Results of the poll about user's top requirements

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Results of the poll about user's top requirements

Postby wobo » Feb 2nd, '12, 19:37

A GNU/Linux distribution is a complex system which in general caters to two different kinds of people:
1. The technical interested and (mostly) skilled people who are more often than not involved in creating and maintaining the distribution
2. The non-technical part of the community, those who are in general "users" of what the people in section #1 created.

So it is quite logical that those two sections have different priorities, different views on the same issue. In a good community these two sides should be in balance - the technical section should listen to the wishes and requirements of the non-technical people and the non-technical people should understand that not every whish they have can be fulfilled in exactly the way they want it to be done. A participant of recent discussions put it in these words: "It would be a shame if developers/packagers/maintainers would invest time and heart in working on what they like but nobody would use it!" The same is valid for the users who must understand the technical implications of this or that in the distribution.

In short: only a living communication guarantees success for both. A part of this communication consists of expressing whishes and requirements of one side while the other part is listening to these whishes. Another part is the respect for each part as an equal member of the community. Without developers and packagers there were no distribution - without users the time for creating the distribution was wasted.

In the light of these thoughts I opened up a poll for the (mostly) non-technical forum users to name the essential features a distribution MUST have to be "their" distribution. The poll was not set up as a professional technical survey like an IT branch of a tech university would do but rather like a survey in a userland magazine. The poll did not ask for packaging systems, single applications, screen backgrounds and all the other minor parts of a distribution. The goal was neither to compare distributions with each other nor to tell the technical active people what to do.
But, yes, it was the goal of the poll to give the makers of the distribution an impression what the "unwashed masses" think as so important for a distribution that they would leave a distribution which does not care for these features.

Options & Results

Period: December 28th - January 31st
Participants: > 82
Votes: 248
(each user had 3 votes but it seems not everybody used all 3 of them)

Here are the options given, first the votes, then the percentage then the option:

61 (25%) Stable system as top priority

42 (17%) Good hardware recognition (including modern hardware)

27 (11%) Networking (whatever way) working out of the box
This shows that networking is the most important usage for most participants of this poll. It also shows that these people have (or would have) severe problems if although the hardware was recognized correctly (see previous option) the software side has flaws - otherwise they would not put so much weight on "working out of the box" (in the forums the major part of questions are related to wifi problems). This is IMHO an understandable signal to developers to improve the setup in the networking area.

24 (10%) Multimedia of all kind working out of the box
This goes into the direction of free vs. non-free codecs. There are 2 groups of users - those who care about closed/non-free and those who don't. I assume that most people who voted for this feature belong to the latter group.

21 (8%) Nice & friendly community

18 (7%) Fast response to upstream updates
Not the same as option #9!

12 (5%) Modern graphical envorinment
The meaning of "modern" in this context (and hopefully understood by users) is in opposition to traditional desktops. Example: KDE4 vs. KDE3, Gnome3 with Gnome shell vs. Gnome2, etc., but also a modern looking "face".

10 (4%) Good & fast support (no matter by whom)
"no matter by whom" means "no matter whether the support is done by the distributor or a community or a 3rd party

7 (3%) Latest software as priority
That's the "bleeding edge" party.

7 (3%) Community based
Although most of the participants seem to acknowledge the Mageia organisation the nature of the distributor seems to be very important for a few only. Especially after the experiences with Mandriva and the opinions in the Mandriva forum this is a bit surprising to me.

5 (2%) Only free software

4 (2%) Sharing remote devices and/or data via any kind of connection
This option was entered because lately this issue (especially with Samba and nfs) has been discussed very often in the forums. But it does not seem to very important for the majority of participants. this shows that the number of forum threads does sometimes not reflect the importance of the issue. :)

4 (2%) LTS
Here we see that the priority requirement of a stable system does not meant that those who voted for that option automatically want a LTS version

3 (1%) Easy (almost automatic) installer

2 (1%) Good documentation

Remarks

Remarkable IMHO are not the top winners, they were expected from the number of forum posts, conversations at events, mails, although I was a bit surprised by the vast majority who voted for a stable system as top priority compared to those who rather want bleeding edge.

Remarkable are also the "losers" of this poll: Who would have thought that an easy installer and good documentation would end up as non-essential for the majority of the participants? After thinking abut it this is not so surprising. New and unexperienced users want answers to their questions now, not after reading a book (or numerous wiki pages). The paradoxon is in the fact that the more experienced a user becomes the more often he searches the documentation first before asking in the forum. :)

Another result shows that at least those who participated put more weight on stability and working functions than on ideologic issues like community or free/non-free.
--------------------------------------------------------

Hopefully this poll and the summary will be received as information rather than a reason to discuss how unusable it may be for one or the other. At least it is the opinion and view of those who participated.

Thx for reading, feel free to do with this whatever you want. :)

Poll & discussion thread: viewtopic.php?f=5&t=1661
Discussion thread in the mageia-discuss list: http://news.gmane.org/gmane.linux.mageia.user
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Re: Results of the poll about user's top requirements

Postby doktor5000 » Feb 2nd, '12, 20:51

wobo wrote:27 (11%) Networking (whatever way) working out of the box
This shows that networking is the most important usage for most participants of this poll. It also shows that these people have (or would have) severe problems if although the hardware was recognized correctly (see previous option) the software side has flaws - otherwise they would not put so much weight on "working out of the box" (in the forums the major part of questions are related to wifi problems). This is IMHO an understandable signal to developers to improve the setup in the networking area.


