[Mageia-discuss] Mageia logo proposals and selection

Frank Griffin ftg at roadrunner.com
Thu Oct 14 12:55:26 CEST 2010


Graham Lauder wrote:
>
> 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.  
>   
I think you may be getting tarred with a brush you don't deserve.  The
pushback you're getting from technical people on this issue is very
likely fallout from the way Mandriva handled this issue.

Most technical people couldn't care less what logo or color scheme you
use.  But Mandriva pushed the philosophy of "let's be the newbie distro"
down to the design level, often hiding or eliminating more advanced
functions, obfuscating internal operations, and offering only
unnecessarily limited/simplified choices. 

So we ended up with a menu scheme that was counterintuitive to most
Linux users, a situation where you could install a package and find that
there was no menu entry created for it because it was a KDE package and
you were using GNOME, or because somebody decided for you that newbies
wouldn't use it so it wasn't worth cluttering the menu.  We confused the
hell out of people by making the default package choice in rpmdrake
"packages with GUI" because somebody decided that newbies shouldn't be
shown CLI-only packages, resulting in a situation where people searching
for packages with keywords couldn't find them unless they realized this
and set the default back to "All".

That's what I, at any rate, don't want to see happen again.  But it
sounds like that's not what you're saying.  But realize that you're
talking to a technical audience, and when you say "target the distro",
they are thinking this sort of thing rather than logos and colors.


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