next steps. Feel free to let me know if I forgot to include some important feedback or if further clarifications are needed. Christian
Hello,
This mail is because I feel a slight unease about this "Fedora Workstation" business.
I have had nothing else than Fedora on my primary machine since the first Fedora Core (and before that RH starting with RH2 from 1995/96). I use it everyday, many hours. It is an excellent "ghost in the machine".
Profesionally I use: R, Stata (=comm), TeX(live), Gummi, LyX, Mutt, Firefox and occasionally a Math package. I work mostly with 4/5 open terminals and sometimes a second workspace. As a hobby I write music using Musescore and Denemo. Fedora with Gnome 3 fits my work and play habits perfectly.
Now it seems that "Fedora Workstation" will primarily target developers and as an afterthought 'sysadmins', 'CS-students', etc.
"Other users", the category I would fall into, only seem to be 'tolerated' and catered to 'if time and resources allow'. At least that seems to be the tenor of this draft document.
Now many of the goals stated would indeed profit all users but might also "overload" Fedora with structure and tools I (and others like me) might not need or even ever use.
I don't give a hoot about 'software development', 'system administration' (other than my own system), 'the cloud', 'messaging', 'playing infantile 3D games', etc..
It seems to me the same goals could be accomplished by making a "barebones", excellent quality 'base' Fedora and then having a 'development group', a 'server group', a 'cloud group', an 'other users group', etc.., of app packages that the user can add to this 'base' Fedora as needed.
This "Fedora Workstation" approach sounds slightly 'threatening' and 'unfriendly' to my 'other user' ears.
AV
On Tue, Nov 26, 2013 at 7:42 AM, Alexander Volovics a.volovic@upcmail.nl wrote:
Profesionally I use: R, Stata (=comm), TeX(live), Gummi, LyX, Mutt, Firefox and occasionally a Math package. I work mostly with 4/5 open terminals and sometimes a second workspace. As a hobby I write music using Musescore and Denemo. Fedora with Gnome 3 fits my work and play habits perfectly.
That's great!
Now it seems that "Fedora Workstation" will primarily target developers and as an afterthought 'sysadmins', 'CS-students', etc.
"Other users", the category I would fall into, only seem to be 'tolerated' and catered to 'if time and resources allow'. At least that seems to be the tenor of this draft document.
I don't read it that way. Is there some alternative wording you could suggest to make it seem less so?
Now many of the goals stated would indeed profit all users but might also "overload" Fedora with structure and tools I (and others like me) might not need or even ever use.
Yes, resource issues with the 3 product approach are clearly a big hurdle. We're working on that across the project.
I don't give a hoot about 'software development', 'system administration' (other than my own system), 'the cloud', 'messaging', 'playing infantile 3D games', etc..
It seems to me the same goals could be accomplished by making a "barebones", excellent quality 'base' Fedora and then having a 'development group', a 'server group', a 'cloud group', an 'other users group', etc.., of app packages that the user can add to this 'base' Fedora as needed.
This is exactly what we're doing, with the extra step that we're going to have those groups actually be the equivalent of a "spin" today. We have a Base WG forming the "core", then Server, Cloud, and Workstation using that to produce focused products. That doesn't preclude people from installing other applications.
This "Fedora Workstation" approach sounds slightly 'threatening' and 'unfriendly' to my 'other user' ears.
That's certainly not the intention. I hope you stay tuned and help us by contributing ideas and testing things once the product actually starts getting developed. I'm fairly sure it will still fit your needs as well as the current Fedora releases do.
josh
Hi Alexander,
On 11/26/2013 07:42 AM, Alexander Volovics wrote:
It seems to me the same goals could be accomplished by making a "barebones", excellent quality 'base' Fedora and then having a 'development group', a 'server group', a 'cloud group', an 'other users group', etc.., of app packages that the user can add to this 'base' Fedora as needed.
I think the 'other users' will be covered by the spins. For example, the 'Design Suite' spin isn't going anywhere - that has Gimp, Inkscape, Blender, and a bunch of other stuff targeted at digital artists. Just because the main workstation doesn't target digital artists doesn't mean it won't be usable for them, and I intend to continue using Fedora for a workstation to use that kind of software.
Anyway, just as you describe, the spins can be added on top of an install. So I think, using design suite as an example again, you could install Fedora workstation and then install the 'design-suite' package group on top to make it a Fedora design-suite system. Does that make sense? There's nothing in the PRD that would cause that to stop working that I can see.
~m
On Tue, Nov 26, 2013 at 10:47:22AM -0500, Máirín Duffy wrote:
On 11/26/2013 07:42 AM, Alexander Volovics wrote:
It seems to me the same goals could be accomplished by making a "barebones", excellent quality 'base' Fedora and then having a 'development group', a 'server group', a 'cloud group', an 'other users group', etc.., of app packages that the user can add to this 'base' Fedora as needed.
I think the 'other users' will be covered by the spins. For example, the 'Design Suite' spin isn't going anywhere - that has Gimp, Inkscape, Blender, and a bunch of other stuff targeted at digital artists. Just because the main workstation doesn't target digital artists doesn't mean it won't be usable for them, and I intend to continue using Fedora for a workstation to use that kind of software.
I too intend to continue using Fedora.
But specifically targeting "developers" could have consequences:
- Fedora is perceived as a 'for developers only' distribution. This might result in less people willing to package "other" software for Fedora.
- Users like you or me might find that Fedora contains about 20% stuff related to development infrastructure and libraries that we will never use and that we might not be able to remove. From our standpoint 'bloat' with acompanying security problems, updates and bugs. (For example now in Fed19 I find 81 items related to Perl. I don't use Perl and are all these items really necessary for running a base Fedora system).
AV
Hi Alexander, Well hopefully we will be able to alleviate this worries as time goes on, but the problem is that Fedora up to now have been trying to reach 'everyone', but have instead ended up reaching 'no one', just try putting a term like 'Fedora linux' into a google trends search. We have to start somewhere and getting developers onto the platform is step one, we can as said in other emails start looking at broadening the scope as time goes by, but trying to start out by adding everyone's favorite user segment quickly puts us back in the land if no focus.
In general though I wouldn't be to worried about a tons of programming language specific stuff filling your system, people defining themselves as developers doesn't really want 5 tons worth of stuff they never use either. So instead we are building tools like the Developer Assistant which will make it easier for developer to install the tools they do want and need, as opposed to trying to preload the system with every development tool under the sky. So the developer focus will more take the form of having a couple of items available like the Developer Assistant that makes installing development tools and scenarios easier and working on features like improved terminal handling and so on, as it is a much wanted developer request.
So that is the nature of the developer focus, working on features and tools for developers, not automatically installing 500 different IDEs as that wouldn't work for anyone either :)
Christian
----- Original Message ----- From: "Alexander Volovics" a.volovic@upcmail.nl To: desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org Sent: Wednesday, November 27, 2013 10:27:53 AM Subject: Re: Updated Fedora Workstation PRD draft
On Tue, Nov 26, 2013 at 10:47:22AM -0500, Máirín Duffy wrote:
On 11/26/2013 07:42 AM, Alexander Volovics wrote:
It seems to me the same goals could be accomplished by making a "barebones", excellent quality 'base' Fedora and then having a 'development group', a 'server group', a 'cloud group', an 'other users group', etc.., of app packages that the user can add to this 'base' Fedora as needed.
I think the 'other users' will be covered by the spins. For example, the 'Design Suite' spin isn't going anywhere - that has Gimp, Inkscape, Blender, and a bunch of other stuff targeted at digital artists. Just because the main workstation doesn't target digital artists doesn't mean it won't be usable for them, and I intend to continue using Fedora for a workstation to use that kind of software.
I too intend to continue using Fedora.
But specifically targeting "developers" could have consequences:
- Fedora is perceived as a 'for developers only' distribution. This might result in less people willing to package "other" software for Fedora.
- Users like you or me might find that Fedora contains about 20% stuff related to development infrastructure and libraries that we will never use and that we might not be able to remove. From our standpoint 'bloat' with acompanying security problems, updates and bugs. (For example now in Fed19 I find 81 items related to Perl. I don't use Perl and are all these items really necessary for running a base Fedora system).
AV
On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 04:52:04AM -0500, Christian Schaller wrote:
Hi Alexander, Well hopefully we will be able to alleviate this worries as time goes on, but the problem is that Fedora up to now have been trying to reach 'everyone', but have instead ended up reaching 'no one', just try putting a term like 'Fedora linux' into a google trends search. We have to start somewhere and getting developers onto the platform is step one, we can as said in other emails start looking at broadening the scope as time goes by, but trying to start out by adding everyone's favorite user segment quickly puts us back in the land if no focus. In general though I wouldn't be to worried about a tons of programming language specific stuff filling your system, people defining themselves as developers doesn't really want 5 tons worth of stuff they never use either. So instead we are building tools like the Developer Assistant which will make it easier for developer to install the tools they do want and need, as opposed to trying to preload the system with every development tool under the sky. So the developer focus will more take the form of having a couple of items available like the Developer Assistant that makes installing development tools and scenarios easier and working on features like improved terminal handling and so on, as it is a much wanted developer request. So that is the nature of the developer focus, working on features and tools for developers, not automatically installing 500 different IDEs as that wouldn't work for anyone either :)
Hi Christian,
Thanks for taking the time to clear up my misconceptions. Though I didn't go so far as expecting to find 500 different IDEs after installing :)
AV
On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 04:52:04AM -0500, Christian Schaller wrote:
Hi Alexander, Well hopefully we will be able to alleviate this worries as time goes on, but the problem is that Fedora up to now have been trying to reach 'everyone', but have instead ended up reaching 'no one', just try putting a term like 'Fedora linux' into a google trends search. We have to start somewhere and getting developers onto the platform is step one, we can as said in other emails start looking at broadening the scope as time goes by, but trying to start out by adding everyone's favorite user segment quickly puts us back in the land if no focus.
Why would a developer use a platform that has no actual users?
Hi Matthew, Because they are not primarily developing desktop applications? Or are developing cross platform applications?
Christian
----- Original Message -----
From: "Matthew Garrett" mjg59@srcf.ucam.org To: "Discussions about development for the Fedora desktop" desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org Sent: Wednesday, November 27, 2013 5:43:41 PM Subject: Re: Updated Fedora Workstation PRD draft
On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 04:52:04AM -0500, Christian Schaller wrote:
Hi Alexander, Well hopefully we will be able to alleviate this worries as time goes on, but the problem is that Fedora up to now have been trying to reach 'everyone', but have instead ended up reaching 'no one', just try putting a term like 'Fedora linux' into a google trends search. We have to start somewhere and getting developers onto the platform is step one, we can as said in other emails start looking at broadening the scope as time goes by, but trying to start out by adding everyone's favorite user segment quickly puts us back in the land if no focus.
Why would a developer use a platform that has no actual users?
-- Matthew Garrett | mjg59@srcf.ucam.org -- desktop mailing list desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 12:18:07PM -0500, Christian Schaller wrote:
Hi Matthew, Because they are not primarily developing desktop applications? Or are developing cross platform applications?
So who's going to write the normal desktop applications for our platform?
On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 05:23:28PM +0000, Matthew Garrett wrote:
On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 12:18:07PM -0500, Christian Schaller wrote:
Hi Matthew, Because they are not primarily developing desktop applications? Or are developing cross platform applications?
So who's going to write the normal desktop applications for our platform?
To expand on this - Fedora is the only significant distribution to use the full GNOME stack for our desktop apps. If we don't seek to target average desktop users then there's no incentive for developers to target the GNOME stack, which means there's no new and interesting desktop apps which means there's no incentive for average desktop users to run Fedora. Saying that we won't actively discourage average desktop users from running Fedora is a copout - the inevitable consequence is that average desktop users will stop running Fedora because there's nothing for them to use there.
Ignoring non-developers does nothing to advance Freedom. It's likely to shrink our community, so it's not clear that it's doing anything for Friends. I'd argue that any PRD should be fundamentally based on the four foundations, and I'd like to see a strong justification for how Workstation is doing so.
On Wed, 27 Nov 2013 18:25:05 +0000 Matthew Garrett mjg59@srcf.ucam.org wrote:
On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 05:23:28PM +0000, Matthew Garrett wrote:
On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 12:18:07PM -0500, Christian Schaller wrote:
Hi Matthew, Because they are not primarily developing desktop applications? Or are developing cross platform applications?
So who's going to write the normal desktop applications for our platform?
To expand on this - Fedora is the only significant distribution to use the full GNOME stack for our desktop apps. If we don't seek to target average desktop users then there's no incentive for developers to target the GNOME stack, which means there's no new and interesting desktop apps which means there's no incentive for average desktop users to run Fedora.
+1
On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 1:25 PM, Matthew Garrett mjg59@srcf.ucam.org wrote:
On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 05:23:28PM +0000, Matthew Garrett wrote:
On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 12:18:07PM -0500, Christian Schaller wrote:
Hi Matthew, Because they are not primarily developing desktop applications? Or are developing cross platform applications?
So who's going to write the normal desktop applications for our platform?
To expand on this - Fedora is the only significant distribution to use the full GNOME stack for our desktop apps. If we don't seek to target average desktop users then there's no incentive for developers to target the GNOME stack, which means there's no new and interesting desktop apps which means there's no incentive for average desktop users to run Fedora. Saying that we won't actively discourage average desktop users from running Fedora is a copout - the inevitable consequence is that average desktop users will stop running Fedora because there's nothing for them to use there.
I think you're conflating what upstream does and what Fedora does. Fedora is a distribution that packages the applications that other upstreams work on. I don't think a Fedora PRD is going to either magically make more upstreams produce more interesting applications nor do I think they'll stop making them. Workstation can and should include the interesting desktop apps you're referring to, but Fedora the project has never been the one to create those.
