Hi Everyone, As I mentioned in the council meeting yesterday, I wrote up a draft shortly after Og's initial call for comments, but just like a few others of you I decided to wait a bit to make sure that I had had the time to properly distill the points I wanted to make.
As it happens, my draft is mostly a cross section of Stephanie's and Antonio's replies, so here goes. On Fri, 2009-06-19 at 11:07 -0400, Stephanie Watson wrote: > I have waited to give my thoughts on this because I wanted to carefully word > my response to be as useful as possible. > > LAYER 1 of 2... the non-technical end-user, and the easy out-of-box > experience: > > One of the original goals of Foresight was to ensure a clean and simple > desktop with the latest versions of some cool open source software for using > the Internet, doing office work, listening to music, watching video, and > just generally ensuring that "your desktop should be cool." This applies to > even the most non-technical audience who needs an easy-to-use out-of-box > experience that is also easy to maintain. I would prefer that continue to > be our target audience from the desktop perspective. > Just to recap: Antonio argues that we need to cater as much as possible to developers. I happen to agree because I, too, believe that we really need to think about how to grow our developer base. To address Stephanie's point, I assert that developers also care about their desktop being cool (I should think that this was Ken's original goal?) - they just care about the aesthetics in *all* aspects of the desktop, including stuff that might not be immediately obvious (or visible) to the casual user. For instance I think it might be instructive to pause for a moment and consider that some of our developers also run Mac OS X on their computers, *precisely* because OS X gives them a cool, clean and elegant 'just works' environment which also happens to be of high quality under the hood. In other words: Focusing on creating a clean and cool desktop out of the box is not exactly going to be a hindrance to getting new developers on board. If anything, the subset of developers that I outlined above are _more_ sensitive to their desktop being cool than what Stephanie labels 'the most non-technical audience'. And developers are also likely to appreciate that their Linux system is easy to maintain. If not, they'd probably be using Gentoo or Arch Linux (i.e. tinkerers' Linux distributions) in the first place as someone already mentioned. > Conary is its own animal. One thing I have been wanting to do, but just not > had sufficient time to do, is further develop the project I started at > conaryuncorked.org: provide all levels of instructional material for both > maintaining a Conary-based system and for packaging software to be installed > and managed by Conary. > > Does fedoraproject.org primarily promote RPM and YUM? Does ubuntu.com dive > into the advantages of APT? Even though Conary is the key reason that > Foresight is "teh @\/\/350|V|3" for us, trying that to a non-technical > end-user that they should use Foresight because of Conary. It is as > convincing as saying that you should fly Delta airlines because they run on > pixie dust. (Just trust us! The pixie dust is awesome! You'll love it!) > > ACTION SUGGESTION: Make sure the first page a user lands on at > foresightlinux.org spins Foresight as "easier to maintain, and always has > the latest versions of your applications thanks to innovative underlying > technology not available in other desktop OSes." In this way, you have > conveyed the features of Conary that make Foresight so great, but you have > not assumed instant trust in the word "Conary." > I conditionally agree with this action suggestion. As an experiment, I even tried my hand at writing up such a page for the CMS evaluation on TForsman's Joomla! site. I think that we definitely need to put the user at centre stage first and foremost, and I agree that we need to do so without immediately flying the geek colours. And per my argument above, I see us aiming primarily at the slightly more mature and sophisticated geek (how's that for a contradiction in terms? :)), which leads me to... > LAYER 2 of 2... the Linux enthusiast ready to go deeper: > > Naturally, as Linux enthusiasts, after the new and shiny has worn off of a > new distro experience, we are ready to break it apart and bend it to our > will. For this, I think all of you are on the right track, though we have > to be careful to add the knowledge in layers instead of tossing the think > "Conary" book at them. Here's where I think my conaryuncorked.org project > can come into play; if you think this is a useful project, I will dive into > it more in the coming weeks. > > ACTION SUGGESTION: From the front page of foresightlinux.org, let's keep it > even simpler than before, kind of like Fedora has done at fedoraproject.org. > Besides the main page, have a "Downloads" page and a "Get Help" page that > address the same audience as the main page, but then have a single page that > is the "Linux Geeks Guide to Foresight." That single geek intro page can > lead to the wiki and other resources that dive into the technical realm. > Let's face it: To a technology enthusiast and in particular a Linux technology enthusiast, Conary is just a hair's breadth away from being dead sexy (yes, some will indeed hold it against it that it is coded in - not Ruby - but Python, that favourite language of all Captain Sensibles). And yes, that's definitely a statement coming from a geek and targeting other geeks :). If we aim to catch the more experienced, sophisticated and mature geek (i.e. a prospective Foresight developer), I think conaryuncorked.org pushes all the right buttons - straight from the URL and onwards. And since I was the one who suggested that Stephanie take a look at the fedoraproject website, it barely needs mentioning that I completely agree with her suggested approach to sections. > I think if we go toward this two-layer kind of system, we can ensure each > goal addresses one or both of these audiences, and we can balance that over > time. If, by some chance, Ubuntu decides to abandon its Debian roots and > embrace Conary... well, Foresight will no longer be competitive for the > first-layer audience described here. In the meantime, though, I don't want > to forget them, especially since Foresight may be their introduction to > Linux in general. I think that, above all, we should heed Paul Cutler's advice and strive to be realistic and honest about where we stand and what we presently have to offer, before we decide what we would aspire to be. In my draft, I argue that we simply do not have the resources to do the usability and support work that Ubuntu can do as a direct consequence of them having a millionaire backer. And I will stick to that assessment, in that I honestly think that Foresight is perhaps not the obvious choice for a Linux newcomer. And this is because it is pretty obvious to me (and I've heard similar sentiments from a few others in the community as well during IRC discussions) that as soon as something breaks (and it currently tends to), users are mostly left to their own devices - not by ill will, but by the chronic lack of manpower that is the trademark of a small community distribution. I know this, because I've been there myself. My response was to try to be active, to ask questions, and to contribute documentation and try to make Foresight better, because I *do* have prior Linux experience, just no Conary experience. And to /really/ appreciate Foresight, I assert that one has to delve into its underpinnings, which is basically all Conary. And if you have no interest or appreciation of technology, why would you want to learn even the basics necessary to appreciate Conary? > > So there you go... some of my thoughts... responses? > > -Stef > There you have it. I think the goal of supporting end users is a worthy, and, if not naïve (naïve is really too strong of a word in this case), then at least ultimately a slightly unrealistic goal. There are other distributions (notably Ubuntu) which, due to the resources at their disposal, are in a vastly better position than us to do just that. But that's not to say that we can't stay friendly to new users and focus on 'clean', 'cool' and 'just works'. I just think that we would do well to embrace the mantra of 'truth in advertising' as someone on IRC put it and be honest with our users and tell them up front that we aim to empower them rather than cuddle them, and that they need to be willing to actively help themselves and become a part of the community if they wish to get the full benefit of what 'we', the people who make Foresight Linux what it is, have to offer. Our side of the bargain is that we adopt a commitment to quality: In our processes, in the software we choose to package, in how we present Foresight and in our user and developer documentation. And finally, we should perhaps also ask ourselves if we are innovators or integrators. Yes, we are forward looking, and yes, we are quality conscious and like to stay just a little bit ahead of the curve. But innovators? Presently, we're very close to upstream, because frankly we cannot afford not to be. To me at least, that clearly points towards 'integrate' rather than 'innovate'. I any case, I sincerely hope that we stay cool. -ermo _______________________________________________ Foresight-devel mailing list Foresight-devel@lists.rpath.org http://lists.rpath.org/mailman/listinfo/foresight-devel
