From Fedora Project Wiki

https://etherpad-fudcon2013.rhcloud.com/p/CrystalBall

Who's here?

  • Steve Gallagher
  • Paul Frields
  • Sandro Mathys (red)
  • Bill Nottingham
  • Miloslav Trmač
  • David Cantrell
  • Will Woods
  • Xavier Lamien
  • Pierre-Yves Chibon
  • Nick Bebout (b) - not here physically but is in another room
  • Iwan Gabovitch
  • Peter Jones
  • Eric Paris
  • Rahul Sundaram (mether)
  • Chris Roberts
  • Pete Travis
  • Dan Walsh
  • Praveen K Paladugu
  • Chris Tyler (ctyler)
  • Zoltan Hoppar (zoltanh721) - remote
  • Clint Savage (herlo) - remote
  • Emily Dirsh (emichan)
  • Onuralp SEZER ( thunderbirdtr) remotely
  • Eugene Mah (imabug) remote
  • Kashyap Chamarthy

What is Fedora Bad at?

  • Getting and keeping users/contributors
  • No outreach programs - like gnome
  • Weak marketing
  • no common place, repo for event posters, or usable content for simple flyers
  • transifex support for marketing materials - dropping out marketing contents texts for posters, flyers
  • Weak main website content problem (always same content on other pages and most of them are old)
  • Not authoritative source for documenting how the OS works, despite heavy involvement upstream
  • Many people go to Ubuntu sites for this :-) +1
    • or archwiki <_ YES! +3
    • or gentoo wiki
  • StackExchange?
  • Fedpkg-web?
  • atomic documentation
  • Introducing system-wide improvements =
  • Getting rid of aggression/rudeness (or people who can't be otherwise)
  • Related to outreach above -- without a pleasant community, outreach is doomed to failure. GNOME does well here because they are nice to new contributors overall
  • Non-technical complaints: Worked great until I upgraded. should we list this under stability?
  • No strong rules regarding upgrading from past versions
  • Success of upgrading is sometimes hit or miss
  • Too focused on desktop, need to spend more time on server + cloud +2
    • cloud is a huge topic but several efforts have been started (like official F19 cloud images)
  • Weak development documentation
  • New features like Anaconda/GNOME etc updated, without proper justification. -1
  • Living what we promote
  • Old Application Center (GUI)
  • Some bureaucracy
  • Relevance in the tech press
  • Secondary ARCH and Electronics application need improvement
  • Getting stuck in the occasional yum dependency hell (although much less often now)
  • failing to do things well when it has to be staged for more than six months
  • Integration with commerical users/downstreams of Fedora
  • delivering releases on time
  • Third-party software

What is Fedora good at?

  • BEING AWESOME
  • Lots of ways to contribute
  • Promoting "first"
    • really? still no btrfs as default, still shipping sendmail, etc.
    • It says "promoting" ;-)
  • Promoting contribution
  • Community is passionate
  • Promoting open source
  • The PERL stack works really well
  • In general, units of software work very well out of the box.
  • upstream focus
  • Security - Secure by default (but negative impact on some usability)
  • We collect contributions of thousands of people into something that actually
  • Community is supportive of new contributors
  • When it works, it works really well
  • Partying :)
  • Many spins !! :)
  • Possibilities, remixes, open source, community, and be the best distribution for engineers, inventors, young clever minds
  • Failing fast
  • Fast releases
  • QA of the new release
  • 60% solution to most problems and markets
  • Focusing on a lot of (very new) things at the same time, development / release wise

Where is technology (including but not limited to IT or Fedora) heading to in the next 5 years?

  • Consumers will use tablets, etc. and producers computers... or tablets with keyboards
  • ARM, and more smaller devices used as desktop - mobility first
  • small multi-core devices but also big many socket (64+) servers
  • Networked home, you bring your office with you but in cloud (private cloud also)- people mostly wants easily reachable content, and net
  • but you also bring your own device to work (BYOD)+1
  • Even more shift from data centers to (public) clouds
  • Wearable computing devices - watches, glasses, tracking devices (fitbit, etc) - a.k.a. ubiquitous computing
  • DIY gets stronger, prototyping faster, and planned obsolessence will turn longer as current - will be worthy again to build something that worths more and usable for long time (3D printing, and designing at home will be available for everyone surely in short term as first)
  • People care more about privacy and where their things are stored (geographically / in terms of jurisdiction, etc.)
  • Non-US People don't want to have their data stored in the USA anymore because the government there is allowed to request access to any data, more or less
  • Also applies to a number of other countries, obviously (private clouds at home yes imho, NAS changes - sorry, speaking about storage and compute providers)
  • More encryption
  • Federated web services
  • 3-D Printing (see also ~5 lines above)
  • Massively-scalable system administration (1000s machines/admin)
  • "Cyborg" technology taking off?

What can / should Fedora do to facilitate such "future things"? Or how can we facilitate them for Fedora?

  • If consumers turn towards tablets and Fedora does computers, do we need to adapt our target users accordingly? Or change our focus?
  • And will Gnome still be the right choice for this (since they seem to target tablet users / consumers ever more) but is still not very touch-friendly....
  • We have to turn Fedora the best available engineering distribution, where we provide the latest tools, and engineering possibilities - eg. LAB spins
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