Ignoring non-developers does nothing to advance Freedom. It's likely to
I think there is middle ground between "ignore" and "focus on". You're painting a picture that seems to have Workstation as simply a random collection of APIs and the usability is left to the users. I don't think that will be the case at all. At least not any more so than today's Fedora.
shrink our community, so it's not clear that it's doing anything for Friends. I'd argue that any PRD should be fundamentally based on the four foundations, and I'd like to see a strong justification for how Workstation is doing so.
You're approaching hyperbole here. Workstation is working through things and you're demanding justifications for decisions that aren't even made. I would rather you make suggestions for the proper focus and approach for Workstation. That will be more helpful.
josh
On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 01:36:20PM -0500, Josh Boyer wrote:
On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 1:25 PM, Matthew Garrett mjg59@srcf.ucam.org wrote:
To expand on this - Fedora is the only significant distribution to use the full GNOME stack for our desktop apps. If we don't seek to target average desktop users then there's no incentive for developers to target the GNOME stack, which means there's no new and interesting desktop apps which means there's no incentive for average desktop users to run Fedora. Saying that we won't actively discourage average desktop users from running Fedora is a copout - the inevitable consequence is that average desktop users will stop running Fedora because there's nothing for them to use there.
I think you're conflating what upstream does and what Fedora does. Fedora is a distribution that packages the applications that other upstreams work on. I don't think a Fedora PRD is going to either magically make more upstreams produce more interesting applications nor do I think they'll stop making them. Workstation can and should include the interesting desktop apps you're referring to, but Fedora the project has never been the one to create those.
If there are no desktop users running GNOME then there's no incentive for developers to target it. Targetting developers is going to change our marketing message, which is going to filter out as "Fedora isn't a good choice for an average end user". Users end up running Unity or Cinnamon or MATE or KDE instead, developers shift to targetting them and we end up with no suite of well integrated applications to ship.
Ignoring non-developers does nothing to advance Freedom. It's likely to
I think there is middle ground between "ignore" and "focus on". You're painting a picture that seems to have Workstation as simply a random collection of APIs and the usability is left to the users. I don't think that will be the case at all. At least not any more so than today's Fedora.
The PRD makes it pretty clear that, as far as the WG is concerned, it's "ignore". That's not our current message.
shrink our community, so it's not clear that it's doing anything for Friends. I'd argue that any PRD should be fundamentally based on the four foundations, and I'd like to see a strong justification for how Workstation is doing so.
You're approaching hyperbole here. Workstation is working through things and you're demanding justifications for decisions that aren't even made. I would rather you make suggestions for the proper focus and approach for Workstation. That will be more helpful.
Decisions *have* been made. They're not necessarily final, but offering alternatives isn't useful unless there's any desire to revisit them.
On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 1:45 PM, Matthew Garrett mjg59@srcf.ucam.org wrote:
On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 01:36:20PM -0500, Josh Boyer wrote:
On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 1:25 PM, Matthew Garrett mjg59@srcf.ucam.org wrote:
To expand on this - Fedora is the only significant distribution to use the full GNOME stack for our desktop apps. If we don't seek to target average desktop users then there's no incentive for developers to target the GNOME stack, which means there's no new and interesting desktop apps which means there's no incentive for average desktop users to run Fedora. Saying that we won't actively discourage average desktop users from running Fedora is a copout - the inevitable consequence is that average desktop users will stop running Fedora because there's nothing for them to use there.
I think you're conflating what upstream does and what Fedora does. Fedora is a distribution that packages the applications that other upstreams work on. I don't think a Fedora PRD is going to either magically make more upstreams produce more interesting applications nor do I think they'll stop making them. Workstation can and should include the interesting desktop apps you're referring to, but Fedora the project has never been the one to create those.
If there are no desktop users running GNOME then there's no incentive for developers to target it. Targetting developers is going to change our marketing message, which is going to filter out as "Fedora isn't a good choice for an average end user". Users end up running Unity or Cinnamon or MATE or KDE instead, developers shift to targetting them and we end up with no suite of well integrated applications to ship.
If that happens, I would expect Workstation to look at this and say GNOME isn't the correct fit. As Matthias said a while ago, Workstation isn't GNOME. Sticking with something the broader group you're targeting isn't using is pointless.
Ignoring non-developers does nothing to advance Freedom. It's likely to
I think there is middle ground between "ignore" and "focus on". You're painting a picture that seems to have Workstation as simply a random collection of APIs and the usability is left to the users. I don't think that will be the case at all. At least not any more so than today's Fedora.
The PRD makes it pretty clear that, as far as the WG is concerned, it's "ignore". That's not our current message.
The word ignore is not in the PRD. Please choose a different word.
shrink our community, so it's not clear that it's doing anything for Friends. I'd argue that any PRD should be fundamentally based on the four foundations, and I'd like to see a strong justification for how Workstation is doing so.
You're approaching hyperbole here. Workstation is working through things and you're demanding justifications for decisions that aren't even made. I would rather you make suggestions for the proper focus and approach for Workstation. That will be more helpful.
Decisions *have* been made. They're not necessarily final, but offering alternatives isn't useful unless there's any desire to revisit them.
Can you point me to where any decision on anything has been made aside from Governance? We have 4 drafts of a PRD that Christian has come up with. The entire WG hasn't even commented on it, let alone voted. If you're basing your statement on the implication that silence is agreement, that's understandable but people need to realize that NOW is the time to make alternative suggestions rather than assumptions that this is done by fiat.
I would love to see alternative draft PRDs presented.
josh
On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 02:04:51PM -0500, Josh Boyer wrote:
On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 1:45 PM, Matthew Garrett mjg59@srcf.ucam.org wrote:
If there are no desktop users running GNOME then there's no incentive for developers to target it. Targetting developers is going to change our marketing message, which is going to filter out as "Fedora isn't a good choice for an average end user". Users end up running Unity or Cinnamon or MATE or KDE instead, developers shift to targetting them and we end up with no suite of well integrated applications to ship.
If that happens, I would expect Workstation to look at this and say GNOME isn't the correct fit. As Matthias said a while ago, Workstation isn't GNOME. Sticking with something the broader group you're targeting isn't using is pointless.
If that's a conscious decision then it's fine, but it's an inevitable consequence of the current focus. That should be made explicit.
The PRD makes it pretty clear that, as far as the WG is concerned, it's "ignore". That's not our current message.
The word ignore is not in the PRD. Please choose a different word.
There's nothing in the PRD to indicate that the working group will put any effort into satisfying normal user requirements unless it happens as a side effect of satisfying the requirements of the target audience. So, indifferent?
Decisions *have* been made. They're not necessarily final, but offering alternatives isn't useful unless there's any desire to revisit them.
Can you point me to where any decision on anything has been made aside from Governance? We have 4 drafts of a PRD that Christian has come up with. The entire WG hasn't even commented on it, let alone voted. If you're basing your statement on the implication that silence is agreement, that's understandable but people need to realize that NOW is the time to make alternative suggestions rather than assumptions that this is done by fiat.
We have four drafts of a PRD that's been written by the manager of the group that's going to be responsible for providing most of the workstation development effort. If he's committed to providing a developer-focused product then it seems likely that that'll be the outcome. If that's not the case, I'm happy to work on an alternative proposal.
I have been following this for a while now, and I would like to voice an opinion.
I am a Systems Admin, who happily supports Red Hat RHEL in my environment at work. However, I want a desktop that allows me to get my work done, is stable, and has no annoyances. With the current state of GNOME and Fedora, I just cant meet those goals. I do run F19, but the first thing I do is setup either Cinnamon or KDE. I have tried to use GNOME, but the workflow differences between it and I are just to much. I don't have time or patience enough to "force" myself to learn a whole new dogma of proper GUI use just to make GNOME work.
I was hoping that the Workstation group would be the best compromise for people like me, SysAdmins whom want to use a Distro that is in line with the Server OS they support. Meaning, the package manager is similar, CLI structure is similar, etc. The GNOME desktop just doesnt "fit" for me.
If the list cares to hear more input from someone whom does SysAdmin work, I'd be pleased to speak more.
Thanks! Lynn
On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 2:16 PM, Matthew Garrett mjg59@srcf.ucam.orgwrote:
On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 02:04:51PM -0500, Josh Boyer wrote:
On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 1:45 PM, Matthew Garrett mjg59@srcf.ucam.org
wrote:
If there are no desktop users running GNOME then there's no incentive for developers to target it. Targetting developers is going to change our marketing message, which is going to filter out as "Fedora isn't a good choice for an average end user". Users end up running Unity or Cinnamon or MATE or KDE instead, developers shift to targetting them
and
we end up with no suite of well integrated applications to ship.
If that happens, I would expect Workstation to look at this and say GNOME isn't the correct fit. As Matthias said a while ago, Workstation isn't GNOME. Sticking with something the broader group you're targeting isn't using is pointless.
If that's a conscious decision then it's fine, but it's an inevitable consequence of the current focus. That should be made explicit.
The PRD makes it pretty clear that, as far as the WG is concerned, it's "ignore". That's not our current message.
The word ignore is not in the PRD. Please choose a different word.
There's nothing in the PRD to indicate that the working group will put any effort into satisfying normal user requirements unless it happens as a side effect of satisfying the requirements of the target audience. So, indifferent?
Decisions *have* been made. They're not necessarily final, but offering alternatives isn't useful unless there's any desire to revisit them.
Can you point me to where any decision on anything has been made aside from Governance? We have 4 drafts of a PRD that Christian has come up with. The entire WG hasn't even commented on it, let alone voted. If you're basing your statement on the implication that silence is agreement, that's understandable but people need to realize that NOW is the time to make alternative suggestions rather than assumptions that this is done by fiat.
We have four drafts of a PRD that's been written by the manager of the group that's going to be responsible for providing most of the workstation development effort. If he's committed to providing a developer-focused product then it seems likely that that'll be the outcome. If that's not the case, I'm happy to work on an alternative proposal.
-- Matthew Garrett | mjg59@srcf.ucam.org -- desktop mailing list desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 02:04:51PM -0500, Josh Boyer wrote:
If there are no desktop users running GNOME then there's no incentive for developers to target it. Targetting developers is going to change our marketing message, which is going to filter out as "Fedora isn't a good choice for an average end user". Users end up running Unity or Cinnamon or MATE or KDE instead, developers shift to targetting them and we end up with no suite of well integrated applications to ship.
If that happens, I would expect Workstation to look at this and say GNOME isn't the correct fit.
So, lets say Workstation goes for KDE. Then, if am to follow Matthew's argument, they interpret that as Fedora (and by extension KDE) is not a good choice for an average end user. They switch to something else.
And then what? We switch from KDE to something else?
Or are we assuming that there is always going to be something other than Fedora that will be the flagship distribution for KDE and make sure that average end users stick around KDE?
Cheers, Debarshi
On 11/27/2013 04:27 AM, Alexander Volovics wrote:
- Users like you or me might find that Fedora contains about 20% stuff related to development infrastructure and libraries that we will never use and that we might not be able to remove. From our standpoint 'bloat' with acompanying security problems, updates and bugs.
Well, there's also going to be a Fedora 'base' that the Workstation will be built on top of. [1] If the workstation has too much developer-centric, irrelevant-to-other-users stuff, maybe we build spins on top of the base.
But honestly, a lot of the developer stuff is pretty easy to remove, and really if you leave it there the only ways it'll affect you are:
- if it's got a GUI it'll appear in app searches in the gnome shell overview / in the menus of other DEs (e.g., devhelp, geany, eclipse, etc.)
- it'll take up space on your hard drive (HDDs are pretty big these days though)
That being said, I don't know how the new target is going to impact the design / UX in other ways. I can't imagine it being too negatively impactful on non-developer users, though. I mean, developers are developers of the project they are working on - but when it comes to other projects, they are users just like us. E.g., a enterprise Java web developer is a 'user' more similar to us when it comes to the desktop - they don't work on the desktop, they're not familiar with the libraries involved, they have more experience in debugging things so they might be better positioned to troubleshoot desktop crashes and issues but it's going to be super-annoying for them and a distraction from what they really want to do - write Java.
(For example now in Fed19 I find 81 items related to Perl. I don't use Perl and are all these items really necessary for running a base Fedora system).
It depends what they are, but for example, I know a bunch of perl libraries get pulled in for inkscape - I think there's a lot of perl-based image processing utilities. I bet some of the computational stuff you're doing relies on perl libraries some as well.
~m
[1] https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/devel/2013-October/190817.html
On Mon, Nov 25, 2013 at 01:59:06PM +0100, Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller wrote:
Feel free to let me know if I forgot to include some important feedback or if further clarifications are needed.
My thread about adding a sysadmin use case got somewhat derailed in the details of multiple monitors and terminal handling, but I still would *really* like to see
Case: Systems Administrator
Systems Administrator supporting Fedora or downstream distributions on servers. Uses a web browser, and ssh with many terminal windows. May use multiple monitors.
This is a _very_ important constituency for Fedora in general and Fedora desktop in specific, and the needs aren't subsumed by the other cases. Please don't leave this group out.
On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 1:13 PM, Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org wrote:
On Mon, Nov 25, 2013 at 01:59:06PM +0100, Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller wrote:
Feel free to let me know if I forgot to include some important feedback or if further clarifications are needed.
My thread about adding a sysadmin use case got somewhat derailed in the details of multiple monitors and terminal handling, but I still would *really* like to see
Case: Systems Administrator
Systems Administrator supporting Fedora or downstream distributions on servers. Uses a web browser, and ssh with many terminal windows. May use multiple monitors.
This is a _very_ important constituency for Fedora in general and Fedora desktop in specific, and the needs aren't subsumed by the other cases. Please don't leave this group out.
