cross-platform virus

[Cefiar]

On Wednesday 12 April 2006 08:45, Peter Garrett wrote:
> On Wed, 12 Apr 2006 00:13:14 +1000
> Sasha Tsykin <stsykin at gmail.com> wrote:
> > When they hear about Ubuntu, they hear how good it is, when they try it
> > they get the opposite impression.
>
> Is there any evidence to back up this surprising assertion? A few people
> criticising Ubuntu does not a valid sample make, methinks...

See below.

> > Most of Ubuntu's growth is from windows.
>
> Really? Do you have any figures on this? I think it's rather doubtful,
> although if it were true, that would be A Good Thing (tm).

It would be interesting to have some sort of survey/poll that new users can 
take to help Ubuntu see what problems they commonly have, and what systems 
they had used previously. This could give us the details of their issues and 
the context to understand them - thereby allowing us to address them better.

Note that I'm sort of envisaging a set of tickboxes (multiple choices allowed) 
with common issues next to them, and a few more free-form fields for users to 
fill in, with a similar sort of thing for their previous computing 
experiences (with multiple choices and free-forms), and perhaps a pulldown 
box for how long they've been using each. Of course, it would be good to keep 
a constant track on the free form fields and try and turn them into their own 
options if they become popular enough.

Sure, there's the data collected through mailing lists and via people on irc, 
but this isn't really measured in a quantifiable way. Recording info from 
mailing lists and irc of course could be a job in itself, but one I suspect 
that would require a lot of human effort. By getting feedback from our 
userbase in a usable manner, we can actually quantify this information, and 
make some reasonable decisions.

-- 
 Stuart Young - aka Cefiar - cef at optus.net