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.
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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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is confused 
. Something doesn't add up. 82 participants x max. 3 votes each = 
How was I to know?