So here's the problem. We currently have:
CS Student Developer DevOps Corporate Developer
then people want to add:
SysAdmin (which is explicitly mentioned in Other Users already) General Student General desktop user Designer/Content creator
If you group all of those together, they could be summed up as:
"Someone who (1) is voluntarily switching to Linux, (2) is familiar with computers, but is not necessarily a hacker or developer, (3) is likely to collaborate in some fashion when something's wrong with Fedora, and (4) wants to use Fedora for general productivity, either using desktop applications or a Web browser."
which, not surprisingly, is exactly what today's Fedora target audience is. The same target audience definition that lead to creating the 3 product approach because it wasn't suitable to today's technology ecosystem.
There needs to be focus. Where that focus is can surely be up for debate, but I'd rather not just drive Workstation into irrelevance by not learning from our past mistakes. We can't focus on everything or we'll wind up gaining nothing.
I would suggest that instead of just saying "Role XXXX is important, add it!" people should look at the existing user definitions in the drafts and rework them as a set. Adding more and more is not going to help us create a product.
josh
On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 01:29:02PM -0500, Josh Boyer wrote:
There needs to be focus. Where that focus is can surely be up for debate, but I'd rather not just drive Workstation into irrelevance by not learning from our past mistakes. We can't focus on everything or we'll wind up gaining nothing.
Who do other desktop operating systems target?
On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 1:32 PM, Matthew Garrett mjg59@srcf.ucam.org wrote:
On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 01:29:02PM -0500, Josh Boyer wrote:
There needs to be focus. Where that focus is can surely be up for debate, but I'd rather not just drive Workstation into irrelevance by not learning from our past mistakes. We can't focus on everything or we'll wind up gaining nothing.
Who do other desktop operating systems target?
Who do you think Workstation should target? Why? How does that differ in a large fashion from what is drafted?
I'm not going to play guessing games with what you are trying to get at. Please just make suggestions instead of presenting leading questions so that you can debate against replies.
josh
On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 01:38:29PM -0500, Josh Boyer wrote:
On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 1:32 PM, Matthew Garrett mjg59@srcf.ucam.org wrote:
On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 01:29:02PM -0500, Josh Boyer wrote:
There needs to be focus. Where that focus is can surely be up for debate, but I'd rather not just drive Workstation into irrelevance by not learning from our past mistakes. We can't focus on everything or we'll wind up gaining nothing.
Who do other desktop operating systems target?
Who do you think Workstation should target? Why? How does that differ in a large fashion from what is drafted?
It's an honest question. Looking at what other desktop operating systems focus on and the userbase that they develop is an important part of figuring out which audiences need to be targetted and which audiences will grow organically. For instance, OS X is used by a huge number of developers. Are they the target audience? What compromises do Apple make in order to satisfy them? Does a focus on an average desktop user impair Apple's ability to attract them?
On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 1:49 PM, Matthew Garrett mjg59@srcf.ucam.org wrote:
On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 01:38:29PM -0500, Josh Boyer wrote:
On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 1:32 PM, Matthew Garrett mjg59@srcf.ucam.org wrote:
On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 01:29:02PM -0500, Josh Boyer wrote:
There needs to be focus. Where that focus is can surely be up for debate, but I'd rather not just drive Workstation into irrelevance by not learning from our past mistakes. We can't focus on everything or we'll wind up gaining nothing.
Who do other desktop operating systems target?
Who do you think Workstation should target? Why? How does that differ in a large fashion from what is drafted?
It's an honest question. Looking at what other desktop operating systems focus on and the userbase that they develop is an important part of figuring out which audiences need to be targetted and which audiences will grow organically. For instance, OS X is used by a huge number of developers. Are they the target audience? What compromises do Apple make in order to satisfy them? Does a focus on an average desktop user impair Apple's ability to attract them?
Apple makes the following compromises:
1) It has it's own hardware division 2) It ties it's OS to that hardware 3) It then creates app stores and services around the OS
Which leads to people buying the hardware because it's actually decent hardware, a smaller set of machines to support which reduces maintenance costs, a completely vertically integrated ecosystem that locks people into their products, and developers focusing on OS X because people buy into this because it works and is shiny.
I really don't think comparing a general purpose OS with OS X is a fair comparison in a broader sense. Sure, some things can be compared from a usability standpoint, etc but it isn't as simple as "OS X targets developers".
josh
On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 02:09:41PM -0500, Josh Boyer wrote:
Apple makes the following compromises:
- It has it's own hardware division
- It ties it's OS to that hardware
- It then creates app stores and services around the OS
Which leads to people buying the hardware because it's actually decent hardware, a smaller set of machines to support which reduces maintenance costs, a completely vertically integrated ecosystem that locks people into their products, and developers focusing on OS X because people buy into this because it works and is shiny.
Most developers running OS X aren't developing for OS X. They're consumers of the ecosystem, not participants in it. It provides the developer tools they want while still giving them a perfectly functional general purpose operating system. I don't think they're buying the hardware and ending up with OS X as a side effect, they're buying the hardware because it's the only practical way to run OS X. They want a Unix-style environment. They want to be able to run git and python and ruby. But they also want to run an OS that feels well designed, that has a wide range of available desktop applications and which behaves in a predictable and reliable way.
These are the people we want running Fedora. What arguments can we give them to migrate?
On 11/27/2013 01:49 PM, Matthew Garrett wrote:
Are they the target audience? What compromises do Apple make in order to satisfy them? Does a focus on an average desktop user impair Apple's ability to attract them?
Developers aren't the target audience for apple (or at least they haven't been, see [1].) I would argue historically their target users were artists / designers / musicians and students. The only mac labs at my college way back when for instance was only available to students in the electronic arts dept. My first exposure to a mac was in middle school art class where we had a single mac for scanning and photoshop usage.
OS X is built on top of a unix-like environment that's close enough to the server envs that developers are deploying to that they'll use it. If OS X was exactly the same but built on top of something like windows underneath and devs were deploying to unix like environments i don't think it would have the same dev uptake it has right now. See [2]
Doesn't Alan Cooper (and many other ux gurus) tell us there is no such thing as an 'average user?'
~m
[1] "Apple's next OS X said to be targeted at 'power users'" http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/04/29/mac_os_x_10_point_nine_rumors/
[2] "'ve been a Unix geek personally and professionally for nearly 15 years now and an Apple user for nearly 20 years. Having the marriage of the two is downright giddy for this geek." https://web.archive.org/web/20010814140546/http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories...
On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 02:19:48PM -0500, Máirín Duffy wrote:
Developers aren't the target audience for apple (or at least they haven't been, see [1].) I would argue historically their target users were artists / designers / musicians and students. The only mac labs at my college way back when for instance was only available to students in the electronic arts dept. My first exposure to a mac was in middle school art class where we had a single mac for scanning and photoshop usage.
Well, I guess that's my point. OS X has been wildly successful at attracting developers without having them as their primary audience. Why do we think we need to explicitly target developers?
On 11/27/2013 02:26 PM, Matthew Garrett wrote:
On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 02:19:48PM -0500, Máirín Duffy wrote:
Developers aren't the target audience for apple (or at least they haven't been, see [1].) I would argue historically their target users were artists / designers / musicians and students. The only mac labs at my college way back when for instance was only available to students in the electronic arts dept. My first exposure to a mac was in middle school art class where we had a single mac for scanning and photoshop usage.
Well, I guess that's my point. OS X has been wildly successful at attracting developers without having them as their primary audience. Why do we think we need to explicitly target developers?
See my other post to you. Didn't you experience how, even though there weren't nearly as many software titles available for Mac and how much more popular PCs were, the Mac people were rabidly fanatical about Macs? I mean, it was hard to find a lukewarm / apathetic Mac user. The people who used it loved it. They broadened from that base.
~m
On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 02:34:16PM -0500, Máirín Duffy wrote:
See my other post to you. Didn't you experience how, even though there weren't nearly as many software titles available for Mac and how much more popular PCs were, the Mac people were rabidly fanatical about Macs? I mean, it was hard to find a lukewarm / apathetic Mac user. The people who used it loved it. They broadened from that base.
To do that we need an audience who's able to evangelise to a wider base. Are developers going to do that? And if they are, how do we attract them in the first place?
On 11/27/2013 02:39 PM, Matthew Garrett wrote:
To do that we need an audience who's able to evangelise to a wider base. Are developers going to do that? And if they are, how do we attract them in the first place?
Well, wasn't it developers and sysadmins evangelizing from the bottom up that got Linux taken seriously and deployed within enterprises from a server POV? So I think yes, if they like something they will evangelize it.
We're more attractive than OS X I think in that we're built on top of a base that is closer to the platforms they're deploying to (assuming a web / server developer of course not desktop / mobile.) Even better, if the three product Fedora.next plan goes well, they'll have server and cloud versions of the environment to deploy to - there is no equivalent that I am aware of for OS X, except for - again - desktop and mobile app devs that are targeting OS X and iOS. Even better, those server/cloud versions are from the same family as the leading enterprise Linux product already widely used in the market.
We could do better on this part of the story, sure. But where we are weakest is in the front end user experience / environment. And I think if we get the first part right, we still don't have enough to pull them over, we need to get the front end user experience good enough in comparison to OS X. (Difficult since they've had 13+ years to hone that)
That being said, a good start would be to look at the longstanding complaints developers have against the OS X front end. For example, I was reading a rant from some guy (I think linked off of that register article i posted before) who bought some huge $$$ Apple Cinema display monitor and was angry because OS X spaces would only use his primary monitor (laptop screen) so his second $$ monitor was kind of useless to him.
Our multi-monitor story is pretty poor as well (eg https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=712325 .) It seems common or at least desirable for developers to have a multi-monitor set up, from my days doing contextual interviews on site with RH customers, and walking around Google's office in Mt. View and even Red Hat's office here in Westford. If we focused on making a kickass multi-monitor experience that bettered OS X, that would be a good step in the right direction.
Anyway we could do a review of complaints devs have about other desktop systems then do an affinity map of the complaints, block them out into different focus areas (e.g., multi-monitor), and then attack them one-by-one.
~m
On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 03:00:11PM -0500, Máirín Duffy wrote:
On 11/27/2013 02:39 PM, Matthew Garrett wrote:
To do that we need an audience who's able to evangelise to a wider base. Are developers going to do that? And if they are, how do we attract them in the first place?
Well, wasn't it developers and sysadmins evangelizing from the bottom up that got Linux taken seriously and deployed within enterprises from a server POV? So I think yes, if they like something they will evangelize it.
At the time, Linux was competing against operating systems that cost hundreds of dollars (if not thousands) a seat. Were people evangelising, or were they just pointing out that it was cheaper?
We're more attractive than OS X I think in that we're built on top of a base that is closer to the platforms they're deploying to (assuming a web / server developer of course not desktop / mobile.) Even better, if the three product Fedora.next plan goes well, they'll have server and cloud versions of the environment to deploy to - there is no equivalent that I am aware of for OS X, except for - again - desktop and mobile app devs that are targeting OS X and iOS. Even better, those server/cloud versions are from the same family as the leading enterprise Linux product already widely used in the market.
We build a Linux-based product. Most of my coworkers run OS X. Client code is all in Python and runs fine on OS X without modification. For server code, they just work remotely. My experience is that this isn't unusual. Running Linux locally might provide some marginal benefit in code testing, but that's at the cost of running an OS that they just don't like as much. They're developers, not sysadmins. Satisfying their development requirements is easy. But they also want to be able to upgrade their iphones, watch movies, listen to music and play the occasional game. *I* can't convince them to switch to Fedora. Whatever its merits as a development platform, they just don't find it a sufficiently useful operating system.
Our multi-monitor story is pretty poor as well (eg https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=712325 .) It seems common or at least desirable for developers to have a multi-monitor set up, from my days doing contextual interviews on site with RH customers, and walking around Google's office in Mt. View and even Red Hat's office here in Westford. If we focused on making a kickass multi-monitor experience that bettered OS X, that would be a good step in the right direction.
I agree that merely being as good as OS X isn't sufficient and we need to think about ways that we can offer concrete benefits, but that still means we need to offer an experience that's approximately as good as OS X. And that means we need to think about more use cases than just development, because these days the development laptop is often also the casual use laptop.
Anyway we could do a review of complaints devs have about other desktop systems then do an affinity map of the complaints, block them out into different focus areas (e.g., multi-monitor), and then attack them one-by-one.
That sounds like an entirely worthwhile thing to do.
On 11/27/2013 03:28 PM, Matthew Garrett wrote:
And that means we need to think about more use cases than just development, because these days the development laptop is often also the casual use laptop.
I think maybe this is where the core misunderstanding is, because I don't see anything in the PRD that would exclude this usage.
~m
On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 04:04:19PM -0500, Máirín Duffy wrote:
On 11/27/2013 03:28 PM, Matthew Garrett wrote:
And that means we need to think about more use cases than just development, because these days the development laptop is often also the casual use laptop.
I think maybe this is where the core misunderstanding is, because I don't see anything in the PRD that would exclude this usage.
We're only going to provide a satisfactory experience for developers if we also provide a satisfactory experience for casual home users. I guess you can infer that from the target audience saying that it should be usable as the developer's only computer, but I worry that as currently phrased the expectation will be that the user is sufficiently technically aware that we can leave rough edges that would dissuade a non-technical user. The developers I work with don't fit into that category - they *can* fix things that break. They'll just choose not to and go back to an OS that lets them forget about implementation details when they're trying to relax.
On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 09:30:33PM +0000, Matthew Garrett wrote:
We're only going to provide a satisfactory experience for developers if we also provide a satisfactory experience for casual home users. I guess you can infer that from the target audience saying that it should be usable as the developer's only computer, but I worry that as currently phrased the expectation will be that the user is sufficiently technically aware that we can leave rough edges that would dissuade a non-technical user. The developers I work with don't fit into that category - they *can* fix things that break. They'll just choose not to and go back to an OS that lets them forget about implementation details when they're trying to relax.
