Fedora: Giving Up Product?

There is an interesting discussion going on in the Fedora Board and it gathers a lot of ideas. Some of them also say that we should give up defaults, or Fedora as an end product. I opposes such a direction and here is why:

Giving Up Defaults

Giving up defaults means giving up Linux newbies because it’d lead to the situation I call “new restaurant experience”. You go to a restaurant you’ve never been to and they give you an endless menu with tens of items usually strangely named. All you know is that you want a good meal, but you’re lost because you have no experience with the cuisine, you know almost nothing about the meals (except for ingredients) and you still need to choose something. Then the waiter comes to your rescue: “What meat do you like? Beef? Great, we’ve got this great meal with beef. You’ll love it! Would you like to give it a try?”, “Sure I would!” Or he could just say: “Beef? Great, we’ve got a huge selection of meals with beef, here see the section Beef.”  Would it help you? I can say it wouldn’t help me and when I’m in an unfamiliar location, I’m looking for restaurants that have simpler menus and predictable meals just to avoid such situations.

It works the same way with software. When my friend gave me a CD with Knoppix, I saw that Linux was quite nice on the desktop and I decided to give it a try. Knoppix was just a live distro, so I was looking for some more solid distribution. All I knew was that I wanted Linux for desktop. Someone told me that Mandrake was the best option for desktop and I went for it. I was glad that they had defaults (environment, apps,…) because I could not possibly make a qualified decision since I knew very little about Linux, and I trusted Mandrake that they chose a good selection for me. Mandrake’s default environment was KDE and I was satisfied with it enough to stick with Linux. After some time, when I was settled, I explored other options and found GNOME a better option for me. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t appreciate KDE as the default option at the beginning. It helped me.

Having defaults is about guiding. You tell newbies what you think is the best experience for them and it’s usually all they want to hear. Once they get more familiar with the distro, they can explore other options and find out that there is a whole world out there. Exposing the whole selection to new, unexperienced users is not helpful, it’s discouraging. The other day, one friend of mine told me that he needed Ubuntu or Debian to install one product that is supported only on these distributions. Because he had no experience with Linux, he asked which one. Well, I told him Ubuntu because I knew that was the quickest and easiest way to his goal: having that product up and running.  Just compare ubuntu.com and debian.org. Ubuntu gives you a very easy way to download and install it while Debian reveals all the complexity right at the beginning. Great for those who know exactly what they want, otherwise simply discouraging. And Debian still has defaults.

Having defaults is about focus. If you want to make a good product, you need to focus. It’s another thing Ubuntu did right (not any more with all that tablet/TV/mobile craze). It’s better to have one solid and working solution than ten unfinished and broken ones. If you have defaults, you know what really needs to work and you can focus on that.

Having defaults is about responsibility. A distribution is a huge selection of software. Something works better, something works worse. But it’s our responsibility that what we push to users as defaults is well maintained and has some future. I’m not sure if we can tell that about all desktop environments and window managers we’d have to equally offer if we had no defaults.

I believe having defaults is very important for Fedora Project. If we should have some default selection, it should be by use cases. You want a Linux for your desktop? Here is our product for desktop. You want to run Linux in the cloud? Here is our product for cloud. I know that choosing defaults is difficult and brings long discussions. But giving it up just because it’s difficult is like hiding head in sand.
Don’t get me wrong. I appreciate every new desktop environment, window manager, or application that is available in Fedora repos because freedom of choice is great, but having defaults doesn’t limit this freedom.

Giving Up Product

Making Fedora just a platform for other end products goes actually far beyond giving up defaults. Fedora would lose a lot. If you don’t have your own end product, you pretty much lose a lot of your visibility and brand. “Selling” a platform to users doesn’t make any sense because users (and most developers, too) don’t care about the platform what’s behind the product. They would use e.g. GNOME OS and just a few of them would know that there is actually some Fedora behind it and even fewer of them would care. Would it help bring more contributors? I don’t know, but I guess it probably wouldn’t. People get more likely attached to the product they’re using. While I like GNOME and I’m also a GNOME Foundation member, I’d rather switch to a different environment and stay with Fedora than stay with GNOME and switch to another distribution. This kind of attachment is very important for getting people involved and contribute. Without being the product people are using, we’d lose the ability to build such an attachment.

