[Mageia-discuss] [Poll] What are your top requirements?

[Michael Scherer]

Le samedi 28 janvier 2012 à 20:37 +0100, Antoine Pitrou a écrit :
> On Sat, 28 Jan 2012 20:19:45 +0100
> Wolfgang Bornath <molch.b at googlemail.com>
> wrote:
> > 
> > > (and let's not talk about "Modern GUI": for me Gnome 2 is as modern as
> > > Gnome 3 and KDE 4)
> > 
> > "modern" in this context means "opposed to the traditional GUIs".
> 
> "traditional" is undefined. Is Gnome 2 traditional? What about Gnustep?
> And Cinnamon?
> 
> For example, I'd like to see Cinnamon in the next Mageia, not because
> it's traditional or modern, but because it's for me the only reasonable
> compensation for losing Gnome 2.
> 
> > > So, I've answered the poll, but my real answer is the following: if I
> > > had to use a distribution with only 3 qualities out of all these, I
> > > would be an unhappy user.
> > 
> > Looks like you did not read the initial posting where I explain what I
> > mean with "top requirements". Of course I could have allowed for 5 or
> > 10 votes, but my intention is to find out the most important features
> > a distribution must have, otherwise you would not touch it.
> 
> Well, what I'm saying is that "top requirements" is not how I function,
> and I don't think it's how most users function either.
> 
> I mean, I certainly want no crashes (who wants crashes in the middle
> of an editing session?) and I certainly want hardware support (otherwise
> how would I use my computer?), but I also want stability, good support,
> a nice community, a good choice of software, etc. I don't draw a
> hierarchy of these criteria: they are *all* important.

The issue is that they cannot be done all at the same time.

You cannot have te latest hardware support and at the same time expect a
crash free support of the same hardware, we unfortunately do not write
bug free softwares at the first time.

While I appreciate Wobo efforts to get meaningful numbers, I am rather
doubtful about a few things. First, the choice of questions make me
wonder, since my memories tell me that for doing such kind of polls, you
first need to do preliminary research to find the options.
There is for example various things like :
"networking out of the box", and "good hardware recognition" that are
the same.
same for "latest software" vs "quick update".
And LTS go hand to hand with "stable as top priority" ( since LTS mean
the system do not change for a long time, and usually, once enough bugs
are fixed, softwares are rather stable ).

Not to mention that a poll may give incorrect expectation to people, and
usually only measure a fraction of the users.

And more importantly, it doesn't help us on the crucial thing ( IMHO ),
how to expend the contributeurs pool.

I think asking "where would you want to put efforts in the next year for
Mageia" would allow us to better see what kind of priority we should
have to grow the community. ( followed by discussions of "why don't you
do it now" that would help finding potential weak spots in the system ).

This or asking directly, "why don't you work on $FOO". Users will come
when we have a great product ( ie, grow naturally up to a point ). And
product will be great with enough contribution, hence the focus on that.

> This poll sounds like you might end up concluding "ok, our users value
> features over stability, so we're gonna make a crashy distro with many
> features". Surely you understand how unreasonable that is: even these
> users which said they values features will still get angry about the
> crashes.

Yup, I agree. But it seems people want stability. 
-- 
Michael Scherer