I think this is part of the reason that developers may be the wrong target. I don't think it's an awful target in the ideal sense, but, providing polish to people who aren't interested in the woes of codec patents or dealing with installing proprietary drivers on an open source OS are going to be hard to please.
I don't think we should aim at the general user, because not only is that nebulous, it has all of those same problems. We should be more specific, but we should also choose a segment where those things aren't serious handicaps.
On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 11:34 PM, Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org wrote:
I don't think we should aim at the general user, because not only is that nebulous, it has all of those same problems.
That happens to be what every successful desktop (and mobile) OS have been doing. They built a system that is generally useful, they don't really care whether you are a developer, graphics designer, gamer or whatever.
If the operating system works for the general user case it works for pretty much everything else (it is just a matter of installing the right applications / tools).
An operating system designed for a specific user type is doomed to end up being a niche OS.
On Thu, Nov 28, 2013 at 12:01:25AM +0100, drago01 wrote:
I don't think we should aim at the general user, because not only is that nebulous, it has all of those same problems.
That happens to be what every successful desktop (and mobile) OS have been doing. They built a system that is generally useful, they don't really care whether you are a developer, graphics designer, gamer or whatever.
If the operating system works for the general user case it works for pretty much everything else (it is just a matter of installing the right applications / tools).
An operating system designed for a specific user type is doomed to end up being a niche OS.
We're always going to be a niche OS, at least on the desktop -- which is, itself, an increasingly small niche. But, let me restate my initial point. It's great if we can be totally awesome for everyone, and sure, it's fine to try for it. *And*, within that subset of everyone, there are some people we want to make particularly happy.
One subset that I've identified is the one I mentioned -- the sysadmin who runs RHEL or Fedora server systems and has Fedora on his or her desktop. The entire LISA conference was _full_ of these people. As I mentioned in the earlier thread, they don't all use Gnome, but they do use Fedora, and very well _could_ use Gnome if we tailored the experience to their needs.
I think it's completely fair to say that previously, we've responded to feedback from this demographic with "well, you're not a general user -- you're a weird special case". What I want is to acknowledge that even after all these years of that, this is still our loyal base, and to make every one of those feel like we are actually directly listening to their concerns (even if they can't all be addressed).
That's what _I_ want out of a Fedora Workstation product. If there are other classes of user where the same sort of feeling applies as well, let's include those too. Maybe that *is* developers, although as expressed, I'm skeptical. Maybe it's the maker/designer market -- at least the Creative Commons / Free Culture segment of it. Those aren't areas where I have a huge amount of history, interaction, or feedback from users. I talk about the sysadmin case because there I *do* have those things and I'm quite sure of myself.
Is this a matter of just installing the right applications and tools? Maybe. It also involves being responsive to feedback, and testing changes with that audience to make sure that they actually make the experience better as intended, rather than becoming an irritation.
On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 07:18:54PM -0500, Matthew Miller wrote:
We're always going to be a niche OS, at least on the desktop -- which is, itself, an increasingly small niche. But, let me restate my initial point. It's great if we can be totally awesome for everyone, and sure, it's fine to try for it. *And*, within that subset of everyone, there are some people we want to make particularly happy.
Almost 350 million desktop PCs were sold last year, down from just over 350 million the year before. It's true that mobile devices are eating some traditional desktop sales, but it's also true that a 5-year old PC is more usable now than a 5-year old PC was in 2004. Market saturation is a problem for operating systems that make most of their sales alongside new PCs. It's not a problem for us.
(Plus, we're seeing more convergence between desktop operating systems and mobile operating systems. Microsoft and Apple are both increasing the commonality between tablet and desktop, and that's a trend that's likely to accelerate)
One subset that I've identified is the one I mentioned -- the sysadmin who runs RHEL or Fedora server systems and has Fedora on his or her desktop. The entire LISA conference was _full_ of these people. As I mentioned in the earlier thread, they don't all use Gnome, but they do use Fedora, and very well _could_ use Gnome if we tailored the experience to their needs.
In what ways are their needs different to those of a naive desktop user? The desktop exists to let you start applications, manage windows and receive notifications. Do sysadmins expect different prioritisation of notifications? Do they manage windows differently? Do we not make it easy enough to launch the applications they need?
You're right that we don't need to concentrate on one group to the exclusion of others, but we're arguing about use cases without thinking about why we're assuming that these are different people. Developers often run the same OS at work and at home. Do sysadmins? If so, do sysadmins not want to watch movies? If not, what is it about Fedora that makes them feel it's suitable for work but not for pleasure?
I think it's completely fair to say that previously, we've responded to feedback from this demographic with "well, you're not a general user -- you're a weird special case". What I want is to acknowledge that even after all these years of that, this is still our loyal base, and to make every one of those feel like we are actually directly listening to their concerns (even if they can't all be addressed).
"We want to pay attention to the needs of more niche consumers" is very different to "We should define our target audience as niche consumers". The former is welcoming. The latter is alienating.
Is this a matter of just installing the right applications and tools? Maybe. It also involves being responsive to feedback, and testing changes with that audience to make sure that they actually make the experience better as intended, rather than becoming an irritation.
Mo's discussion regarding figuring out exactly what it is that users dislike about fundamental OS behaviour and attempting to satisfy that is vital, but the optimal outcome is for us to satisfy more technical users without compromising our usability amongst non-technical users. The PRD currently suggests that one has to come at the expense of the other. Let's spend some time figuring out whether that ssumption is true.
On Thu, Nov 28, 2013 at 01:21:51AM +0000, Matthew Garrett wrote:
One subset that I've identified is the one I mentioned -- the sysadmin who runs RHEL or Fedora server systems and has Fedora on his or her desktop. The entire LISA conference was _full_ of these people. As I mentioned in the earlier thread, they don't all use Gnome, but they do use Fedora, and very well _could_ use Gnome if we tailored the experience to their needs.
In what ways are their needs different to those of a naive desktop user? The desktop exists to let you start applications, manage windows and receive notifications. Do sysadmins expect different prioritisation of notifications? Do they manage windows differently? Do we not make it easy enough to launch the applications they need?
I mentioned two specific things based on feedback I've gotten: better multiple monitor support (probably good in general), and better handling of multiple terminal windows. Some other particular things about the current Gnome design also get pretty strong feedback among the sysadmins I talk to, but I don't know enough to say if it's specific or universal (dislike for the "shield" and wanting to turn it off, for a representative example).
There may be some greater degree of change-aversion, and possibly an attachment to some particular Unix UI conventions (mouse behavior, say), but overall I don't think this group likes nice new things any less. If there is a different expectation of managing windows and notifications, it's a general desire for a clean, simple design where the system gets out of the way -- I think that's why the shield is annoying in a way that seems irrationally out of proportion, because it's very in-your-face.
(And to be clear, I'm definitely not down on Gnome 3. It's _very_ able to be a clean, fast, out-of-the-way desktop environment, and it's what I run on my systems.)
You're right that we don't need to concentrate on one group to the exclusion of others, but we're arguing about use cases without thinking about why we're assuming that these are different people. Developers often run the same OS at work and at home. Do sysadmins? If so, do sysadmins not want to watch movies? If not, what is it about Fedora that makes them feel it's suitable for work but not for pleasure?
A lot of sysadmins I know run Linux at home. Sure, they like to watch movies, but I think in general they're more aware of licensing and patent concerns than the general public, and therefore more forgiving of what we can and can't do in these areas.
"We want to pay attention to the needs of more niche consumers" is very different to "We should define our target audience as niche consumers". The former is welcoming. The latter is alienating.
Oh, I absolutely agree.
Mo's discussion regarding figuring out exactly what it is that users dislike about fundamental OS behaviour and attempting to satisfy that is vital, but the optimal outcome is for us to satisfy more technical users without compromising our usability amongst non-technical users. The PRD currently suggests that one has to come at the expense of the other. Let's spend some time figuring out whether that ssumption is true.
Okay, that sounds good to me too. But I'd also like to put it the other way around: Let's not compromise our appeal to technical users and contributors in an effort to appeal to a non-specific "general user" who isn't really defined except by the implication that anyone who doesn't like some design decision clearly doesn't qualify as the target.
ons 2013-11-27 klockan 20:58 -0500 skrev Matthew Miller:
I mentioned two specific things based on feedback I've gotten: better multiple monitor support (probably good in general), and better handling of multiple terminal windows. Some other particular things about the current Gnome design also get pretty strong feedback among the sysadmins I talk to, but I don't know enough to say if it's specific or universal
Yes, this is a real issue that Fedora users like me have had to deal with for several Fedora releases now.
However, I doubt trying to change GNOME to be more sysadmin friendly is the right course. Perhaps it would be better to just gently suggest sysadmins might want to consider Cinnamon? It's certainly not perfect, but it is a better starting point in this case, while still sharing most of GNOME's underlying infrastructure.
Here's my sysadmin use case:
* Multiple virtual desktops, each for a specific "focus". * Each desktop has a set of terminal windows, text editors and browser windows; i.e. "read docs", "edit files" and "run commands".
Now, imagine you want a new browser window on the current desktop. You click the browser icon to the left, but then the darn thing switches your focus to a random Firefox window on another desktop. So you google a bit and learn to always hold down Ctrl whenever you click an icon or press Enter in the overview. Perhaps you find an extension to fix it.
Then you try to Alt-tab to an existing window and accidentally bring all Firefox/xterm windows on all desktops to the front. Conclusion: Alt-tab is useless now, don't even try to use it in its default incarnation.
I think this is where most of the feeling that GNOME 3 gets in the way comes from. There are probably other contributing issues as well.
/Alexander
On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 08:58:53PM -0500, Matthew Miller wrote:
On Thu, Nov 28, 2013 at 01:21:51AM +0000, Matthew Garrett wrote:
One subset that I've identified is the one I mentioned -- the sysadmin who runs RHEL or Fedora server systems and has Fedora on his or her desktop. The entire LISA conference was _full_ of these people. As I mentioned in the earlier thread, they don't all use Gnome, but they do use Fedora, and very well _could_ use Gnome if we tailored the experience to their needs.
In what ways are their needs different to those of a naive desktop user? The desktop exists to let you start applications, manage windows and receive notifications. Do sysadmins expect different prioritisation of notifications? Do they manage windows differently? Do we not make it easy enough to launch the applications they need?
I mentioned two specific things based on feedback I've gotten: better multiple monitor support (probably good in general), and better handling of multiple terminal windows. Some other particular things about the current Gnome design also get pretty strong feedback among the sysadmins I talk to, but I don't know enough to say if it's specific or universal (dislike for the "shield" and wanting to turn it off, for a representative example).
Why would sysadmins object more strongly to the shield implementation than anyone else? Better multiple monitor handling sounds like it would be good in general, and improving handling of multiple terminal windows in some way doesn't seem incompatible with anything that we'd like to offer other types of user.
There may be some greater degree of change-aversion, and possibly an attachment to some particular Unix UI conventions (mouse behavior, say), but overall I don't think this group likes nice new things any less. If there is a different expectation of managing windows and notifications, it's a general desire for a clean, simple design where the system gets out of the way -- I think that's why the shield is annoying in a way that seems irrationally out of proportion, because it's very in-your-face.
I don't really understand. You type your password, hit enter and it goes away. There are other ways of interacting with it that make more sense on systems without a hardware keyboard, but the shield doesn't make it any harder to unlock my screen.
Okay, that sounds good to me too. But I'd also like to put it the other way around: Let's not compromise our appeal to technical users and contributors in an effort to appeal to a non-specific "general user" who isn't really defined except by the implication that anyone who doesn't like some design decision clearly doesn't qualify as the target.
People who are interested in supporting more technical users and contributors should continue to do so, but should avoid compromising the accessibility of the OS to users who aren't. So far I haven't seen anybody give examples of where satisfying non-technical use cases is incompatible with giving more technical users what they want.
On Mon, Dec 02, 2013 at 03:28:18PM +0000, Matthew Garrett wrote:
Gnome design also get pretty strong feedback among the sysadmins I talk to, but I don't know enough to say if it's specific or universal (dislike for the "shield" and wanting to turn it off, for a representative example).
Why would sysadmins object more strongly to the shield implementation than anyone else? Better multiple monitor handling sounds like it would
I don't want to get hung up on any specific example, but as I said, I don't know, and since I don't know I'm hesitant to extrapolate to the universal. What I'd like is for us to test this kind of assumption, and, while I agree we shouldn't discount the general user completely, we should make sure we *do* test with our key groups, not only random people off of the street. In cases where the results are the same, cool, we win. In cases where there's a difference, we need to figure out how to accommodate.
People who are interested in supporting more technical users and contributors should continue to do so, but should avoid compromising the accessibility of the OS to users who aren't. So far I haven't seen anybody give examples of where satisfying non-technical use cases is incompatible with giving more technical users what they want.
I'm in basic agreement, but I also want it to go the other way: the interaction design should appeal to the technical users we want for Fedora, and we shouldn't make their experience worse in the name of appealing to an unspecific everyone. Maybe you are right and no compromise would be necessary, but let's (continuously) test with some representative samples of user groups that are important to the distribution as a whole.
On Tue, Dec 3, 2013 at 10:11 AM, Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org wrote:
On Mon, Dec 02, 2013 at 03:28:18PM +0000, Matthew Garrett wrote:
Gnome design also get pretty strong feedback among the sysadmins I talk to, but I don't know enough to say if it's specific or universal (dislike for the "shield" and wanting to turn it off, for a representative example).
