[Mageia-discuss] Mageia review with bad experience

Wolfgang Bornath molch.b at googlemail.com
Tue Oct 11 23:39:53 CEST 2011


2011/10/11 Michael Scherer <misc at zarb.org>:
> Le lundi 10 octobre 2011 à 23:37 +0200, Oliver Burger a écrit :
>> Am Montag, 10. Oktober 2011, 23:29:08 schrieb Michael Scherer:
>> > With the problem of having experienced people leaving, because "mandrake
>> > is a distribution for newbie, i am not a newbie, therefor, mandrake is
>> > not for me". This surely helped debian or fedora to get contributers.
>> >
>> Yes, that's why I always pressed at the linux events I was present, that in
>> the past Mandrake/Mandriva and now Mageia is a distribution, that makes it
>> easy for newbies to start, but isn't holding back anything for experienced
>> users.
>> Other than yast did in the past and still does in parts, the draktools don't
>> overwrite any configuration but parses it correctly.
>>
>> We have to make it clear, that we do care about newbies but we don't "lay any
>> stones in the way" of experienced users.
>> After all, if we did, most of us wouldn't use it, would we?
>
> As I may have said before, Apple do it right, they do not say the word
> newbie or beginner at all, see their website.
>
> So someone reading Apple marketing material will think of simplicity, or
> a system that doesnt get in the way, but it doesn't think "that's great
> for people that know nothing to computer". Apple prepared a narrative
> explaing the elegance, the power, etc.
>
> The simple evocation of "beginner" will make people think about a
> separation between newbie and experts ( what psychologists call a
> framing effect, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnX5v0uwNjc ). If we
> speak of newbie, then people will feel sooner or later the need to find
> their position on this supposed separation, with the problem we
> highlighted.
>
> And so I think we should simply ban the word from our official
> communication.

I also used (with Mandriva and Mageia) to make a point that these
distributions cater to all kind of users, be they on beginner,
experienced or expert level. But I see the advantage to leave this out
of our "marketing". The better path would be to call it "straight
forward, just what you want it to be".

-- 
wobo


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