There was actually an attempt to build just a platform upon which others can build their products – Unity Linux. And it never took off. They never attracted enough developers while Mageia, another derivative of Mandriva which is also an end product, is doing much better. I still think a distribution like Fedora is the best wrapping for what’s called a Linux system. While e.g. GNOME is the face of the system, it’s Fedora who has the expertize from the kernel up to the desktop.

Another question is if any community would be interested in building a product based on Fedora. Why wouldn’t they choose Debian at the first place? By becoming just a platform, Fedora would lose a lot, but would we get something back, someone else on board? I doubt. And OS products generated from our own community? Regarding desktops, the GNOME part of the Fedora community might able to produce a solid desktop product, maybe KDE, too. But that’s pretty much it. I don’t see any other spins that are strong enough to build and promote products on their own.

Again, don’t get me wrong. I’d love to see Fedora as a great platform to build on, but I’d rather have Fedora as a great product to use and I don’t think that building a great product prevents us from being a good platform to build on. However, I’d encourage people to build things in Fedora rather than on Fedora.

And what would be my vision for Fedora?

A truly free and community general-purpose operating system that aims at people who create things and build solutions. It doesn’t matter whether they are designers, developers, admins etc.

Testing GNOME 3 on family members

I’ve read a lot of bashing about GNOME 3. It makes the overall negative impression about the new generation of GNOME. In fact, it’s because negative opinions are usually more vocal than positive ones. Satisfied users are using the software and don’t have to write blogposts about it. That’s a reason why I decided to write this blogpost. In the last year, I tried to test GNOME 3 pretty much on all my family members. They all got used to it without bigger problems. But I’d like to write a bit more about one family member who got a computer with GNOME 3 just recently – my mom. She had a really old laptop with Fedora 14 and GNOME 2 because nothing newer would run well on it (512 MB RAM is just not enough these days). But Fedora 14 has been EOL for quite a while and hardware was very unsatisfying. That’s why she got a newer ThinkPad. I decided to install Fedora 18 on it. It was still a development version, but I had two good reasons: 1. I didn’t want to undergo upgrade in a few months, 2. there were significant changes between GNOME 3.4 and 3.6 and I didn’t want her to get used to something that would change soon. In addition, I think Fedora 18 is pretty stable if you get past Anaconda or Fedup.

Before I get to my mom’s experience with GNOME 3, I have to explain why it was my mom who was the most interesting member of our family to test GNOME 3 on. She is a completely unexperienced user. She’d refused to use computers until she was 45. Then she was forced to use them because of her business and because she learned that she could auction antiquities at Aukro (Czech eBay) But computers and her were never friends. I tried KDE, LXDE with her. She was using Windows for a while. Last time, she was using GNOME 2, but was struggling even after two years.

I installed Fedora 18 on her new laptop and explained her how GNOME 3 works. And here are some findings from her experience with it:

• She hasn’t called since then! It’s something unbelievable because when she had GNOME 2 she called all the time and I felt like a technical support. My colleagues made fun of me at work.
• When I called her and asked her how the new system was, she replied that she liked it much more than the one before which was really surprising for me because I’d expected a wave of complaints because everything was different and all her old instructions were useless. My mom usually doesn’t like changes.
• Activities overview helps her a lot. She never understood the concept of apps and windows. Her work with computers was always very task-based. Once a new window covered the old one, it ceased to exist for her. She switches between tasks, not between apps or windows. When she wants to go back to writing or reading emails, she clicks the mail icon no matter if the app is open or not. In GNOME 2, she easily ended up with 3 instances of one app.  Now, she just needs to remember to press the “Super” icon to get to Activities where she sees all open windows or big icons of her favourite apps. She says she gets oriented much better than with task bar in GNOME 2 which she never truly understood.
• Having everything under one key (the Windows/Super key) makes her life much easier. It’s pretty much the only keyboard shortcut she knows.
• Powerusers complain that GNOME 3 doesn’t start another instance of an app if its icon is clicked. Well, my mom appreciates it because when she for example clicks the envelope icon in Activities she gets the email client no matter if it’s already open or not. And she doesn’t end up with several instances like in GNOME 2.
• Large icons work. I always wondered why GNOME 3 had such large icons. My mom likes them.
• She was a bit surprised by absence of buttons to maximize and minimize windows. I added them, but after I explained her that she could maximize by dragging the window to the top of the screen and there was no need to minimize windows, she told me that she didn’t want the icons there. So I removed them again and she’s never mentioned that again.
• Virtual workspaces is something that she’s never used. It didn’t change with GNOME 3. That’s why it’s good that they’re not visible if the user is not using them.
• I even taught her to search for apps by typing. What she didn’t understand is that you can start typing immediately after switching to Activities. Average users seem to need a text field to type.
• This is a fresh experience: she called me today that she’d wanted to turn the laptop off, she’d clicked the “Power Off” button and ended up with a screen where there was just time and the computer wouldn’t turn off even after pressing the “Power Off” hardware button. It sounded weird. I was already thinking of a hardware failure etc., recommended she should take the battery off. Then I got it. She misclicked and locked her screen instead of powering off. She had no idea that it was a lockscreen. In this case, GNOME 3 could be more intuitive. To defense GNOME 3, I must say that until today my mom had no idea that something like a lockscreen existed.

Those are just a few findings from my mom’s first experiences with GNOME 3. Before I installed it on her computer, I called it an ultimate usability test of GNOME 3 because if my mom can use GNOME 3 anyone can. GNOME 3 has succeeded in it so far.

DevConf is getting content and it looks great!

It’s been a couple of weeks since we started call for papers for Developer Conference 2013. The call for papers is on till the beginning of December, but here is a little tasting of what we’ve already gathered:

Kernel: Network Team Driver Project (Jiří Pírko), Local Kernel File Systems Update (Lukáš Czerner), Beyond the Experiences of Butterbloat, Have We Found the Cure? (Jesper Dangaard Brouer)

Security: Integration Linux System into Active Directory Environment (Dmitri Pal, Simo Sorce), Identity Management Roadmap (Dmitri Pal), RHEL 7 New Security Features (Daniel J. Walsh), openssh in Fedora and RHEL (Petr Lautrbach)

Core: Hawkey and DNF (Aleš Kozumplík), Package Management in openSUSE (Michael Schroeder), Using a SAT Algorithm to Solve Package Dependencies (Michael Schroeder), Software Collections (Marcela Mašláňová), Evolution of Linux Network Management (Pavel Šimerda), Power Management (Jaroslav Škarvada), BIND10 (Adam Tkáč)

Virtualization & Cloud: SECure Linux App Container (Daniel J. Walsh), OpenShift (Marek Jelen), Java Loves Ruby: Katello on TorqueBox (Lukáš Zapletal), DeltaCloud 1.0 (Michal Fojtík), Open vSwitch on Fedora (Thomas Graf)

Desktop: Creating Translatable Animation in Blender (Jakub Steiner), The Technology Beyond Anaconda New UI (Martin Sivák)

Other: Fedora User Experience (Tom Callaway), Open Build Service – Possible Use Cases for Fedora (Adrian Schrueter), Licensing+Licensing Tool (Tomáš Raděj)

JBoss: What’s New in Java EE 7 (Josef Hartinger), JDK8 – Under the Roof (Jiří Vaněk), Taming Beasts in Arquillian (Lukáš Fryč, Juraj Húska), Developing Mobile Apps with AeroGear (Lukáš Fryč, Ondřej Skutka)

We’ve started publishing introductions of the most interesting speakers at the conference’s website.
This is just a portion of talks that have been already submitted. There are also workshops/labs and short talks and we already have 65 submissions. But there is room for more and if you have an interesting topic, submit it!

There will also be other events during the conference. Several Fedora Activity Days are planned. Systemd developers already announced that they would have a hackfest on Thursday and Friday before the conference. RPM guys of SUSE will have a BoF with Red Hat’s RPM team on improving maintainability of RPMs for openSUSE and Fedora. GNOME Docs team will come to Brno to work on GNOME documentation for 5 days. And more is to be revealed!

