Mageia forum

Inspired by this thread and all those postings where people report why they left this distribution and joined that community I would like to see your feedback to the questions of this poll. First it is out of pure curiosity, but then it may also tell Mageia a little bit more about our users, what is on top of their list and what not.

You have 3 votes, so you can mark up to 3 items which MUST be met by your system. Feel free to comment in this thread (without bashing other people's opinions or distributions, pls!).

Hint: All the items are important, some more for you, some less. Please only mark those items which MUST be there or you will definitely stop using a distribution, so nothing like "A good homepage" (although this is important, no doubt!) or "A nice background" or other graphical things which can be changed with one click. Real MUST HAVEs only, without them you will not bite! Example: if you don't care for free or non-free software you will not mark "Only free software", it's neither a show stopper nor a MUST for you.

Have fun!

Only three choices, hard to to decide wobo, but I tried

What is the difference between "community based" and "a nice and friendly community". I have started to think that the Mageia community is so nice and friendly because Mageia is community based

marja wrote:What is the difference between "community based" and "a nice and friendly community". I have started to think that the Mageia community is so nice and friendly because Mageia is community based

community based = build/development is done by community with no commercial interest behind.
nice and friendly community = You and me and all other gals/guys who help each other in a respectful and friendly manner.

My idea was, that that's an inseparable pair. But I just heard about the nice MUD community. And Mandriva isn't a 100% community based distro, so apparently the pair isn't as inseparable as I thought

Yes marja, see where I come from
MUD is a good example that both items are not necessarily inseparable.

EDIT:
I just recognized that I missed one point which may be essential for one or the other: good communication between distributor and user - this was one of the topics with Mandriva (at least for me it was).

There were 40 votes until now. So for some voters having 3 choices is too many, or they couldn't decide and will come back later to add there 2nd and/or 3rd vote

I just recognized that I missed one point which may be essential for one or the other: good communication between distributor and user

If this includes good communication between developers and users I'll definitely vote for it.

...but then it may also tell Mageia a little bit more about our users, what is on top of their list and what not.

Well done poll but I'm curious, suppose it will reveal some clear tendencies (maybe not quite in Mageia's actual path), will they lead to some shifts in Mageia's policy?

dubigrasu wrote:If this includes good communication between developers and users I'll definitely vote for it.

I meant the distributor in total, including all departments. This can be managed by one or a team who compiles all informations and sends them out in a blog, also reading a mutual platform to receive user's feedback. For Mageia there is the blog pages and the website to read/announce and the forum, Bugzilla und mailing lists to talk back and give feedback. The user can dig in as deep as he wants to. Then some distributions have a structure in place to relay user comments and ideas/suggestions to the active makers. This is what I'd call good communication.

Well done poll but I'm curious, suppose it will reveal some clear tendencies (maybe not quite in Mageia's actual path), will they lead to some shifts in Mageia's policy?

This is basic research (if you don't mind), where it will lead is in the future. I thought about bringing a summary with the results to the attention of the council (if enough users participate to have a fair enough picture).

For Mageia there is the blog site - if this is filled with a constant flow of articles about all related happenings inside and outside, this is what I would call good communication. If the user wants more he can read all mailinglists, attend meetings or read the logs, etc.

Fair enough.
I meant something like more presence here in the forum but maybe that's too much to ask.

I thought about bringing a summary with the results to the attention of the council

Good initiative, thanks.

dubigrasu wrote:I meant something like more presence here in the forum but maybe that's too much to ask.

Well, you know, this has been discussed a lot of times and there have been strong arguments for either positions. What we have now in place for Mageia seems to me a working situation for all sides.

Sorry, I expanded my previous post a little bit to make my view on this clearer.

Good documentation/Good Forum Support, Little to no bugs/stability, and Good Hardware support... sounds like I am asking for the perfect system. I would prefer documentation over forum support. A good wiki would do the job. Smashing Bugs to improve stability should be more important than trying to maintain a rigid release schedule with the latest and greatest version. Good Hardware support is the bane of most OS today. Windows is actually one of the worst if you ever have to install things manually... such a pain, and Apple's Mac OSX avoids the issue by only operating on certain hardware. Blah... I have a desktop computer that does not even have USB support if you install from Windows OEM. I had to hook up another internal drive to get the drivers to it.

