[Mageia-discuss] Mageia logo proposals and selection

Thu Oct 14 12:55:26 CEST 2010

Graham Lauder wrote:
+>
+> It is a well known fact, that you cannot be all things to all people, to try 
+> to do that would end up being everything to noone.  I would prefer to be the 
+> best we can be to those who grow to love the brand.  
+>   
+I think you may be getting tarred with a brush you don't deserve.  The
+pushback you're getting from technical people on this issue is very
+likely fallout from the way Mandriva handled this issue.
+
+Most technical people couldn't care less what logo or color scheme you
+use.  But Mandriva pushed the philosophy of "let's be the newbie distro"
+down to the design level, often hiding or eliminating more advanced
+functions, obfuscating internal operations, and offering only
+unnecessarily limited/simplified choices. 
+
+So we ended up with a menu scheme that was counterintuitive to most
+Linux users, a situation where you could install a package and find that
+there was no menu entry created for it because it was a KDE package and
+you were using GNOME, or because somebody decided for you that newbies
+wouldn't use it so it wasn't worth cluttering the menu.  We confused the
+hell out of people by making the default package choice in rpmdrake
+"packages with GUI" because somebody decided that newbies shouldn't be
+shown CLI-only packages, resulting in a situation where people searching
+for packages with keywords couldn't find them unless they realized this
+and set the default back to "All".
+
+That's what I, at any rate, don't want to see happen again.  But it
+sounds like that's not what you're saying.  But realize that you're
+talking to a technical audience, and when you say "target the distro",
+they are thinking this sort of thing rather than logos and colors.
+