BTW we’d like to hear what information you miss at the conference’s website to add it and make your stay in Brno as pleasant as possible.

 

What Desktop Environments Are Czech Fedora Users Using?

Yesterday, I posted results of a survey to find out what distributions and desktop environments Linux users are using. Today, I asked the editor-in-chief of Root.cz for figures solely for Fedora to find out what desktop environments Czech users of Fedora are using. Here are the results (and comparison with figures for Ubuntu from the same survey):

Fedora: GNOME 3 – 45.8%, KDE 4 26.5%, Xfce 12.4 %, GNOME 2 8 %, LXDE 1.8%, KDE 3/Trinity 0.6%, Others – 4.9%. Ubuntu: Unity – 29.8%, GNOME 3 – 20.5%, GNOME 2 – 17.5%, KDE 4 – 14.9%, Xfce – 9.9%, LXDE – 3.8%, KDE 3/Trinity – 0.5%, Others – 3.7%. GNOME 2 also includes GNOME 3 Fallback, MATE.

And some findings:

• Adoption of GNOME 3 among Fedora users is not bad at all. Almost half of them is already using GNOME 3. Xfce didn’t gain much ground and GNOME 2/Mate is quite low. Ubuntu is apparently struggling more with adoption of their new default environment – Unity. Less than 30 % of its users are using it and the number of users with GNOME 2 is high compared to Fedora.
•  KDE 4 is very popular among Fedora users. Over 25 % is a really decent job for an environment that is not default. It proves that our KDE SIG is doing a great job. They have always had to fight the widespread opinion that Fedora is a GNOME distro and not very KDE-friendly. Those figures show they are doing great at it and I have a feedback from the community that KDE in Fedora is really well supported. In Ubuntu, KDE is not so popular according to these stats.
• I expected Xfce to be more popular in Fedora than the stats show. There have been many people loudly saying that they are switching to Xfce because of GNOME 3. This has probably been a bit exaggerated, at least in the Czech Republic. But still: Xfce is more popular among Fedora users than among Ubuntu users.
• KDE 3/Trinity is pretty much dead. Again, I’ve heard many people saying that they stick with KDE 3 and don’t want to switch to KDE 4, but in fact, almost no one is using it today. It may be a message for MATE developers that stopping time is not a viable vision for a desktop environment. Most users just get used to new generations of DEs, or switch to something else, but don’t stick with old generations.
• Unity is still an Ubuntu-only thing. Unity was recently ported to Fedora, or more precisely there is a third-party repository with Unity for Fedora, but Unity didn’t get a single vote from Fedora users in this survey. Maybe it’s too early, we’ll see later.

User Bases of Linux Distributions in the Czech Republic

The biggest Czech Linux magazine Root.cz organized a survey to find out what distributions Linux users are using on desktops. There were 4423 answers which I think is quite a lot from statistical point of view. And here are the results:

I expected Ubuntu to have the largest user base. But still, such dominance is surprising. Over 50% of all Linux users are using Ubuntu. It’s pretty much Ubuntu… and the rest. And what about Deb vs. RPM? 80% vs 22.4% (note that the total is over 100% because there are users using multiple distributions). It’s even more horrifying. RHEL/CentOS weren’t included, but I don’t think they have a large user base on desktops and their share can’t be bigger than 8% because that’s what “Other distributions” got.

Fedora is doing the best (12%) in the world outside Ubuntu/Debian because we have a quite living Fedora community here and there is a large engineering office of Red Hat which has some impact, too. But face the truth: In terms of user base, Fedora is doing very bad compared to Ubuntu. What can we do about it? Because if we lose user base we will eventually lose contributors, too.

Other distributions with traditionally large user base are doing even worse: openSUSE has only 7.4% and Mandriva, which used to be the most popular desktop distro in the Czech Republic, is pretty much dead – <2%. And users didn’t run to Mageia because Mageia has even less users.

Another interesting results are shares of desktop environments:

 A very interesting finding is that GNOME 3 is actually more popular than Unity (19.7% vs 13.6%) which is the default environment in the far most popular distribution – Ubuntu. In fact, only 1/4 of Ubuntu users are using Unity according to the stats. GNOME 3 is also more popular than GNOME 2/MATE (16.5%), so looks like it’s not that bad with popularity of GNOME 3. GNOME-based vs KDE-based environment: 49.8% vs 24.5%. KDE 3/Trinity has less than 1%, so stopping time doesn’t seem to be very appealing to users.