Good presence in forum helps with bugs as well as getting support for those rare hardware configurations.

Hi,
If you have a look at the very bottom of the votes, you find "Easy (almost automatic) installer", "Good, comprehensive, and up-to-date documentation" and "LTS". That means that newcomers don't visit the forum, it is only read by geeks who don't nead basic help. So, we have hard work to do to spread Linux!
Note I am not asking for LTS, but people who don't know how to install an OS are.

Lebarhon, I don't think I can follow your analysis.

LTS is not something you would expect to be needed by newbies (if they only knew what it means) - so in reverse this being at the very bottom speaks for a rather unexperienced voter group, they give more votes to other things. A Long Time Suport release is mostly asked by people who know how to install an OS but don't want to do that so often

Documentation is not the place most unexperienced users go first so it is not in the top range of their requirements. That's what we have been learning in the forums all the time. When I look at the Mandriva forums (international and German) I see that many of the questions asked are answered in the manuals. The situation with documentation is odd: the more experienced a user is the more he will look at documentation (wiki or manuals) before he asks in the forum. So this being not much asked for also speaks for unexperienced users as voters.

"Easy Installer" is something most people are expecting to be there, not to be mentioned. Surely most users will complain if it is not available but they would not leave an otherwise good distribution because of that - I even thought about not listing it as a "critical" requirement at all. I don't think that only few votes for this item says anything about the voters.

wobo wrote:Lebarhon, I don't think I can follow your analysis.

It is your right, even your duty to boost improvement.

wobo wrote:LTS is not something you would expect to be needed by newbies (if they only knew what it means)

I agree and never said LTS was better for newbies, I said LTS was asked by newbies who are afraid to install an OS, and never installed windows either.

wobo wrote:Documentation is not the place most unexperienced users go first so it is not in the top range of their requirements.

Ok, because unexperienced users mostly want to fix troubles and our doc isn't oriented troubleshooting enough, too difficult and missing examples. (I hope it is intelligible)

wobo wrote:The situation with documentation is odd: the more experienced a user is the more he will look at documentation (wiki or manuals) before he asks in the forum. So this being not much asked for also speaks for unexperienced users as voters.

I agree, that is true in every technology, to take benefit of a documentation, you have to find quickly what you are looking for and understand the answer. That means being experienced. For example, I never succeeded to use command line options from the man page.

Lebarhon wrote:

wobo wrote:Lebarhon, I don't think I can follow your analysis.

It is your right, even your duty to boost improvement.

Maybe we have a language-caused misunderstanding here, I do not see the relation between these two sentences. What I tried to say is: I do not agree to the conclusions you take from the current result of the poll.

wobo wrote:LTS is not something you would expect to be needed by newbies (if they only knew what it means)

I agree and never said LTS was better for newbies, I said LTS was asked by newbies who are afraid to install an OS, and never installed windows either.

Yes, I read that and I do not agree. IMHO it's the opposite. LTS is seldomly asked by newbies because most of them are looking for new software, while experienced users (especially those who administrate servers) are looking for LTS because they do not want to isntall/upgrade so often.

As I said, it's too early for an analysis anyway, only 30+ have participated (I had hoped that this is something which would be interesting for many users).

wobo wrote:As I said, it's too early for an analysis anyway, only 30+ have participated (I had hoped that this is something which would be interesting for many users).

Are you sure this is caused by lack of interest? When you visit Mageia, you don't see at first sight there is a poll: you have to go to the forums and then find where it is hidden. It would be nice to either or:

have a link to the latest poll on other Mageia pages, like http://www.mageia.org and http://blog.mageia.org, and to have a "Polls" subforum in the "FORUM" forum, under the "Welcome on board" one, that links to all polls we have or had and/or contains them

Add a sidebar to Mageia pages and put the poll there

redirect our users to the poll when logging out of the forum, the wiki and/or bugzilla

Another possibility is to have the poll appearing in a pop up when someone visits Mageia, but I don't like that one at all. My vote would be for the first solution

marja wrote:Are you sure this is caused by lack of interest? When you visit Mageia, you don't see at first sight there is a poll: you have to go to the forums and then find where it is hidden.

Yes, you are quite right here.
My favorite place for temporary hints at interesting messages/threads/polls is the second line of the header. It's a one-liner in the template file, so it just needs 2 minutes to insert/remove/change. After the poll is over this line can be removed or replaced by a hint to somewhere else.