Why would sysadmins object more strongly to the shield implementation than anyone else? Better multiple monitor handling sounds like it would
I don't want to get hung up on any specific example, but as I said, I don't know, and since I don't know I'm hesitant to extrapolate to the universal. What I'd like is for us to test this kind of assumption, and, while I agree we shouldn't discount the general user completely, we should make sure we *do* test with our key groups, not only random people off of the street. In cases where the results are the same, cool, we win. In cases where there's a difference, we need to figure out how to accommodate.
So the two main areas for sysadmins you highlighted were multiple monitor support, and handling large numbers of terminal windows. Those are already addressed as things Workstation is looking at in the Other users section, but it seems they actually fit into at least the 'corporate developer' user case as well. I'd suggest moving those two specific items into one of those other user cases as a starting point and move on from there.
I'm not sure targeting sysadmins specifically is something Workstation can focus on, because their needs often get into specific areas that aren't really what Workstation is for. Things like admin tools, etc. However, we can certainly try and address the more general needs from a sysadmin group, and of course we can (and should) solicit feedback from them as we go.
josh
On Tue, Dec 03, 2013 at 10:17:10AM -0500, Josh Boyer wrote:
So the two main areas for sysadmins you highlighted were multiple monitor support, and handling large numbers of terminal windows. Those are already addressed as things Workstation is looking at in the Other users section, but it seems they actually fit into at least the 'corporate developer' user case as well. I'd suggest moving those two specific items into one of those other user cases as a starting point and move on from there.
*nod*
I'm not sure targeting sysadmins specifically is something Workstation can focus on, because their needs often get into specific areas that aren't really what Workstation is for. Things like admin tools, etc. However, we can certainly try and address the more general needs from a sysadmin group, and of course we can (and should) solicit feedback from them as we go.
Yeah, I hear the point about not developing or focusing on admin tools.
I just don't want to send the message that the new main Fedora desktop offering is intended to be exclusionary of feedback from our technical users, and sysadmins in particular (because that group is important to the whole Fedora ecosystem!). That would be the opposite of what we were talking about at Flock when Stephen brought the idea. The developer targets certainly have some overlap, and as I understand the PRD they're not meant to be exclusionary, so I think it's overall good even if it's not exactly what I personally would want.
On Wed, Dec 4, 2013 at 11:36 AM, Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org wrote:
On Tue, Dec 03, 2013 at 10:17:10AM -0500, Josh Boyer wrote:
So the two main areas for sysadmins you highlighted were multiple monitor support, and handling large numbers of terminal windows. Those are already addressed as things Workstation is looking at in the Other users section, but it seems they actually fit into at least the 'corporate developer' user case as well. I'd suggest moving those two specific items into one of those other user cases as a starting point and move on from there.
*nod*
I'm not sure targeting sysadmins specifically is something Workstation can focus on, because their needs often get into specific areas that aren't really what Workstation is for. Things like admin tools, etc. However, we can certainly try and address the more general needs from a sysadmin group, and of course we can (and should) solicit feedback from them as we go.
Yeah, I hear the point about not developing or focusing on admin tools.
I just don't want to send the message that the new main Fedora desktop offering is intended to be exclusionary of feedback from our technical users, and sysadmins in particular (because that group is important to the
Sigh. The PRD is not a marketing document. THE PRD IS NOT A MARKETING DOCUMENT.
Seriously, if the PRD is being used to send messages, then we're failing at actually doing any marketing of the products. It is entirely feasible, and likely desirable, to have the PRD be the thing that the WGs use to focus their development with, and marketing be the thing the Fedora project uses to reach a broader audience.
josh
On Wed, Dec 04, 2013 at 11:44:31AM -0500, Josh Boyer wrote:
I just don't want to send the message that the new main Fedora desktop offering is intended to be exclusionary of feedback from our technical users, and sysadmins in particular (because that group is important to the
Sigh. The PRD is not a marketing document. THE PRD IS NOT A MARKETING DOCUMENT.
I didn't mean "message" in a marketing sense. I meant internally, in user-developer interactions within Fedora; I don't want a Fedora contributor's report of "change X makes it harder for me to use Fedora" or "this is great! more of this please" to be met with "you're not a developer so Fedora isn't interested in you."
On Wed, Dec 4, 2013 at 5:25 PM, Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org wrote:
On Wed, Dec 04, 2013 at 11:44:31AM -0500, Josh Boyer wrote:
I just don't want to send the message that the new main Fedora desktop offering is intended to be exclusionary of feedback from our technical users, and sysadmins in particular (because that group is important to the
Sigh. The PRD is not a marketing document. THE PRD IS NOT A MARKETING DOCUMENT.
I didn't mean "message" in a marketing sense. I meant internally, in user-developer interactions within Fedora; I don't want a Fedora contributor's report of "change X makes it harder for me to use Fedora" or "this is great! more of this please" to be met with "you're not a developer so Fedora isn't interested in you."
Fair. There needs to be a feedback loop.
Though I don't think it's unreasonable to politely say Feature requests are out of scope for particular products. Or that particular features (small f) would be nice, but aren't prioritized. That won't be driven by "you aren't a developer" or "you aren't using the Cloud product the way we intended" answers, but by the reality of limited resources and prioritization.
josh
Matthew, I agree with you completely. I am one of those use cases of a Sys Admin whom manages about 100 RHEL machines. I use Fedora on my laptop to do my duties, but its not ideal. I shy away from Gnome and typically use Cinnamon or KDE. On Nov 27, 2013 7:18 PM, "Matthew Miller" mattdm@fedoraproject.org wrote:
On Thu, Nov 28, 2013 at 12:01:25AM +0100, drago01 wrote:
I don't think we should aim at the general user, because not only is
that
nebulous, it has all of those same problems.
That happens to be what every successful desktop (and mobile) OS have been doing. They built a system that is generally useful, they don't really care whether you are a developer, graphics designer, gamer or whatever.
If the operating system works for the general user case it works for pretty much everything else (it is just a matter of installing the right applications / tools).
An operating system designed for a specific user type is doomed to end up being a niche OS.
We're always going to be a niche OS, at least on the desktop -- which is, itself, an increasingly small niche. But, let me restate my initial point. It's great if we can be totally awesome for everyone, and sure, it's fine to try for it. *And*, within that subset of everyone, there are some people we want to make particularly happy.
One subset that I've identified is the one I mentioned -- the sysadmin who runs RHEL or Fedora server systems and has Fedora on his or her desktop. The entire LISA conference was _full_ of these people. As I mentioned in the earlier thread, they don't all use Gnome, but they do use Fedora, and very well _could_ use Gnome if we tailored the experience to their needs.
I think it's completely fair to say that previously, we've responded to feedback from this demographic with "well, you're not a general user -- you're a weird special case". What I want is to acknowledge that even after all these years of that, this is still our loyal base, and to make every one of those feel like we are actually directly listening to their concerns (even if they can't all be addressed).
That's what _I_ want out of a Fedora Workstation product. If there are other classes of user where the same sort of feeling applies as well, let's include those too. Maybe that *is* developers, although as expressed, I'm skeptical. Maybe it's the maker/designer market -- at least the Creative Commons / Free Culture segment of it. Those aren't areas where I have a huge amount of history, interaction, or feedback from users. I talk about the sysadmin case because there I *do* have those things and I'm quite sure of myself.
Is this a matter of just installing the right applications and tools? Maybe. It also involves being responsive to feedback, and testing changes with that audience to make sure that they actually make the experience better as intended, rather than becoming an irritation.
-- Matthew Miller ☁☁☁ Fedora Cloud Architect ☁☁☁ < mattdm@fedoraproject.org> -- desktop mailing list desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
On Thu, Nov 28, 2013 at 1:18 AM, Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org wrote:
On Thu, Nov 28, 2013 at 12:01:25AM +0100, drago01 wrote:
I don't think we should aim at the general user, because not only is that nebulous, it has all of those same problems.
That happens to be what every successful desktop (and mobile) OS have been doing. They built a system that is generally useful, they don't really care whether you are a developer, graphics designer, gamer or whatever.
If the operating system works for the general user case it works for pretty much everything else (it is just a matter of installing the right applications / tools).
An operating system designed for a specific user type is doomed to end up being a niche OS.
We're always going to be a niche OS, at least on the desktop -- which is, itself, an increasingly small niche. But, let me restate my initial point. It's great if we can be totally awesome for everyone, and sure, it's fine to try for it. *And*, within that subset of everyone, there are some people we want to make particularly happy.
One subset that I've identified is the one I mentioned -- the sysadmin who runs RHEL or Fedora server systems and has Fedora on his or her desktop. The entire LISA conference was _full_ of these people. As I mentioned in the earlier thread, they don't all use Gnome, but they do use Fedora, and very well _could_ use Gnome if we tailored the experience to their needs.
I think it's completely fair to say that previously, we've responded to feedback from this demographic with "well, you're not a general user -- you're a weird special case". What I want is to acknowledge that even after all these years of that, this is still our loyal base, and to make every one of those feel like we are actually directly listening to their concerns (even if they can't all be addressed).
That's what _I_ want out of a Fedora Workstation product. If there are other classes of user where the same sort of feeling applies as well, let's include those too. Maybe that *is* developers, although as expressed, I'm skeptical. Maybe it's the maker/designer market -- at least the Creative Commons / Free Culture segment of it. Those aren't areas where I have a huge amount of history, interaction, or feedback from users. I talk about the sysadmin case because there I *do* have those things and I'm quite sure of myself.
Is this a matter of just installing the right applications and tools? Maybe.
s/Maybe/Yes/ ...
To pick up your example what is so special about being a sysadmin? You ran an email client? Web browser with for some web based administration tools? Terminals? Some other tool / tools? Use more then one monitor?
There simply is nothing here is specific to being a sysadmin. "I don't like the screenshield" isn't either (it has nothing to do with said user being a sysadmin or not).
Just look at the rest of the market? Who is being successful the ones that target some niche or the ones that target "everyone" i.e provide a solid general purpose OS that lets people run their tools and applications.
So make it easy to install applications. Are there any issues with multiple terminals? Improve multiple window handling (terminals are just a specific instance of "using many windows"). There are multimonitor issues? Not sysadmin specific either ... multiple monitors are being used everywhere.
By focusing on a specific user you put your self in a niche by trying to create a solid overall usable operating systems you open the doors for pretty much every type of user.
On Wed, 27.11.13 19:18, Matthew Miller (mattdm@fedoraproject.org) wrote:
On Thu, Nov 28, 2013 at 12:01:25AM +0100, drago01 wrote:
I don't think we should aim at the general user, because not only is that nebulous, it has all of those same problems.
That happens to be what every successful desktop (and mobile) OS have been doing. They built a system that is generally useful, they don't really care whether you are a developer, graphics designer, gamer or whatever.
If the operating system works for the general user case it works for pretty much everything else (it is just a matter of installing the right applications / tools).
An operating system designed for a specific user type is doomed to end up being a niche OS.
We're always going to be a niche OS, at least on the desktop -- which is, itself, an increasingly small niche. But, let me restate my initial point. It's great if we can be totally awesome for everyone, and sure, it's fine to try for it. *And*, within that subset of everyone, there are some people we want to make particularly happy.
One subset that I've identified is the one I mentioned -- the sysadmin who runs RHEL or Fedora server systems and has Fedora on his or her desktop. The entire LISA conference was _full_ of these people. As I mentioned in the earlier thread, they don't all use Gnome, but they do use Fedora, and very well _could_ use Gnome if we tailored the experience to their needs.
I think it's completely fair to say that previously, we've responded to feedback from this demographic with "well, you're not a general user -- you're a weird special case". What I want is to acknowledge that even after all these years of that, this is still our loyal base, and to make every one of those feel like we are actually directly listening to their concerns (even if they can't all be addressed).
This is just well disguised anti-GNOME FUD. I don't think this is useful at all. You are just trying to turn GNOME into what you personally think that GNOME should be, suggesting it was in some way accepted truth that GNOME would be awful in its current state for admin and technical folks. But that's not accepted truth, that's just your personal opinion. And I certainly disagree with it, and so do many others.
That's what _I_ want out of a Fedora Workstation product. If there are other classes of user where the same sort of feeling applies as well, let's include those too. Maybe that *is* developers, although as expressed, I'm skeptical. Maybe it's the maker/designer market -- at least the Creative Commons / Free Culture segment of it. Those aren't areas where I have a huge amount of history, interaction, or feedback from users. I talk about the sysadmin case because there I *do* have those things and I'm quite sure of myself.
Is this a matter of just installing the right applications and tools? Maybe. It also involves being responsive to feedback, and testing changes with that audience to make sure that they actually make the experience better as intended, rather than becoming an irritation.
Giving up the goal of creating a desktop product that somewhat comprehensively covers the desktop usecase is just going to make everything worse for everybody. If we do desktop stuff we should do desktop stuff, as in the desktop space the lines where one application area ends and another one starts are much more fluent than on other areas.
You are ignoring the fact that GNOME is in a major way different from other technologies: it is and always has been one of the biggest drivers of Linux infrastructure. Wherever you look, if it's udev, or dbus or, or systemd, or NM, or all the other infrastructure that the GNOME guys or people connected to the GNOME community have created: it's the desktop that drove them, and specifically the GNOME project, way more than other desktop environments.
Without GNOME you wouldn't have standardized IPC on Linux (I mean, seriously fuck it, which other general purpose OS has no sane standardized IPC to start with?), there wouldn't be sane device management, nothing. The "base OS" people of Linux couldn't get here shit together to get this infrastructure in place, so the GNOME guys had to do it instead.
And because that is this way, because GNOME and the desktop are major drivers, of what a Linux system is, and what infrastructure we have on it, we should promote what GNOME is doing, and not try to intervene in your "Matthew-knows-best-how-to-design-a-good-desktop" way.