Developer Conference 2012 – looking back

Developer Conference 2012 is over. I nearly want to say “finally” because the last week for pretty exhausting for me. It was a great weekend though! I enjoyed the event even though it was pretty busy for me because of all the organizational workload.

A big surprise for us was the audience. Over 600 people showed up. I met a lot of people from the Linux community and from companies that use Red Hat technologies or build their products on them. The conference was finally completely international. 95 % of all talks were in English, most conversations in the hallway were also in English. There were much over 100 foreigners that had come from all over the world. Several “subevents” helped us attract a lot of interesting people from abroad. GTK+ hackfest and GNOME Docs Sprint brought about 30 people from several continents. Mini Logging Summit, that took place in our office on Thursday, brought another bunch of very interesting people. KDE SIG Fedora Activity Day also brought a bunch of interesting people and as Jaroslav Řezník told me, it was very productive.
I wish I could have attended more talks. There were 60 of them and as I could hear I was not the only one who had hard times to decide which talk to attend and which not. It was even harder for me because I spent most of the time taking care of organization and I could attend only a few of them. I’m really glad that I could attend Bryn Reeves’ “How To Lose Data and Implicate People” which was one of the best conference talks I’ve ever attended. Bryn had two talks at DevConf and both were great. I hope he will come next year again.

BTW 600+ attendees make Developer Conference the biggest annual Linux event in the Czech Republic, which is not bad for a conference for developers, right?

I was really glad to see familiar faces from the GNOME and Fedora community. I was especially glad that Fedorians such as Christoph Wickert, Jared Smith, Sirko Kemter, and Rex Dieter came to Developer Conference. We had many interesting conversations over a glass of beer.

BTW I’d like to ask everyone that attended Developer Conference to fill out our feedback form. It will help us make Developer Conference 2013 even better.

Developer Conference 2012′s schedule is out

We’re proud to announce that the schedule for Developer Conference 2012 is ready (check it out on the conference’s website).. It’s going to be two busy days with 60 talks (in 3 tracks), 8 labs and workshops, and 3 hackfests. Speakers, we’ve managed to come, are from all over the world and some of them are really big names in the world of open source software. This year, the conference is a must for all that are interested in Fedora/Red Hat/JBoss technologies.

In addition to information I’ve already mention, we’ve started developing a conference’s app for all kinds of mobile platforms (Android, webOS, Blackberry, Maemo/Harmattan, Symbian) for your convenience (viewing the schedule, selecting talks you wanna attend and making a custom schedule in your calendar, maps with the venue, hotel etc., Twitter hashtag wall etc.).

For more information, visit the conference’s site.

 

Desktop Summit 2011 with a bit of Fedora

Last week, I and a bunch of other guys from Brno’s office traveled to Desktop Summit which took place in Berlin this year.  We were interested in Linux desktop technologies, but also wanted to support our candidacy for GUADEC 2012. I also signed up for volunteering and spent the first three days as a session chair guy and could see what difficulties organizers encountered. The venue was not ideal and I must say I was a bit surprised that such an old university campus still could exist in Germany and it was even in the centre of Berlin.

We met many Fedora users there. Mainly among people, who are interested in GNOME development, Fedora is really popular. We also met several people who are active in the Fedora community such as Christoph Wickert and Sirko Kemter. I took a few Fedora DVDs to give them away at the summit. We placed them on one of the tables in the registration hall and they were gone in 10 minutes! Looks like I will have to take more next time.

Unfortunately, we didn’t get GUADEC 2012 to Brno. It was a bit disappointing for us because we had made a quality proposal and had a great venue which was really high-tech especially in comparison with the one in Berlin. But it’s life that doesn’t always bring success. At least, we’ll have more time for organizing Fedora-related things.

