Hey all, long time no see
On the Fedora front I was busy doing marketing stuff for the Fedora 11 release. Overall, it went pretty well, it was a great release day and we had quite a lot of good press. Part of this job is also to follow user comments on all the websites we publish news to, on my side this means all the major French speaking IT websites. Doing this, I could see a few tendencies:
- People don’t have a clue which Fedora spin to download (KDE, Gnome, x86, x86-64 …), the actual download page REALLY confuses a lot of people. Too much choice seems to kill the choice.
- In the same vein, I’ve seen a lot of comments regarding the Live CD’s…comments like “Why does Fedora start to propose LiveCD’s as the primary installation source instead of the normal installation DVD?”.
Rant: I don’t have much to say on this front, but I don’t think it helps Fedora to multiply the installation medias in an exponential way (Note: specialized spins are something else). Personally I don’t like LiveCD’s because they are slow and have very few “cool” software on them due to space requirements, this defeats the “showcase for new users” argument. Anyway. the download page is broken IMO. Why do we provide a “Desktop Edition” and a “KDE Desktop Edition”? Shouldn’t we have a single “Desktop Edition” link pointing to a choice between Gnome and KDE? Or clearly put “Gnome Desktop Edition” and “KDE Desktop Edition” on the front page? Is KDE a second class citizen? How do you expect a new user to do the right choice?
Couldn’t we have some kind of “choice list” instead? A bit like Ubuntu/OpenSuse do:

We could help people chose the right installation media this way, by providing defaults and clearly explain the options. Wouldn’t it be clearer than having KDE and PowerPC links on the right side of http://fedoraproject.org/get-fedora ?
If you have anything to say about the way we marketed Fedora 11, please give feedback to the marketing group! You can leave a comment here, I’ll forward it. This really helps us.