[Mageia-discuss] Mageia review with bad experience

[Michael Scherer]

Le lundi 10 octobre 2011 à 23:37 +0200, Oliver Burger a écrit :
> Am Montag, 10. Oktober 2011, 23:29:08 schrieb Michael Scherer:
> > With the problem of having experienced people leaving, because "mandrake
> > is a distribution for newbie, i am not a newbie, therefor, mandrake is
> > not for me". This surely helped debian or fedora to get contributers.
> > 
> Yes, that's why I always pressed at the linux events I was present, that in 
> the past Mandrake/Mandriva and now Mageia is a distribution, that makes it 
> easy for newbies to start, but isn't holding back anything for experienced 
> users.
> Other than yast did in the past and still does in parts, the draktools don't 
> overwrite any configuration but parses it correctly.
> 
> We have to make it clear, that we do care about newbies but we don't "lay any 
> stones in the way" of experienced users.
> After all, if we did, most of us wouldn't use it, would we?

As I may have said before, Apple do it right, they do not say the word
newbie or beginner at all, see their website.

So someone reading Apple marketing material will think of simplicity, or
a system that doesnt get in the way, but it doesn't think "that's great
for people that know nothing to computer". Apple prepared a narrative
explaing the elegance, the power, etc.

The simple evocation of "beginner" will make people think about a
separation between newbie and experts ( what psychologists call a
framing effect, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OnX5v0uwNjc ). If we
speak of newbie, then people will feel sooner or later the need to find
their position on this supposed separation, with the problem we
highlighted. 

And so I think we should simply ban the word from our official
communication.
-- 
Michael Scherer