 Fedora 15 at the Desktop Summit 2011

GNOME 3 Launch Party

O víkendu se v Praze konala GNOME 3 Launch Party, jejíž organizaci jsem si vzal na starosti já. Jednalo se o oficiální akci organizovanou ve spolupráci s GNOME Foundation. Po světě se tento týden konalo téměř 150 takových akcí a myslím, že ta naše se mezi nimi neztratila. Z brněnské pobočky Red Hatu jsme se vydali autem čtyři (já, Tomáš Bžatek, Jarda Řezník a Víťa Humpa) a na party dorazili i další lidi z Brna, kteří jeli po vlastní ose. Přednášková část se konala ve Školícím centru Silicon Hillu v areálu strahovských kolejí. Na tom samé místě se koná i InstallFest. Měli jsme k dispozici přednáškový sál pro cca 100 lidí, projektor, ozvučení a také se všechny přednášky nahrávaly na video (v dohlédně době je můžou vidět i ti, kteří se akce nezúčastnili). Tímto bych chtěl poděkovat klubu Silicon Hill a AVC, kteří vše uvedené poskytli zdarma.

Po příjezdu na místo jsme začali přednáškovou místnost připravovat. Z Číny nám od GNOME Foundation došel balíček s propagačními materiály. Rozvěsili jsme řadu zelených balónků z logem GNOME, pod prostorem, kde se zobrazují slidy, jsme vyvěsili velký nápis GNOME atd. Účast byla na akci tohoto druhu víc než slušná. Počet účastníků jsme detailně nesledovali, ale krátce po začátku akce jsem napočítal zhruba 50 lidí a v průběhu akce ještě další přicházeli. Můj odhad tedy je minimálně 60. Z Red Hatu jsme dovezli 20 flashek s posledním vývojovým vydáním Fedory 15 s GNOME 3, po kterých se jenom zaprášilo stejně jako po zelených odznáčcích GNOME a samolepkách.

Přednášky trvaly skoro čtyři hodiny. Tomáš Bžatek, který vyvíjí GNOME v rámci se práce v Red Hatu, mluvil o novinkách v GNOME 3 a souvisejících knihovnách (GTK+ 3, glib,…). Druhou část přednášky si vzal španělský vývojář Tomeu Vizoso, který momentálně žije v Praze. Překvapil nás tím, že se nás zeptal solidní češtinou, jestli má přednášet v češtině nebo angličtině. Nakonec o podpoře jazyků v platformě GNOME mluvil anglicky, ale jsem si jistý, že česky by to zvládl stejně tak dobře. Škoda, že by trochu zklamaný, že se mezi posluchači nenašlo více GTK vývojářů. Druhou přednášku měl Vojta Trefný, vedoucí české komunity Ubuntu. Některým lidem se nelíbilo, že jsme do programu zařadili přednášku o alternativním shellu Unity, ale myslím, že právě okamžité srovnání GNOME Shell a Unity bylo jednou z nejzajímavějších věcí přednáškové části. Osobně si myslím, že přístup, kdy se tváříme, že existuje jen jedna možnost (v tomto případě GNOME Shell), do open source, které je především o možnosti volby, nepatří. Třetí přednášku měl Andre Klapper, který je aktivní ve vývoji GNOME už léta a ví toho z této oblasti opravdu hodně. Připravil si neuvěřitelných 77 slidů. Naštěstí jimi proklikával hodně svižně. Poslední přednášku měl Petr Kovář, který už několik let vede český překladatelský tým GNOME a mluvil tedy o lokalizaci. Mimochodem dnes ráno jsem zjistil, že je Petr ode dneška novým red hatterem. Ani se v sobotu nepochlubil Kromě přednášejících se akce zúčastnila řada dalších lidí, kteří se aktivně podílejí na vývoji GNOME. Byl tam dlouholetý koordinátor španělského lokalizačního týmu, účast oznámil i téměř celý GNOME Design Team, který měl zrovna tento víkend sraz v Praze. Nevím, ale jestli nakonec dorazili nebo ne.

Po poslední přednášce jsme se přesunuli do nedaleké restaurace Petřín, kde probíhala neformální část u piva. Došlo taky k nakrojení GNOME 3 dortu. Party skončila kolem půlnoci, kdy restaurace zavírala.

Více fotografií z akce naleznete v mé FB galerii.