I mean, seriously, show some respect to the GNOME project from time to time. It gave you more than you might want to acknowledge. Don't try to fuck it up with your attempts to reign into what the desktop guys think a desktop should be like. If Fedora wants to continue to drive technology, then you need to do your best to promote GNOME, not to work against it, and try to rule into what its design decisions are.
And yupp, I might not be in the RH desktop group anymore, and we strive for universiality with systemd, but heck, tht mind set the GNOME guys always had, which is to fix the problems where there are and create the infrastructure where its missing, that's certainly the same mindset that created systemd and hence much of the core of what Fedora now is. I for one am proudly a member of the GNOME community, and yes, I trust their desktop designs a lot more than I would trust yours.
Matthew, stay out of my desktop please, it's not your turf.
Lennart
Dne 29.11.2013 14:18, Lennart Poettering napsal(a):
On Wed, 27.11.13 19:18, Matthew Miller (mattdm@fedoraproject.org) wrote:
On Thu, Nov 28, 2013 at 12:01:25AM +0100, drago01 wrote:
I don't think we should aim at the general user, because not only is that nebulous, it has all of those same problems.
That happens to be what every successful desktop (and mobile) OS have been doing. They built a system that is generally useful, they don't really care whether you are a developer, graphics designer, gamer or whatever.
If the operating system works for the general user case it works for pretty much everything else (it is just a matter of installing the right applications / tools).
An operating system designed for a specific user type is doomed to end up being a niche OS.
We're always going to be a niche OS, at least on the desktop -- which is, itself, an increasingly small niche. But, let me restate my initial point. It's great if we can be totally awesome for everyone, and sure, it's fine to try for it. *And*, within that subset of everyone, there are some people we want to make particularly happy.
One subset that I've identified is the one I mentioned -- the sysadmin who runs RHEL or Fedora server systems and has Fedora on his or her desktop. The entire LISA conference was _full_ of these people. As I mentioned in the earlier thread, they don't all use Gnome, but they do use Fedora, and very well _could_ use Gnome if we tailored the experience to their needs.
I think it's completely fair to say that previously, we've responded to feedback from this demographic with "well, you're not a general user -- you're a weird special case". What I want is to acknowledge that even after all these years of that, this is still our loyal base, and to make every one of those feel like we are actually directly listening to their concerns (even if they can't all be addressed).
This is just well disguised anti-GNOME FUD. I don't think this is useful at all. You are just trying to turn GNOME into what you personally think that GNOME should be, suggesting it was in some way accepted truth that GNOME would be awful in its current state for admin and technical folks. But that's not accepted truth, that's just your personal opinion. And I certainly disagree with it, and so do many
That's what _I_ want out of a Fedora Workstation product. If there are other classes of user where the same sort of feeling applies as well, let's include those too. Maybe that *is* developers, although as expressed, I'm skeptical. Maybe it's the maker/designer market -- at least the Creative Commons / Free Culture segment of it. Those aren't areas where I have a huge amount of history, interaction, or feedback from users. I talk about the sysadmin case because there I *do* have those things and I'm quite sure of myself.
Is this a matter of just installing the right applications and tools? Maybe. It also involves being responsive to feedback, and testing changes with that audience to make sure that they actually make the experience better as intended, rather than becoming an irritation.
<snip>
Without GNOME you wouldn't have standardized IPC on Linux (I mean, seriously fuck it, which other general purpose OS has no sane standardized IPC to start with?), there wouldn't be sane device management, nothing. The "base OS" people of Linux couldn't get here shit together to get this infrastructure in place, so the GNOME guys had to do it instead.
You would have, I know this FAQ is really outdated but still, there was a DCOP IPC mechanism before DBUS got created and which KDE also adopted later on: http://dbus.freedesktop.org/doc/dbus-faq.html#dcop
<quote> D-Bus is intentionally pretty similar to DCOP, and can be thought of as a "DCOP the next generation" suitable for sharing between the various open source desktop projects. </quote>
On Fri, 29.11.13 14:43, Lukáš Tinkl (ltinkl@redhat.com) wrote:
Without GNOME you wouldn't have standardized IPC on Linux (I mean, seriously fuck it, which other general purpose OS has no sane standardized IPC to start with?), there wouldn't be sane device management, nothing. The "base OS" people of Linux couldn't get here shit together to get this infrastructure in place, so the GNOME guys had to do it instead.
You would have, I know this FAQ is really outdated but still, there was a DCOP IPC mechanism before DBUS got created and which KDE also adopted later on: http://dbus.freedesktop.org/doc/dbus-faq.html#dcop
<quote> D-Bus is intentionally pretty similar to DCOP, and can be thought of as a "DCOP the next generation" suitable for sharing between the various open source desktop projects. </quote>
Well, there's actually major difference between DCOP and D-Bus. DCOP was a solution that was specifically useful for making desktop apps talk to each other. It's a domain specific solution, it was not something that would allow communication outside of the desktop session, crossing the privilege boundary. D-Bus OTOH actually was a general solution, real infrastructure of the OS, that was an upgrade to the OS itself, not just another component of an island that a desktop environment was.
You can use DCOP/D-Bus as a good example to underline the point I am making: it's GNOME's success to have changed the infrastructure of the whole OS to a level that somewhat standardized IPC is now available across most of userspace.
Lennart
On Fri, Nov 29, 2013 at 02:18:19PM +0100, Lennart Poettering wrote:
I think it's completely fair to say that previously, we've responded to feedback from this demographic with "well, you're not a general user -- you're a weird special case". What I want is to acknowledge that even after all these years of that, this is still our loyal base, and to make every one of those feel like we are actually directly listening to their concerns (even if they can't all be addressed).
This is just well disguised anti-GNOME FUD. I don't think this is useful at all. You are just trying to turn GNOME into what you personally think that GNOME should be, suggesting it was in some way accepted truth that GNOME would be awful in its current state for admin and technical folks. But that's not accepted truth, that's just your personal opinion. And I certainly disagree with it, and so do many others.
I'm not sure what you're even saying here. I didn't even say the thing you say that I'm "suggesting". I am relaying feedback from the real world, though, and I'd like real-world feedback to be listened to, because that's what Fedora needs.
Is this a matter of just installing the right applications and tools? Maybe. It also involves being responsive to feedback, and testing changes with that audience to make sure that they actually make the experience better as intended, rather than becoming an irritation.
Giving up the goal of creating a desktop product that somewhat comprehensively covers the desktop usecase is just going to make everything worse for everybody. If we do desktop stuff we should do desktop stuff, as in the desktop space the lines where one application area ends and another one starts are much more fluent than on other areas.
This also seems like a non sequitur, so I'll repeat my point and maybee you can say straight up if you disagree: We need to get feedback from and test Fedora desktop user interface design changes from groups of people we identify as important to Fedora, and be responsive to that feedback.
(I'm going to cut out your entire rant about not giving respect to the infrastructure engineering work from the GNOME project. It's simply off base; if I believed what you're saying I do I wouldn't be supportive of having Gnome as the default desktop at all and we wouldn't even be having this conversation.)
Matthew, stay out of my desktop please, it's not your turf.
I don't know where "turf" comes into it, but I'm certainly interested in and will continue to work on improving Fedora across the distribution. Since desktop is an important part of that, I'm going to be involved in this too.
On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 05:34:40PM -0500, Matthew Miller wrote:
I don't think we should aim at the general user, because not only is that nebulous, it has all of those same problems. We should be more specific, but we should also choose a segment where those things aren't serious handicaps.
Remember that we not only need to attract users, we need to attract contributors. Aiming to be a big fish in a small pond won't do that.
On Thu, Nov 28, 2013 at 01:08:34AM +0000, Matthew Garrett wrote:
I don't think we should aim at the general user, because not only is that nebulous, it has all of those same problems. We should be more specific, but we should also choose a segment where those things aren't serious handicaps.
Remember that we not only need to attract users, we need to attract contributors. Aiming to be a big fish in a small pond won't do that.
I agree with the first part. I don't think the analogy helps very much, though. Are you suggesting that we should try to tackle the general desktop market with no particular focus at all?
For the goal of attracting contributors, students, developers, and sysadmins seem like good target groups. As does the "maker" segment. Those collectively aren't a cohesive group with exactly the same needs, but the idea that people have been expressing that _all_ users really need a good solid all-around environment (rather than something über-specialized) answers that. I don't think we need to (or should) narrow the interface so much that it's _limited_ to these users (whatever that would look like), but we should specifically make sure we do testing with and outreach to these groups. And, for that matter, to existing contributors.
On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 08:35:28PM -0500, Matthew Miller wrote:
On Thu, Nov 28, 2013 at 01:08:34AM +0000, Matthew Garrett wrote:
I don't think we should aim at the general user, because not only is that nebulous, it has all of those same problems. We should be more specific, but we should also choose a segment where those things aren't serious handicaps.
Remember that we not only need to attract users, we need to attract contributors. Aiming to be a big fish in a small pond won't do that.
I agree with the first part. I don't think the analogy helps very much, though. Are you suggesting that we should try to tackle the general desktop market with no particular focus at all?
No, I'm suggesting that focusing purely on niche groups is unlikely to attract a sufficient number of contributors to allow us to ever expand beyond that niche. I'm not a sysadmin. I've got no interest in developing an OS that's aimed at sysadmins to the exclusion of others. If I have a limited amount of time, why should I spend it contributing to Fedora rather than a project that's more closely aligned with my interests?
For the goal of attracting contributors, students, developers, and sysadmins seem like good target groups. As does the "maker" segment. Those collectively aren't a cohesive group with exactly the same needs, but the idea that people have been expressing that _all_ users really need a good solid all-around environment (rather than something über-specialized) answers that. I don't think we need to (or should) narrow the interface so much that it's _limited_ to these users (whatever that would look like), but we should specifically make sure we do testing with and outreach to these groups. And, for that matter, to existing contributors.
The one thing in common between all these groups is that they use a desktop operating system. We're going to need to provide a good one of those in order to satisfy them all.
On Wed, 2013-11-27 at 21:30 +0000, Matthew Garrett wrote:
We're only going to provide a satisfactory experience for developers if we also provide a satisfactory experience for casual home users. I guess you can infer that from the target audience saying that it should be usable as the developer's only computer, but I worry that as currently phrased the expectation will be that the user is sufficiently technically aware that we can leave rough edges that would dissuade a non-technical user.
Whose expectation ? Certainly not mine.
Your last sentence ('rough edges that would dissuade a non-technical user') could almost be read as a description of the current Fedora releases.
My expectation is that we will have to put most of the attention on the 'satisfactory experience for casual home users' initially, before we even get to adding any of the 'marketable developer features', as the prd draft calls it.
It has to work first, before you can add bells and whistles.
On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 08:30:51PM -0500, Matthias Clasen wrote:
Your last sentence ('rough edges that would dissuade a non-technical user') could almost be read as a description of the current Fedora releases.
Absolutely. We've done an awful job of providing a cohesive desktop operating system that's usable by mere mortals. I've just reinstalled Windows on my wife's laptop because Fedora had managed to sufficiently fuck up a stable upgrade that even I couldn't get things back into a reasonable state. Fixing that is vital for us to have any kind of user base at all.
My expectation is that we will have to put most of the attention on the 'satisfactory experience for casual home users' initially, before we even get to adding any of the 'marketable developer features', as the prd draft calls it.
If that was expressed in the PRD then I'd be completely happy. I'm not suggesting that satisfying developer requirements is a bad idea, just that describing developers as our primary focus will lead to people assuming that Fedora isn't for them.
It has to work first, before you can add bells and whistles.
Entirely agreed.
On Wed, 2013-11-27 at 19:39 +0000, Matthew Garrett wrote:
On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 02:34:16PM -0500, Máirín Duffy wrote:
See my other post to you. Didn't you experience how, even though there weren't nearly as many software titles available for Mac and how much more popular PCs were, the Mac people were rabidly fanatical about Macs? I mean, it was hard to find a lukewarm / apathetic Mac user. The people who used it loved it. They broadened from that base.
To do that we need an audience who's able to evangelise to a wider base. Are developers going to do that? And if they are, how do we attract them in the first place?
So I've been reading this thread, and I don't have all the answers, but one observation to throw in:
I'm not sure there's that much of a difference between targeting developers and targeting 'casual' users.
In my experience, what a 'developer' wants and what a 'casual user' wants are often quite similar. Often, they both seem principally to want a system that's functional, reliable and stable (in both senses of that overloaded term). I'd say 'developers' and 'casual users' have more in common with each other than either has in common with the 'power user', who wants to install three OSes with five desktops each onto a complex partition layout, be able to pick any of those at the drop of a hat, and change all their configuration settings every Wednesday.
If the elephant in this room is the 'why don't more people use Fedora?' debate, then I think some of the major reasons for that aren't really things we're answering in this discussion at all. My impression is not based on rigorous scientific data, it's based on observation of list/forum/comment thread/irc/etc etc discussions. But if I can be allowed to be a bit immodest I'd say I've done quite a _lot_ of that observation, possibly more than most. I'd summarize the Hive Mind's Opinion Of Fedora as this:
"Fedora? Hey, I like Fedora. They're good guys. We like Red Hat because they're the Good F/OSS Company and Fedora is basically like a beta for Red Hat, right? I wouldn't run it, though. It changes too quickly and breaks things too often and it's kind of a pain to install proprietary stuff on, so why wouldn't I just use Mint or Ubuntu?"
People generally don't have a negative impression of Fedora. They think we're good folks doing good work. But they often don't run Fedora, and the reasons why really do always seem to boil down to the above: too unstable - both in terms of changing things fast and without great documentation, and in terms of our quality bar - and our F/OSS principles are a barrier for pragmatists.
