Karsten 'quaid' Wade escribió:
One thing I kept reading in recent time on fedoraforum.org is how much
of a disconnect people felt between the marketing message for F9 and the
reality. "If they had just said it's a beta X.org and beta KDE, suck it
up, it would have been easier. But they invited all these new users
with slick shiny promises and let them down."
I'm going to try to address this head-on in the release documentation,
with sections that highlight potential and known problems. I'm not sure
what to do about the marketing message except to note that we don't want
to undermine our success through over-hype.
- Karsten
This absolutely is a problem... One that even us, old time Fedora users
and would-be-contributors have had (or still have) with the system in
one way or another. Personally I have been having a hard time with
relatives and friends regarding Fedora 9. It is undeniable that there
have been all sorts of problems with this particular release, but the
main problem is that most of the people experiencing the problems don't
necessarily file bug reports about them, and even when they seem to know
how to, some people would simply say that reporting bugs seems to be a
complex process (especially the follow up of issues).
I had this experience with a friend of mine, we both bought the very
same laptop model pretty much at the same time and she *demanded* that I
installed Fedora in it (she's fond of Fedora, as when I first introduced
her to Fedora and offered her to install it on her computer, she
basically told me to install whatever I was using so I could lend a
helping hand whenever she needed one). At any rate, I installed Fedora 8
on our computers (x86_64 on mine, i386 on hers, as she makes heavy use
of stuff like Flash and other programs through, or that are 32-bit
exclusively, which even though can run on x86_64, some times one has to
jump through hoops to get them right), but soon after Fedora 9 was
released, she downloaded the LiveCD for Fedora 9 and wiped out Fedora 8
from her HDD and started to have all sorts of problems. By that time, a
bit before she actually had done that I had downloaded and installed
Fedora 9 (again x86_64) on mine and actually got see first hand many of
the problems she was experiencing. I offered her to help her get her
data onto a backup and reinstall Fedora 8, and so we did. Later I asked
her if she reported any of the bugs she found (few of them were
substantially different than mine) and she simply replied "No, it seemed
too cumbersome". Later that very same day, we started to experience a
problem on her machine with Totem and audio CDs (Totem was crashing,
bringing up Bug-Buddy), and she told me something I have though of ever
since I knew about Bug-Buddy "Why can't Fedora [Bug-Buddy, actually]
work with regular e-mail addresses. Every time I try to send a report
that this program shows up, I seem to require to be running some sort of
mail server". I have thought that very same thing a few times in the
past with regards to Bug-Buddy as even if it is very helpful, and you
can even save the trace and much of the "report" it generates, people
(me included) tend to simply let it slip. It would be great if somehow
Bug-Buddy could be tuned to report bugs directly to bugzilla.redhat.com
rather than upstream gnome, and integrate it with other programs (KDE
programs, even).
Another issue people seem to have with bug reporting is "searching".
More often than not, when some of my friends or family actually is going
to report a bug, they keep saying that they can't find a bug report that
matches their criteria, and in one occasion someone said "I was looking
for just THAT in bugzilla the other day!" (speaking about a bug we both
encounterd), and when I inquired him of the result, he said "I found one
report about it, and long discussion about it", and when I asked him if
the chimed in to confirm the bug was still there (after apparently a few
updates), he simply said "No, it was already reported, anyway". This is
to some point the main issue I see with people (regular users) with
regards to bug reports and problems they encounter with the
distribution. Like some other posters on this thread, I have also people
tell me that they have stopped using Fedora due to a problem (curiously
enough the most common problem seems to be with regards to printers, at
least of those who actually TELL ME, which is, of course the main
problem). More often than I'd like to, I have to act as a proxy for bug
reports, the problem is that since I do not have the issue itself, and
can't reproduce it on my system (due to version or architecture
discrepancy), the feedback I can provide in bugzilla (or upstream) is
rather limited.
I'm aware there is no easy or simple solution for this problem (lack of
bug reporting), and that this may involve maybe too much effort to
correct over time and through many releases... One possible way (and I
really hate myself to bring this up) I have thought of is to have some
sort of "interactive demo tour" for new users, as it is present in other
operating systems. Through this method it would actually be possible to
have more people actually know about many of the features and possibly
how to deal with problems (where and how to seek help, reporting bugs,
etc). I know there is a "tours" SIG and project within Fedora, and there
are also video-tours of many of the highlights and features for each
release (I think this started with FC6)... Now, my idea is basically
have one of the "screens" of First Boot with a list of videos showcasing
that particular release. The videos would obviously be those from the
Tours project, and we wouldn't have to worry about proprietary codecs or
what not, as they would be already in a free format. However, this
imposes a series of prerequisites that may be hard to meet: Have the
content at release date (the hardest to do!), be able to somehow
internationalize it (could be possible through the use of external
subtitle files, trying to avoid speech in the videos, and only relying
on the subs to get the message), add the feature to First Boot ideally
embedding into the "page" the video player with series of "links" bellow
indicating the different features... And this is where things can get
difficult, as the content (the videos) cannot be bundled with the LiveCD
images (they'd add too much to the images). The way I see it is to have
the videos in a package readily available on the DVD images, and
downloadable in the LiveCD installer, this should also be completely
optional, as not everybody has broad band internet access (and very
likely the videos would amount to at least a couple hundred megabytes),
so they may be installed at user action and request. I'm aware this
would be a very ambitious project and feature to have in Fedora, and
maybe not all that worth for the semestral release of the distribution,
but is something I have been thinking for Fedora for quite a long time
in an effort to improve communication of features to end-users, and
serving the alternate purpose of also being an educational tool for
users not all that familiar with Linux in general and Fedora in particular.
--
Fedora-marketing-list mailing list
Fedora-marketing-list@redhat.com
https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-marketing-list
