Why switch to Fedora?
Fedora, like other distributions, has often struggled with how to attract new users. It is not always clear what the "pain points" are for new Fedora users, nor what it might take to get users to switch. A recent discussion on the Fedora desktop mailing list highlights some of those issues.
In an April blog
post, Christian Schaller noted that a review of GNOME 3.16
was, in some sense, really a review of Fedora Workstation. The
review
reflected a lot of work the distribution has done to integrate GNOME into
the Workstation product, resulting in what Schaller called "a tightly
vertically
integrated and tested system from the kernel up to core desktop
applications
". He was disappointed that the reviewer was awaiting
GNOME 3.16's appearance in Ubuntu, rather than continuing on with
Fedora, so he asked for feedback from blog readers on what it might
take to get people to switch to Fedora.
He then summarized those responses in a post to the desktop list on May 7. Some of the responses are something of recurring themes for complaints heard about Fedora: its release cadence, lack of third-party software (including media codecs, drivers, and applications), and pain caused by SELinux. Several of the others were graphics related, including support for NVIDIA Optimus hardware, high-DPI display problems, and multi-monitor support. The rest were a grab bag of user annoyances: lack of a UI for Fedora upgrades, the need for better Android integration, no solution for backups, and the need for a handful of packages that aren't currently available for Fedora.
The third-party software issue occupied much of the thread. The lack of royalty-encumbered codecs (e.g. MP3 for music and H.264 for video) for Fedora is a common complaint about the distribution, especially from less-technical users. Developers are the target users for Fedora Workstation, though, so they may well be able to find Fedora's list of forbidden items as well as information on third-party repositories (which do have solutions for many things that Fedora can't distribute).
Those repositories may suffer from security problems, however, as Elad Alfassa pointed out. In addition, the availability of those repositories doesn't solve all these problems by any means:
Basically, the more time a person needs to spend on learning how to make your OS work the less they'd want to make the switch.
For codecs, though, it would be possible for someone (e.g. Red Hat) to license them for Fedora, as "drago01" noted. Beyond the unlikelihood of any organization actually doing that, there is another problem: the license would not necessarily apply for downstream Fedora remixes. Those distributions would either have to remove the codecs or license them too—not something the Fedora project wants its downstreams to have to deal with. But Fedora is one of the few distributions that has this particular problem, since most other distributions find some way to install the necessary codecs for users that need them.
The age-old tension between seeing users as participants in free-software development versus users that "just want to get their work done" also played out some in the thread. Because users are (mostly) unwilling to mess with their computers to get them working, they gravitate to Windows and Mac OS X, Alfassa said. And they don't switch away:
But Michael Catanzaro thinks Fedora should be looking at a different question: why aren't users switching to Fedora Workstation from Ubuntu?
The question of cadence and the interest in a "rolling" release also came
up a bit in the thread. Edward Borasky noted
that he moved to Fedora from openSUSE a few years back, partly due to the
eight-month
release cycle versus six months for Fedora. So he is happy now with
Workstation and, even though he would like a rolling release, he wouldn't
return to openSUSE for Tumbleweed. There are
lots of good distributions, but he wouldn't switch because
"they have no *compelling* advantage and I'd have to
spend a couple of weeks getting up to speed on the way *they* do
things.
"
He continued:
So if you want to take users away from Ubuntu, you need a *compelling* advantage. Fedora Workstation has to make users badass at something meaningful in a way that Ubuntu doesn't.
Another pain point that came out in the thread is the current state of Office 365 support in Workstation. "Alex G.S." argued that one of the main reasons people end up on Macs is because they need access to Microsoft's collaboration tools. They work well with OS X, but have a variety of problems on Fedora. From the list he provided, there would seem to be a fairly large hurdle there.
No real conclusions were drawn in the thread. For the most part, there were not truly any surprises in the comments on Schaller's blog post. These complaints have been heard before (and likely will be again). Other distributions have similar lists, with at least some overlap with Fedora's. It will be interesting to see which of the items the Workstation project tries to tackle—and what progress it makes.