I don't think we could do a lot about the second point; I'm not in favour of compromising our principles, I think there has to be a major distro which doesn't compromise but pushes for proper solutions and I think it's Fedora's natural role to be that distro. But I think Fedora could potentially do more about the first point, and I'm not sure the three product proposal and the discussion this WG is having at the moment really touches on it.
To point out some practical examples of what I'm talking about:
* We migrated to PulseAudio and systemd very early and without anything much in terms of hand-holding for users. We didn't publish a systemd Survival Guide or anything, we just threw it at users and let them figure it out.
* We decided to use GPT disklabels for BIOS system installs for a whole release cycle, pushed the change out despite knowing it caused quite a lot of problems, and then eventually backed it back out again with the next release.
* We replaced the method that's been used for doing Fedora upgrades since Fedora *first existed* with a completely new and incomplete system which was completed sometime after the last possible minute (fedup), with minimal notice to users.
* We've had one or more major change to how we configure how you input characters into the operating system in _every single release_ from Fedora 18 through Fedora 20. This mail would be way too long if I went into the details, but suffice it to say, if you're a Russian or Japanese Fedora user, you probably had a heck of a rollercoaster ride trying to type for the last year and a half.
* We never really make a concerted effort to define baseline functionalities of our OS and consider how they're changing from release to release. This is something a mature, grown-up, 'proper' OS would do. We wouldn't ship two releases in a row with system-config-keyboard not actually working at all, for instance. We would be checking that our OS actually still conforms to our documentation on how to deploy it and how to use it, at each release. There are individual superstars doing their best to keep up with the firehose of changes in these areas, but is it an organized effort that the distro buys into? Does the entity called 'Fedora' consider it important to make sure that, if you download Fedora XX and read the Fedora XX manual about how to do things in Fedora XX, it's actually correct, and we haven't lost or massively changed whole areas of functionality without fixing the documentation and making sure we're not dropping important capabilities? I'm not sure we do.
* Our quality bar is pretty damn low for a 'real' operating system. This is something I think I have a decent feel for as I'm heavily involved in the release validation process. As a QA guy I try to push for the quality bar to be as high as possible, but you get a feel for what 'Fedora' as a whole has as its expectations and you can't really push much higher than that, and what we have is pretty damn low. The installer in Fedora 18 is not something that a project with high standards of quality would ever have released. https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F19_bugs#Installer_screens_sometimes_d... . It took two releases for us to have a consistent story about how updates are supposed to happen, after the partial introduction of offline updates in Fedora 18, F18 and F19 were confusing messes in this area. Our graphical package manager was an acknowledged weak area of the distribution for 10+ releases: to a rough approximation, no-one likes gnome-packagekit, but we're only doing something about it in Fedora 20 (and GNOME Software is a classic Fedora feature: in F20, it's there and it just about manages the most basic functions. But there are all sorts of features it's missing compared to what even gnome-packagekit had. You can't tell how big a package is. You can't configure repositories. There is no longer any graphical configuration of settings like 'should updates be downloaded in the background or not?' This stuff is coming back...in Fedora 21 or 22. Probably.) And so on, and so on. I can pull out as many examples as you like.
When people ask me to describe Fedora's niche, I tend to say that we make a prototype of something that could be a really great operating system a year later. But we never stop and turn it into a really great operating system: instead we introduce another dozen shiny things that aren't quite finished yet and turn out another prototype. We never build a Toyota Corolla, we're perpetually building motor show prototypes - something with all sorts of shiny amazing features that isn't really intended to work satisfactorily in the real world. We're not interested in doing the last 20% of boring work to turn our super-exciting prototype into something Joe Normal will drive to work every day: we just want to keep building more super-exciting prototypes.
This kind of stuff is the reason more people don't use Fedora. If we slowed down our pace of development and improved our documentation and our quality standards, we would likely build something that more people wanted to use...and we wouldn't necessarily need the three-product proposal or the WGs to achieve that. It's something that we could theoretically do under that new model, _or_ under our old model. It's not really a part of the current proposals.
*but*, I'm not saying that's actually what we should do. I quite like building exciting prototypes. Building Corollas probably ain't as much fun. Still, there is an obvious corollary; I think it's vitally important that in any debate which touches on this question, we bear the above in mind. No matter how we re-arrange our deliverables or talk about 'target audiences' and the like, as long as we maintain our current focus on building lots of shiny new things and landing them as soon as we possibly can and releasing often and not sweating the small stuff, we are building prototypes, and we're not going to get a mass user base. So I think it would be a mistake to make decisions as a part of this process based on the idea that we're trying to make Fedora a credible operating system for 'regular folks' *or* for 'developers' who want a stable, reliable operating system more than they want the latest shiny version of absolutely everything, *without* addressing the more fundamental stuff I'm talking about above.
This a thousand times. Thanks Adam.
Why are we targeting developers and home users for a product called Workstation? Workstations are where work gets done, as in the sys admin use can originally prescribed.
Why let the standard Fedora release appeal to developers and home users whom want a fast moving distro and let workstation appeal to those folks wanting something that's not always breaking so they can with confidence deploy it for use in their work environments where work is getting done, like sys admins and the like. On Nov 27, 2013 4:28 PM, "Adam Williamson" awilliam@redhat.com wrote:
On Wed, 2013-11-27 at 19:39 +0000, Matthew Garrett wrote:
On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 02:34:16PM -0500, Máirín Duffy wrote:
See my other post to you. Didn't you experience how, even though there weren't nearly as many software titles available for Mac and how much more popular PCs were, the Mac people were rabidly fanatical about
Macs?
I mean, it was hard to find a lukewarm / apathetic Mac user. The people who used it loved it. They broadened from that base.
To do that we need an audience who's able to evangelise to a wider base. Are developers going to do that? And if they are, how do we attract them in the first place?
So I've been reading this thread, and I don't have all the answers, but one observation to throw in:
I'm not sure there's that much of a difference between targeting developers and targeting 'casual' users.
In my experience, what a 'developer' wants and what a 'casual user' wants are often quite similar. Often, they both seem principally to want a system that's functional, reliable and stable (in both senses of that overloaded term). I'd say 'developers' and 'casual users' have more in common with each other than either has in common with the 'power user', who wants to install three OSes with five desktops each onto a complex partition layout, be able to pick any of those at the drop of a hat, and change all their configuration settings every Wednesday.
If the elephant in this room is the 'why don't more people use Fedora?' debate, then I think some of the major reasons for that aren't really things we're answering in this discussion at all. My impression is not based on rigorous scientific data, it's based on observation of list/forum/comment thread/irc/etc etc discussions. But if I can be allowed to be a bit immodest I'd say I've done quite a _lot_ of that observation, possibly more than most. I'd summarize the Hive Mind's Opinion Of Fedora as this:
"Fedora? Hey, I like Fedora. They're good guys. We like Red Hat because they're the Good F/OSS Company and Fedora is basically like a beta for Red Hat, right? I wouldn't run it, though. It changes too quickly and breaks things too often and it's kind of a pain to install proprietary stuff on, so why wouldn't I just use Mint or Ubuntu?"
People generally don't have a negative impression of Fedora. They think we're good folks doing good work. But they often don't run Fedora, and the reasons why really do always seem to boil down to the above: too unstable - both in terms of changing things fast and without great documentation, and in terms of our quality bar - and our F/OSS principles are a barrier for pragmatists.
I don't think we could do a lot about the second point; I'm not in favour of compromising our principles, I think there has to be a major distro which doesn't compromise but pushes for proper solutions and I think it's Fedora's natural role to be that distro. But I think Fedora could potentially do more about the first point, and I'm not sure the three product proposal and the discussion this WG is having at the moment really touches on it.
To point out some practical examples of what I'm talking about:
- We migrated to PulseAudio and systemd very early and without anything
much in terms of hand-holding for users. We didn't publish a systemd Survival Guide or anything, we just threw it at users and let them figure it out.
- We decided to use GPT disklabels for BIOS system installs for a whole
release cycle, pushed the change out despite knowing it caused quite a lot of problems, and then eventually backed it back out again with the next release.
- We replaced the method that's been used for doing Fedora upgrades
since Fedora *first existed* with a completely new and incomplete system which was completed sometime after the last possible minute (fedup), with minimal notice to users.
- We've had one or more major change to how we configure how you input
characters into the operating system in _every single release_ from Fedora 18 through Fedora 20. This mail would be way too long if I went into the details, but suffice it to say, if you're a Russian or Japanese Fedora user, you probably had a heck of a rollercoaster ride trying to type for the last year and a half.
- We never really make a concerted effort to define baseline
functionalities of our OS and consider how they're changing from release to release. This is something a mature, grown-up, 'proper' OS would do. We wouldn't ship two releases in a row with system-config-keyboard not actually working at all, for instance. We would be checking that our OS actually still conforms to our documentation on how to deploy it and how to use it, at each release. There are individual superstars doing their best to keep up with the firehose of changes in these areas, but is it an organized effort that the distro buys into? Does the entity called 'Fedora' consider it important to make sure that, if you download Fedora XX and read the Fedora XX manual about how to do things in Fedora XX, it's actually correct, and we haven't lost or massively changed whole areas of functionality without fixing the documentation and making sure we're not dropping important capabilities? I'm not sure we do.
- Our quality bar is pretty damn low for a 'real' operating system. This
is something I think I have a decent feel for as I'm heavily involved in the release validation process. As a QA guy I try to push for the quality bar to be as high as possible, but you get a feel for what 'Fedora' as a whole has as its expectations and you can't really push much higher than that, and what we have is pretty damn low. The installer in Fedora 18 is not something that a project with high standards of quality would ever have released.
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F19_bugs#Installer_screens_sometimes_d.... It took two releases for us to have a consistent story about how updates are supposed to happen, after the partial introduction of offline updates in Fedora 18, F18 and F19 were confusing messes in this area. Our graphical package manager was an acknowledged weak area of the distribution for 10+ releases: to a rough approximation, no-one likes gnome-packagekit, but we're only doing something about it in Fedora 20 (and GNOME Software is a classic Fedora feature: in F20, it's there and it just about manages the most basic functions. But there are all sorts of features it's missing compared to what even gnome-packagekit had. You can't tell how big a package is. You can't configure repositories. There is no longer any graphical configuration of settings like 'should updates be downloaded in the background or not?' This stuff is coming back...in Fedora 21 or 22. Probably.) And so on, and so on. I can pull out as many examples as you like.
When people ask me to describe Fedora's niche, I tend to say that we make a prototype of something that could be a really great operating system a year later. But we never stop and turn it into a really great operating system: instead we introduce another dozen shiny things that aren't quite finished yet and turn out another prototype. We never build a Toyota Corolla, we're perpetually building motor show prototypes - something with all sorts of shiny amazing features that isn't really intended to work satisfactorily in the real world. We're not interested in doing the last 20% of boring work to turn our super-exciting prototype into something Joe Normal will drive to work every day: we just want to keep building more super-exciting prototypes.
This kind of stuff is the reason more people don't use Fedora. If we slowed down our pace of development and improved our documentation and our quality standards, we would likely build something that more people wanted to use...and we wouldn't necessarily need the three-product proposal or the WGs to achieve that. It's something that we could theoretically do under that new model, _or_ under our old model. It's not really a part of the current proposals.
*but*, I'm not saying that's actually what we should do. I quite like building exciting prototypes. Building Corollas probably ain't as much fun. Still, there is an obvious corollary; I think it's vitally important that in any debate which touches on this question, we bear the above in mind. No matter how we re-arrange our deliverables or talk about 'target audiences' and the like, as long as we maintain our current focus on building lots of shiny new things and landing them as soon as we possibly can and releasing often and not sweating the small stuff, we are building prototypes, and we're not going to get a mass user base. So I think it would be a mistake to make decisions as a part of this process based on the idea that we're trying to make Fedora a credible operating system for 'regular folks' *or* for 'developers' who want a stable, reliable operating system more than they want the latest shiny version of absolutely everything, *without* addressing the more fundamental stuff I'm talking about above. -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net http://www.happyassassin.net
-- desktop mailing list desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
On 27 November 2013 21:28, Adam Williamson awilliam@redhat.com wrote:
to a rough approximation, no-one likes gnome-packagekit
What a way to be awesome.
GNOME Software is a classic Fedora feature: in F20, it's there and it just about manages the most basic functions.
You know what, I don't know why I bother. Do you know what the alternative is? A developer goes into a cave, and comes out two years later with a finished design and implementation that cannot be changed. Real (not theoretical) users try to use the finished code, and find it unsuitable for X, Y, Z reasons. I thought Fedora was *all about* release early, release often?
If I had 5 people working on software and application management full time we could have done something better than gnome-packagekit years before, and we certainly could have prototyped, designed, implemented and tested a working offline update in less than 6 months. But the reality was that until very recently we had a toxic environment for the package stack with an unstable API that nobody was allowed to alter (remember the debacle with Zif?) and a single person (me) working about one day a week on the whole middleware and UI stack.
Anyway, I best get back to writing confusing code.
Richard
On Thu, 2013-11-28 at 09:01 +0000, Richard Hughes wrote:
On 27 November 2013 21:28, Adam Williamson awilliam@redhat.com wrote:
to a rough approximation, no-one likes gnome-packagekit
What a way to be awesome.
Okay, a bit harsh, but c'mon...it's kinda true. This isn't really your fault, because you're spread so thin you don't have time to make it a really great app (as you note below). I just see it as a consequence of Fedora's dev cycle and resource allocations: we just don't consider it that important to have a great graphical package manager.
GNOME Software is a classic Fedora feature: in F20, it's there and it just about manages the most basic functions.
You know what, I don't know why I bother. Do you know what the alternative is? A developer goes into a cave, and comes out two years later with a finished design and implementation that cannot be changed. Real (not theoretical) users try to use the finished code, and find it unsuitable for X, Y, Z reasons. I thought Fedora was *all about* release early, release often?
