It might be useful to seed the process of finding out what people want by putting together a survey form. Put all of the features you think people might want on it, and let them assign a weight to each. Also allow net features to be added to the list, to seed new ideas. It would also be helpful to set up discussion groups specific to each feature to allow discourse among the community members interested in that particular feature. The appropriate software developers could more easily monitor a specific discussion than a general one . The mail list format only goes so far, and has several drawbacks. Past threads can be hard to get to among all the new postings, and the free-for -all aspect of mingling topics makes it hard to focus on interesting information. Take a look at www.photo.net for a look at how useful discussion groups can be. Now, for my personal opinion of mandrake: (like I'm sure your dying to hear it : -) ) Of the distro's I've installed and tested, Mandrake is the best in several respects. It has the best install, good looking desktops, and a nice variety of app' s and utilities. It does fall short on quality control issues. Too many bugs that never get fixed. Also, too little info in the form of FAQ's is available to an interested user. Stability issues sent me to explore Linux, and stability is still an important issue to me. I think more time should be spent fixing bugs than stuffing more half-implimented apps into a distro. I also think that developers should spend some time testing their product for usability before moving on to other projects. A little polish would go a long way in winning over the public to Linux. You guys are doing a great job overall, but you need to take some vacation time! There is much more to life than computers and computing. All artists need to spend some time getting life experience if they are to become masters. Regards, Marc Sitkin
