[Mageia-discuss] Mageia logo proposals and selection

J.A. Magallón jamagallon at ono.com
Thu Oct 14 11:10:33 CEST 2010


On Thu, 14 Oct 2010 15:37:29 +1300, Graham Lauder <yorick_ at openoffice.org> wrote:

> On Thursday 14 Oct 2010 14:18:02 Tux99 wrote:
> > I'm with wobo and Margot here, I fear this 'targeting' will simply result
> > in restricting our potential user-base (i.e. rather than attracting more
> > users it will turn off many users).
> 
> It is a well known fact, that you cannot be all things to all people, to try 
> to do that would end up being everything to noone.  I would prefer to be the 
> best we can be to those who grow to love the brand.  
> 

Wrong, from my POV.
Its Linux. Linux has it all. You just have to choose what you want in
your install, desktop software, server software or both.

An example. Our admins at the university choose CentOS as their distro
for labs and servers. CentOS is marketed as a RHEL derivative, focused
on server and stability. Why CentOS ? Its RHEL but with free
support. What about desktop software ? Its generally outated. What
about HW support ? Same. CentOS people patches their soft, but what
do you prefer, a home patched ancient kernel or an updated one with the real
official and tested fixes ? If they wanted the best of both worlds
they could choose Mandriva for labs desktops and CentOS for servers,
if they are so fond of CentOS as server. But noooone wants to admin two
linux distros.

But me, I have always intalled Mandriva both for desktops and for servers.
Reasons:
- I had the best hw support
- I had updated software
- It is stable
- I could use the SAME distro (even the same CD) to install a desktop
  box for development, for office work, or a server with samba and ldap
  and apache, or a HPC cluster with openmpi.

Why ? I know Mandriva, I know it has all the soft that I need for all
fields, and yes, ONE SIZE FITS ALL my meeds. But that is because I
know Mandriva. Why Mandriva has no fame in the big picture of
servers ? Because someone marketed it time ago as a desktop distro.
But as a server is much better than any CentOS or Ubuntu out there.
But nobody knows...

Lets suppose the marketing decissions focus Mageia on desktop, and there
is no effort in packaging things like MPI, the latest version of gcc,
or no cluster filesystem. I don't want to use two distros. I don't like
to go to external repos (like one has to do in CentOS) to get some
common software, or a decently updated version of common things.
I would have to look for another option. Now I like Mandriva because
it has _all_ the _latest_ things I need.

> That's the difference.  In these days of online build services there is 
> arguably no reason that we could not create different package sets on 
> different media for different markets and completely different branding for 
> each set.
> 

I would not do the branding part. That's like using Ubuntu for desktops
and RHEL for servers. It becomes using two different distros in the end.
And usually people don't like that.

> How many users does Mandriva have worldwide, compare that to the number of 
> computer users and you will see that the "one size fits all" does not equal 
> significant market share.   

Two examples (from what I have seen, I know its not the general rule...):
- Fedora/Ubuntu users: I want a modern desktop. I don't mind 'bout my
  samba being modern and hit some recent obscure undisclosed bug.
- RHEL/CentOS: I want a 3 years old samba, tested and debugged.
  I don't mind about firefox being still 3.0.

Why can't we have a distro that says 'Here you have the latest stable server
software, with the latest hardware kernel support, all packed under the
best looking desktop ever!!!'. Is it hard to do ? Mandriva community was doing.

No focus, state clearly you have all and user just have to choose.
For each interest group, just say 'what do you want, what do you need...
here it is!'.

Just my POV...

-- 
J.A. Magallon <jamagallon()ono!com>     \               Software is like sex:
                                         \         It's better when it's free


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