To expand on this a bit and also show some related context information:
Another problem is broadband modem support (UMTS, HSDPA, EDGE) where the modems themselves are mostly supported, but due to some implementation bugs are not recognized or correctly switched by usb_modeswitch by default.

Same applies for wireless support. Whereas the driver support itself is quite good, there are gazillions of issues breaking wireless for users.
F.ex. "bootstrapping" after installation from free installation media needing wired internet, because of the need for firmware or additional drivers.
Then there are other things, like multiple drivers for one and the same chipset, like with some popular broadcom ones, where you can choose
between the proprietary -wl driver and the free brcm80211 and b43 drivers. Most people don't even know about one of these drivers,
nor how to set them up (if you don't have network access in the first place). Problem is - for many Broadcom devices, only one of those drivers
works correctly. How is a novice going to find out about that?

Mostly these situations are a classical catch-22: No internet access due to missing driver/firmware and no driver/firmware installation possible due missing internet access

There are also various other issues like many problems caused by networkmanager, in some situations like with many broadband modems you have to use it, in many others you must not use it or it will break your network access. Other issues result from draknetcenter usage, as it often "forgets" or wrongly saves the used encryption method, or shows WPA/WPA2 networks as WEP or Open WEP and similar stuff.

We still have a LOT to improve especially in that area.
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Re: Results of the poll about user's top requirements

Postby filip » Feb 4th, '12, 19:57

wobo wrote:Participants: > 82
Votes: 248
(each user had 3 votes but it seems not everybody used all 3 of them)


Thanks Wobo. For the poll and conclusions. I always like to read views from those who are "down to Earth". Especially since I'm a dreamer sometimes too ;).

BTW: Mathematical me :geek: is confused :?:. Something doesn't add up. 82 participants x max. 3 votes each = 246 total votes
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Re: Results of the poll about user's top requirements

Postby wobo » Feb 5th, '12, 09:43

filip wrote:BTW: Mathematical me :geek: is confused :?:. Something doesn't add up. 82 participants x max. 3 votes each = 246 total votes
You may have missed the sign in front of the number: "participants: > 82"
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Re: Results of the poll about user's top requirements

Postby isadora » Feb 5th, '12, 11:01

Thanks wobo for your fine analyses.

For me in particular i am very happy to see closely behind the four hard-coded
priorities
, the presence of a "nice and friendly community".
No matter what issues, without a community appealing, it would be less
attractive/motivating building on our great distribution. :)
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Re: Results of the poll about user's top requirements

Postby Max » Feb 5th, '12, 16:32

isadora wrote:Thanks wobo for your fine analyses.

For me in particular i am very happy to see closely behind the four hard-coded
priorities
, the presence of a "nice and friendly community".
No matter what issues, without a community appealing, it would be less
attractive/motivating building on our great distribution. :)

This is why I push new Windows migrants to Mageia, for the great community.
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Re: Results of the poll about user's top requirements

Postby angelo-girardi » May 5th, '12, 05:29

Hi wobo,

Very good job.

I just leave Mandriva and I saw that you have already done what Mdv should have done years ago.

How to manage Mageia.

May be that it should be yearly populate.

I wish all Mageia community the best.
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Re: Results of the poll about user's top requirements

Postby Will94 » May 10th, '12, 01:15

A clear omission... the fortune program is installed by default, but when I want to install the 'fortunes-offensive' module, I have to get the Mandriva version. Image

;)
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Re: Results of the poll about user's top requirements

Postby doktor5000 » May 10th, '12, 21:20

Will94 wrote:A clear omission... the fortune program is installed by default, but when I want to install the 'fortunes-offensive' module, I have to get the Mandriva version. Image


If that was not intended as a joke (my sensor currently doesn't have enough spare time to sense properly) please report it as package request: https://wiki.mageia.org/en/How_to_repor ... ge_request
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Re: Results of the poll about user's top requirements

Postby Will94 » May 11th, '12, 16:17

It was a joke...
probably not a well-time one either.

I am loving Mageia 2. Job well done!
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No internet, no clue either

Postby andreano » May 28th, '12, 13:03

doktor5000 wrote:Mostly these situations are a classical catch-22: No internet access due to missing driver/firmware and no driver/firmware installation possible due missing internet access

Yes, what a pain that is! I once had to compile the Atheros kernel module for Mandrakelinux 10.2 by hand. I was in the army, and we didn't have wired internet. Supposedly, Atheros was the most Linux friendly WiFi chipset you could get in the mid 2000s, wasn't it?

I could not have done it without substantial help from a room mate's Windows laptop. Not just for downloading the atheros source code, but rpms for dependencies that later came up (for one thing, kernel headers was not included on the install CD). The rpm utility only reports one missing dependency at a time, so you can't just boot Windows and download them all in one go. But the most time, I definately spent googling. I would remain clueless today if I didn't.

Unfortunately, the same procedure that worked for Mandrakelinux 10.2 was not working for several later releases and other distros (details on my blog). I was unable to upgrade for several releases, until I found out (with Mandriva Linux 2008.0) that I just had to blacklist some other driver… :cry: How was I to know?
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Re: No internet, no clue either

Postby doktor5000 » May 28th, '12, 15:00

andreano wrote:Unfortunately, the same procedure that worked for Mandrakelinux 10.2 was not working for several later releases and other distros (details on my blog). I was unable to upgrade for several releases, until I found out (with Mandriva Linux 2008.0) that I just had to blacklist some other driver… :cry: How was I to know?


Mind to share some more details so we can get that documented in Errata or so so other users won't have the same problem or at least documentation available?
Apart from that, maybe you posted in the wrong thread, as that's quite offtopic here, in my humble opinion. But still apreciated.
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