If I had 5 people working on software and application management full time we could have done something better than gnome-packagekit years before, and we certainly could have prototyped, designed, implemented and tested a working offline update in less than 6 months. But the reality was that until very recently we had a toxic environment for the package stack with an unstable API that nobody was allowed to alter (remember the debacle with Zif?) and a single person (me) working about one day a week on the whole middleware and UI stack.
Anyway, I best get back to writing confusing code.
Sorry, Richard, I was hoping the mail wouldn't read that way to someone involved in one of the things I highlighted as 'prototype' examples, because that wasn't my intent. I debated including a sideline on this, but decided against it because it would make an already-long mail even longer. Still, obviously I should have done, so here it is. I saw this as kind of a subtext to my mail, but obviously it wasn't clear enough.
The things I identified as examples of Fedora's prototype-y approach were _just that_: examples of the prototype-y approach. I didn't intend to suggest that they were Objectively Bad Things, or that the people involved in doing those things made the wrong decisions or were incompetent. I actually agree precisely with what you wrote above, Richard - "I thought Fedora was *all about* release early, release often?" - and the point I was trying to convey with my mail is that I think Fedora is actually _intentionally_ this kind of 'prototype project', and I don't think that's inherently a bad thing...but it's a major reason why we don't get more 'mass market' / 'regular' users, and we have to be aware of that. The goals of 'have an aggressive release cycle, develop big new features and release them as early as possible, generally push the envelope' and 'develop a mass user base' are at least to an extent mutually exclusive.
Again, though, I'm not trying to suggest that I think we don't know what we're doing, or that the prototype approach is the wrong approach. My _personal_ opinion is actually that the prototype approach is a good, useful and interesting thing for Fedora to be doing, and we should think very hard before moving away from it.
So again, sorry to give the wrong impression, and I wasn't actually trying to suggest that I think we should have landed GNOME Software later or worked harder on GPK in the last few years or whatever. That wasn't the intent of bringing up that example. I was just trying to highlight that we need to make sure all our thinking is joined-up: it doesn't necessarily make sense for this group to be having this PRD discussion which (at least by my reading) seems informed by a desire to broaden the Fedora user base without considering this question of Fedora's 'prototype' approach. And if we all agree that the 'prototype' nature of Fedora is a key part of Fedora's identity that we want to retain, we need to recognize that that places significant limitations on our ability to go in some of the directions this whole three-product-proposal appears to be heading.
As I said, I actually quite enjoy the prototype approach and think it is a good thing, long term, for the whole ecosystem. If there wasn't a project like Fedora which pushes the envelope, pushes out new technologies quickly and provides a nearly-stable environment to whack them all against each other and see where the sparks fly, I think that would be bad for the ecosystem: it would slow down development and cause more friction between developers trying to push new stuff and a relatively conservative set of distros trying to provide a stable user-friendly experience. I think by being the envelope-pushing distro, Fedora provides a valuable service to _everyone_. But being that distro comes with consequences that we have to keep in mind.
Releasing Fedora 20 with GNOME Software in its current state is exactly the right call for Fedora-as-I-see-it, Fedora the 'prototype project'. It's the classic example of what Fedora does; we put it out there as early as possible, and that helps us work out the kinks. It would be the wrong call for Fedora-as-an-attempt-to-build-a-credible-end-user-OS, and that's why I brought it up in a specific context in my original email, because I was kinda invoking hypotheticals. But I don't want to suggest it's a bad project or F20 shouldn't include it or anyone's making bad calls, because I don't think that.
On Wed, 2013-11-27 at 13:28 -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
[ replying to old mail here - catching up from Thanksgiving ]
[ ... lots of accurate case studies elided ... ]
When people ask me to describe Fedora's niche, I tend to say that we make a prototype of something that could be a really great operating system a year later. But we never stop and turn it into a really great operating system: instead we introduce another dozen shiny things that aren't quite finished yet and turn out another prototype. We never build a Toyota Corolla, we're perpetually building motor show prototypes - something with all sorts of shiny amazing features that isn't really intended to work satisfactorily in the real world. We're not interested in doing the last 20% of boring work to turn our super-exciting prototype into something Joe Normal will drive to work every day: we just want to keep building more super-exciting prototypes.
This kind of stuff is the reason more people don't use Fedora. If we slowed down our pace of development and improved our documentation and our quality standards, we would likely build something that more people wanted to use...and we wouldn't necessarily need the three-product proposal or the WGs to achieve that. It's something that we could theoretically do under that new model, _or_ under our old model. It's not really a part of the current proposals.
*but*, I'm not saying that's actually what we should do. I quite like building exciting prototypes. Building Corollas probably ain't as much fun. Still, there is an obvious corollary; I think it's vitally important that in any debate which touches on this question, we bear the above in mind. No matter how we re-arrange our deliverables or talk about 'target audiences' and the like, as long as we maintain our current focus on building lots of shiny new things and landing them as soon as we possibly can and releasing often and not sweating the small stuff, we are building prototypes, and we're not going to get a mass user base. So I think it would be a mistake to make decisions as a part of this process based on the idea that we're trying to make Fedora a credible operating system for 'regular folks' *or* for 'developers' who want a stable, reliable operating system more than they want the latest shiny version of absolutely everything, *without* addressing the more fundamental stuff I'm talking about above.
I think this is what the three-product WGs are all about, I'm afraid: Getting away from continuous distraction by the next shiny thing, move the quality threshold way up, and deliver products instead of prototypes.
On Tue, 2013-12-03 at 09:10 -0500, Matthias Clasen wrote:
On Wed, 2013-11-27 at 13:28 -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
[ replying to old mail here - catching up from Thanksgiving ]
[ ... lots of accurate case studies elided ... ]
When people ask me to describe Fedora's niche, I tend to say that we make a prototype of something that could be a really great operating system a year later. But we never stop and turn it into a really great operating system: instead we introduce another dozen shiny things that aren't quite finished yet and turn out another prototype. We never build a Toyota Corolla, we're perpetually building motor show prototypes - something with all sorts of shiny amazing features that isn't really intended to work satisfactorily in the real world. We're not interested in doing the last 20% of boring work to turn our super-exciting prototype into something Joe Normal will drive to work every day: we just want to keep building more super-exciting prototypes.
This kind of stuff is the reason more people don't use Fedora. If we slowed down our pace of development and improved our documentation and our quality standards, we would likely build something that more people wanted to use...and we wouldn't necessarily need the three-product proposal or the WGs to achieve that. It's something that we could theoretically do under that new model, _or_ under our old model. It's not really a part of the current proposals.
*but*, I'm not saying that's actually what we should do. I quite like building exciting prototypes. Building Corollas probably ain't as much fun. Still, there is an obvious corollary; I think it's vitally important that in any debate which touches on this question, we bear the above in mind. No matter how we re-arrange our deliverables or talk about 'target audiences' and the like, as long as we maintain our current focus on building lots of shiny new things and landing them as soon as we possibly can and releasing often and not sweating the small stuff, we are building prototypes, and we're not going to get a mass user base. So I think it would be a mistake to make decisions as a part of this process based on the idea that we're trying to make Fedora a credible operating system for 'regular folks' *or* for 'developers' who want a stable, reliable operating system more than they want the latest shiny version of absolutely everything, *without* addressing the more fundamental stuff I'm talking about above.
I think this is what the three-product WGs are all about, I'm afraid: Getting away from continuous distraction by the next shiny thing, move the quality threshold way up, and deliver products instead of prototypes.
Well if that's where people want to go, it's where they want to go. But in that case, I'd suggest we'd need to discuss the stuff I raised: fiddling around the edges of product definitions and target audiences and our exact set of deliverables is all well and good, but as long as we have the Change policies, release cycle, approach to 'stability', and quality tolerances we're currently sporting, we're not going to be building viable products.
Personally I'd be a bit sad to start building Ford Focuses, and I do worry about the long-term implications of there no longer being a major distro with a large number of associated talented upstream developers where you can do big change fast. But it's certainly a choice we can make.
On Tue, Dec 03, 2013 at 08:14:34AM -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
Getting away from continuous distraction by the next shiny thing, move the quality threshold way up, and deliver products instead of prototypes.
Well if that's where people want to go, it's where they want to go. But in that case, I'd suggest we'd need to discuss the stuff I raised: fiddling around the edges of product definitions and target audiences and our exact set of deliverables is all well and good, but as long as we have the Change policies, release cycle, approach to 'stability', and quality tolerances we're currently sporting, we're not going to be building viable products.
+1 to discussing all of those things. This process is just one aspect of the whole conversation.
Personally I'd be a bit sad to start building Ford Focuses, and I do worry about the long-term implications of there no longer being a major distro with a large number of associated talented upstream developers where you can do big change fast. But it's certainly a choice we can make.
I don't really know my cars, but I don't think Ford Focus is what we want to go for in any case.
I'm confident that we can make big change available quickly without being so disruptive to users. We need more than just the three-products approach to do that, though. (This is a conversation to take back to the main devel list. And probably after the F20 release crunch is through.)
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On 11/27/2013 01:32 PM, Matthew Garrett wrote:
On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 01:29:02PM -0500, Josh Boyer wrote:
There needs to be focus. Where that focus is can surely be up for debate, but I'd rather not just drive Workstation into irrelevance by not learning from our past mistakes. We can't focus on everything or we'll wind up gaining nothing.
Who do other desktop operating systems target?
Nobody seems to know who Microsoft is targeting these days with Windows 8.
Apple is targeting the casual user with the iPad and the graphic designer with the Mac.
Ubuntu is ostensibly targeting the casual user as well.
On 11/27/2013 01:32 PM, Matthew Garrett wrote:
On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 01:29:02PM -0500, Josh Boyer wrote:
There needs to be focus. Where that focus is can surely be up for debate, but I'd rather not just drive Workstation into irrelevance by not learning from our past mistakes. We can't focus on everything or we'll wind up gaining nothing.
Who do other desktop operating systems target?
Didn't Windows used to target the type of people who built their own PC out of parts from PC catalogs, whereas Macs targeted the type of people who didn't want to open up a hardware case?
I mean, it's kind of hard to talk about who other desktops target now, because so much time has passed. E.g. I think the Alan Cooper method of explaining this was to say that rolling luggage was not designed for everybody. It was specifically designed for flight crew only. It came to be that it was a widely-useful design and is probably the most common type of luggage used by air travelers today. So now of course when you go build a rolling luggage set you'll not be targeting just flight crew, but that's because the initial focused design was successful beyond its initial target user.
Again, roughly paraphrasing Alan Cooper:
It's better to target and make 20% of the market 90%+ happy with your product rather than target 100% of the market and have them 20% happy with your product.
I think when you focus finely and create a high level of satisfaction with that finely-scoped initial target, you can then expand. To expand before you've really gotten that initial success makes the entire process more difficult and success less likely.
~m
On Wed, 27 Nov 2013 18:32:54 +0000 Matthew Garrett mjg59@srcf.ucam.org wrote:
Who do other desktop operating systems target?
Everyone basically, from Granny to Grandchild. And a myriad of Devs in between Microsoft gives full Developer Studio (free beer) to students at recognised 3rd level Colleges here in Ireland
The College I dropped out from (falling asleep in class) I was told quite firmly "You will never be able to use Linux for real work"
On Wed, Nov 27, 2013 at 01:29:02PM -0500, Josh Boyer wrote:
Case: Systems Administrator This is a _very_ important constituency for Fedora in general and Fedora desktop in specific, and the needs aren't subsumed by the other cases. Please don't leave this group out.
So here's the problem. We currently have: CS Student Developer DevOps Corporate Developer then people want to add:
SysAdmin (which is explicitly mentioned in Other Users already) General Student General desktop user Designer/Content creator
If you group all of those together, they could be summed up as:
Well, that's because you're including the "general" cases. I think that's too broad, but I also think having _just_ developers as the four target use cases is far too narrow.
On 11/27/13, 1:29 PM, Josh Boyer wrote:
Corporate Developer
...
"Someone who (1) is voluntarily switching to Linux,
Just to be complete, I force people to use Fedora. If you are a "Red Hat" flavor shop and you need an up to date Linux workstation, you force people to use Fedora. I have users how would rather have a different distro, but maintaining a "bring your own distro" environment would be insane.
Cheers, Jimmy
On Mon, 25 Nov 2013 13:59:06 +0100 Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller cschalle@redhat.com wrote:
After having read the thread so far. Fedora is morphing from a distro to an OS platform, based on Gnome N(N+)
Hope this doesn't sound too far off topic.
1: Will Gnome then be proffered to non-Fedora distros, 2: or will Gnome (Upstream) in effect be Fedora OS.
Because if 1:, what incentive is there for "new" people to try Fedora OS, as they can carry on with foo distro.
On Mon, 2013-12-02 at 11:40 +0000, Frank Murphy wrote:
On Mon, 25 Nov 2013 13:59:06 +0100 Christian Fredrik Kalager Schaller cschalle@redhat.com wrote:
After having read the thread so far. Fedora is morphing from a distro to an OS platform, based on Gnome N(N+)
Hope this doesn't sound too far off topic.
1: Will Gnome then be proffered to non-Fedora distros, 2: or will Gnome (Upstream) in effect be Fedora OS.
Because if 1:, what incentive is there for "new" people to try Fedora OS, as they can carry on with foo distro.
In my post I was using GNOME as an example of things, but it wasn't intended to make it sound like it was the only one that mattered. I'd characterize the two approaches I discussed in my reply to Marcel as 'the distribution is the product' vs. 'the distribution is the platform'. In the second case, you can see different desktops as each defining the 'user interaction' layer of different products, which can all be implemented on the platform called Fedora.
desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org