Archive for June, 2009

Steam available on Linux soon?

Friday, June 19th, 2009

There have been rumours about Linux support in Steam for months, but yesterday a friend pointed me at http://store.steampowered.com/app/900804/

If you look at the bottom of the page, you’ll see this:

linux-steam

So, if it’s not a typo, we could have a pretty good surprise soon :)

Fedora 11 Retrospective Meeting

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009

Yesterday, the Fedora 11 Retrospective Meeting was held, I had the chance to be invited there as a member of the Marketing group. This meeting, done by phone, was a cross-group talk to see what went well and not so well during the Fedora 11 release cycle.  The goal is to gather feedback so we can learn from our errors to create an even better Fedora 12. People from the Ambassador group, Fedora Board, Design team, Marketing team, Documentation team, FESCo, Infrastructure team, Quality Insurance team, Release Engineering, Translation team and Website team were present, everyone had around 5 minutes to talk.

I found it very useful even if I didn’t talk too much; Jack, the Marketing team leader, did a good job of saying what needed to be said on our side :p

Long story short, it looks like Fedora 12 will be a “stabilization” release compared to Fedora 11. The main demands could be summed up with:

  • A longer freeze period before release would be nice.
  • More features need to be tested by QA.
  • Testing periods should be longer.
  • Last minute features should be pushed to rawhide for the next release instead of being squeezed in the current cycle.
  • A better communication between groups is needed.
  • In every group, more feedback is needed.

Watches

Saturday, June 13th, 2009

As a good Swiss guy, I like watches (clichés, clichés), but after a while you get a bit tired of always wearing the same one. So you begin to look around for a second watch, and a third, and so on…It’s really hard to tell WHY you always want new watches just to see the time. Isn’t a 10$ plastic watch enough some may think? Well, no :D

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Fedora marketing feedback

Saturday, June 13th, 2009

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:

choicelist

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.