pátek 18. listopadu 2011

Fedora 16 Verne, the Plasma one and marketing

Fedora 16 Verne is out for more than one week now and of course it contains the latest Qt and KDE Plasma bits. And when I say latest, I mean really THE latest. This time we were probably too overhyped with Qt 4.8, so you'll find RC1 and you know, the nerves waiting at least for it (rc1).... I hope it will change with Open Governance and we will get public release schedules. There are also zero-day 4.7.3 updates available for F16. It's something you can expect from Fedora. But Lukas Tvrdy reminded me one thing we usually fail, especially our KDE SIG team. Marketing. Yeah, I know - we can't compete with you, Krita guys - the Comic book with DVD is really awesome (/me wants more, thank you Timothee!!! Btw. your website is broken, no links are working). But we should work on it, make more KDE Plasma appearance in release notes, announcements, over Internet, reviews and blogs ;-) Well, let's make it better.




The Fedora KDE SIG team and Jules Verne are proud to announce Fedora 16, the KDE Plasma Edition is available for download (for over week now :). Please, visit the spin homepage.


The most visible change for users and the most notable one is probably change of our packaging schema - as we want to stick to upstream as close as possible, we provide split packages now.



I've found one review, nice reading, called "Fedora 16 KDE: Improving Perfection". Please, if you like Fedora and Plasma, write more, help us with marketing. Also I'd like to react to this review - why two media players? We'd like to have only one - most of people prefer Amarok and we think it's the one everyone is looking for. For now we gave an excuse to JuK. Or should we try Bangarang?

Also we're preparing Fedora 16 release party in Brno, everyone from this area is welcomed to join us. It's also being my birthday party - 23rd November at Red Hat's Tower Meeting Room. Please, sign up. I'll show you again the shining Plasma bits. Hopefully with Plasma Active running on top of Fedora (we're currently working on).

8 komentářů:

DarkDuck řekl(a)...

Hi!

Thanks for mentioning my review!

Amarok is rather resource-hungry application. I never use this type of player. Prefer simple still functional interface of VLC or something like that.
Why put both Amarok, JuK and also add DragonPlayer? Leave them in repositories and let people install themselves if needed!

Anonymní řekl(a)...

As I replied on your blog:

We actually get more requests for Amarok than GIMP. I guess there are just more people listening to music than doing advanced image editing. GIMP not being a KDE Platform application is also a deciding factor to some extent.

As for the other players: Dragon Player is included because it can play videos (and also because it's part of kdemultimedia). JuK is included because it is part of kdemultimedia (but Amarok is clearly the better application).

There's also some history here: kdemultimedia used to be packaged monolithically, and we still included the whole metapackage in Fedora 16. Now that we split kdemultimedia into subpackages, we can consider dropping JuK by default from Fedora 17 (though the space savings will probably not be impressive, also considering that Amarok drags in all the dependencies anyway). But Dragon Player will stay because we need a video player! (It is also small and basically has no dependencies beyond kdelibs and Phonon, so it isn't an application we'll consider dropping for space reasons.)

AhmedG. řekl(a)...

I think bangarang is the way to go. Last time I used amarok I got very confused with the interface/collections management.

Bangarang seems to have a pretty good interface though I've never used it. I was however VERY impressed with clementine
http://www.clementine-player.org/

I'm not sure what the dependencies on that would look like but I'd imagine they might be a bit lighter than amarok.

I would normally post about fedora-kde but I've been quite busy latley. I agree it needs more marketing because it really does provide one the best out-of-box/simple KDE experiances out there. For some reason it just feels faster than kubuntu and opensuse and the fonts seem to be nicer (though that might be very subjective)
I'll help anyway I can :-)

AhmedG. řekl(a)...
Tento komentář byl odstraněn autorem.
Anonymní řekl(a)...

I like this release very much. However, I don't understand why there are so many Gnome dependencies in Fedora KDE spin. I suppose some of them are needed for the Anaconda installer, but why not to remove them in the end?

Anonymní řekl(a)...

bangarang for videos,
amarok for music :)

Xeno řekl(a)...

Absolutely Fedora KDE spin could et some more hype :)

What i'd change in the spin itself:
First add a well supported web-browser like Firefox or Chromium. Konqueror and Rekonq are nice, but might not work properly with some web-sites. So most of the users will install other browser anyway.
If Firefox would be included by default it should be KDE-ised with "OxygenKDE".

I'd love to see programs menu decluttered too. It's really hard to find anyting in default one. My usuall tweaks are:
- removing dupicate entries
- move all the tools requiring admin priviledges into "administration" dir.
- move less usefull programs, to the "More programs" subdir.
- group programs by type: example Internet dir: web-browsers then email clients, messaging sofware, downloaders, other tools.

I think there should be something like "Fedora 16 post-installation guide" mentioned in the review put on the desktop. It seems lots of people don't know most of their complaints could be solved with adding rpmfusion and adobe repos.
Full-fledged "Fedora KDE Introduction Guide would be great, but simple FAQ style doc should be sufficient for the start.

DarkDuck řekl(a)...

Hi,
If you like my review, maybe you can push it to distrowatch's list of Fedora reviews?
;-)
Dmitry (DarkDuck)