Re: How to make Debian more attractive for users, was: Re: The number of popcon.debian.org-submissions is falling
Hi community,
well, I think, the main problem is, WHO are the persons, you want to
actiuvate.
During my meanwhile 15 years activity in my it-job, I met mostly several main
groups of people:
Group 1: people, who are not interested, whatever OS they are using, as long
as it is working. They do not care of costs or freedom. They never change
anything on their computers and they even do not know, what they are doing at
all. This is the biggest group.
Group 2. Gamers - they use their computer just for games, and they do also not
care of the OS, as long as the games are running on their computers. Sadly
most of the games are running only in windows (sigh).
Group 3: Systemadmins - Yes, there are a lot of sysadmins out there, who are
not able to see the difference between Linux and Windows server systems. IMO
these people will bring the most power into debian, if you can motivate them.
Group 4: People, who decide in business, which OS to use.
There are some smaller groups, too, but let me just suggest, how these biggest
groups could be interested.
Group 1 can be interested, either when there are Debian (and I mean really
Debian, not derivates like Ubuntu) preinstalled Computers available. These
should be easily configurable. A graphical interface (for example in the style
of webmin) is absolutely necessary. There are a lot of people outside, which
are NOT gamers, but like internet surfing, need office, e-mail and other stuff.
Group 2 IMO can only be motivated, if it will be possible, to prove customers
and distributors, that a fine installed debian is running much faster than a
windows system. I imagine, that preconfigured "gaming images" or "-packages"
might help them.
Group 3: I think, there can be nothing done, than to develop clickable
interfaces, as windows sysadmins are used to this style of administration.
Sorry, please be not angry, but 90 percent windows sysadmins I met in my life,
were lazy, did never read manuals and expected everything to be worked by a
mouse click (sigh!).
Group 4: Business deciders are a big problem. They only see money! But I
think, if you want to convince them, then you need a web prensentation or a
presentation at all, who makes the idea of debian clear: save costs through
the work of a community , development will be guaranteed in the future, use of
real standards, more power for less money, no license problems and some other
things I forgot. For those people, a presentation should be developed by
people, who create professionell advertisements.
Well, those are IMO the biggest groups of computer users. I estimate all
together about 80 percent. If you can win only 1/3 of them, then it will be a
big step.
But the question is: Is that really, what you want?
Best regards
Hans-J. Ullrich
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