The advantages: This line is visible whatever view of the forum you go to. It does not take any place away because the line is there anyway. It is top visibility and draws attention.
The disadvantage: Unfortunately this solution needs 2 minutes attention of an admin to go to the ACP and insert/remove/change the line, which seems to be hard to get.

Attached screenshot is showing what I mean (the font of the line should be a bit smaller than in this draft):

wobo wrote:My favorite place for temporary hints at interesting messages/threads/polls is the second line of the header. It's a one-liner in the template file, so it just needs 2 minutes to insert/remove/change. After the poll is over this line can be removed or replaced by a hint to somewhere else.

Good idea And maybe move it up a bit further, under this line that is on most Mageia pages:
Mageia | 1 | Blog | Downloads | Support | Forum | Contribute | Wiki | Bugzilla | Donations | About
so that whoever visits a non-forum Mageia page, sees the link to the poll, too.

wobo wrote:The disadvantage: Unfortunately this solution needs 2 minutes attention of an admin to go to the ACP and insert/remove/change the line, which seems to be hard to get.

Even if it isn't possible yet, it might be good to put it on a wish list, for when there is an admin who has time. We can even open a bug report for it

wobo wrote:Attached screenshot is showing what I mean (the font of the line should be a bit smaller than in this draft):

Thanks, wobo, a picture says more than a thousand words

Oops, i didn't notice this poll until it came back at the top of the "view active topics". Probably the idea of increasing the visibility of polls is not bad, especially for users not coming on the forum every day!

I voted as a personal user, where i would favor the availability of a modern graphical environment, the multimedia working out of the box and a good and fast support (whatever the way). But also, i would like to add the importance of stability (outside of Cauldron...), and i really appreciate also the idea of a community based distro. If i take the hat of the professional user (i managed to install a few Mageia boxes at work, for end users), i would definitely appreciate a LTS, as it would be the missing argument to convince others to install it for some of our servers.

eonwir wrote:Oops, i didn't notice this poll until it came back at the top of the "view active topics".

Thx, this was the issue of our latest posts here. So we will have to do a post every 2 days to make the poll appear in the "Active topics" or "New posts" view and use this as workaround until we have a better solution

marja wrote:

wobo wrote:My favorite place for temporary hints at interesting messages/threads/polls is the second line of the header. It's a one-liner in the template file, so it just needs 2 minutes to insert/remove/change. After the poll is over this line can be removed or replaced by a hint to somewhere else.

Good idea And maybe move it up a bit further, under this line that is on most Mageia pages:
Mageia | 1 | Blog | Downloads | Support | Forum | Contribute | Wiki | Bugzilla | Donations | About
so that whoever visits a non-forum Mageia page, sees the link to the poll, too.

That is not so easy, and does require much more time to implement in contrary to wobo's proposal.

doktor5000 wrote:That is not so easy, and does require much more time to implement in contrary to wobo's proposal.

That's one point. Another is, it involves more people (webteam). Another is that it uses additional space in the forum while my way of alerting the users does not. People with tablets and netbooks hate each additional line, especially in the vertical direction.

wobo wrote:That's one point. Another is, it involves more people (webteam). Another is that it uses additional space in the forum while my way of alerting the users does not. People with tablets and netbooks hate each additional line, especially in the vertical direction.

And the wiki pages are narrow for people with netbooks who can't easily scroll horizontally (if I'm not mistaken, obgr_seneca was the one who told me that and he is a netbook user). So our pages should be small in all directions? In that case I really need to split at least one wikipage I imported.

Sorry for going more and more off topic, is that allowed in the Wizards Lair? Please remove this comment if it isn't.

marja wrote:

wobo wrote:That's one point. Another is, it involves more people (webteam). Another is that it uses additional space in the forum while my way of alerting the users does not. People with tablets and netbooks hate each additional line, especially in the vertical direction.

And the wiki pages are narrow for people with netbooks who can't easily scroll horizontally.

Yes, if you are using fixed width it should not sum up beyond 1024 width.
I made that remark about vertical space because everybody hates to scroll. So, adding a line to an already large (vertical) page is something I would try to avoid, if possible.

Sorry for going more and more off topic, is that allowed in the Wizards Lair?

In a wizard's lair, strolling sideways from a given path, very dangerous it is !