Tuesday, November 13th, 2007
Fedora 8 sees strong first week adoption; but what will it take to quadruple or exponentially grow?
While the Fedora camp may be excited about 54,000 users, I have to admit given the stats I’ve seen 54K users is a small drop in the Linux user base ocean. I’m not sure exactly how they track this …
I’m actually one of those 54,000 users as I installed Fedora 8 on my home PC which now dual boots Fedora and Vista (solely for Photoshop and my Sony HD camcorder video editing). I actually replace Ubuntu Gutsy with Fedora to try out the new virtualization features in Fedora 8. I must admit, when it comes to virtualization, no distro comes close to Fedora (I tried Ubuntu 7.10 and OpenSuse 10.3). The polish, focus, and achievements with Xen and KVM are second to none. The Fedora 8 Virtual Machine Monitor is fantastic – worth testing the distro out alone. I have not (yet) seen any other distro port this with as many features available.
However, from an end user experience perspective, I would recommend every Fedora developer force themselves to use Ubuntu for the next month. The Ubuntu competition has a huge leg up on Fedora from a user experience perspective and it’s as if they don’t even know it (or Fedora has decided just to not care). For instance, just try watching an MPEG movie, try even finding how to use the licensed, paid for codecs, try listening to an MP3, try enabling 3D desktop with nVidia drivers, try customizing the 3D effects. When you need help, does the Wiki really help? Does the FAQ that is still stuck on Fedora 7 content apply? Fedora has now released quite a few well done releases – why are there still issues?
It truly was difficult to accept that Fedora was still as far behind as it was from an end user perspective. Now, I don’t want to scare anyone off – as a Linux user – I’ve grown accustomed to self help and working through these issues one by one. None are insurmountable and Fedora 8 is no more complicated for these things than Fedora 7. However, Fedora 7 should not be the bar against which you’re competing. I’ve said many times that Linux distros should ignore Windows and focus on the value Mac OS X offers its users (security holes, firewall issues, and upgrade dilemmas aside).
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November 15th, 2007 at 5:55 am
Mark Wielaard said:
All statistics (bittorrent, yum, smolt) and explanations of possible bias can be found at: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Statistics
November 17th, 2007 at 4:11 pm
Mike Dolan said:
Ahh.. that’s right – thanks Mark. I remembered seeing something like that. I didn’t mean to imply there was any bias in the 54K figure – just that it didn’t seem like a huge number relative to other distros to be honest.