Ubuntu market segmentation and analysis (Was: Mono required by ubuntu-desktop)

[Micah J. Cowan]

On Wed, Aug 02, 2006 at 07:46:48AM -0400, Peter Whittaker wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-01-08 at 15:44 -0700, Micah J. Cowan wrote: 
> > 2) The audience you are describing as being lucky to have 128MB or RAM
> > on old Pentiums should really be using Xubuntu, not Ubuntu. It's really
> > the wrong market...
> 
> Not to pick on Micah, but how exactly are the people in each target
> market going to know what market they are in? Ubuntu claims to be Linux
> for human beings. Which human beings get to be the default set served by
> "basic Ubuntu", and which get to be special cases, served by special
> Ubuntus, like edu-, k-, x-, etc.?
> 
> Read that again: Which people are in the default set, which are the
> special cases, and how does each human being know if they are default or
> a special case?

<snip more, very valid points>

> Distro literacy should not be a prerequisite to successful use of
> Ubuntu, nor should "most users" have to install more than once to get
> what they need on the machines they have.

Well, to directly answer your question as to "how people should know":
our packaging, and any other means by which they arrive at a copy of
Ubuntu, should tell them. I'm hearing people on this list say that,
essentially, the Ubuntu information lies and says it requires only
32MB/64MB. However, the first page with information I could find on it,
in fact says 64MB for server, 256MB for desktop (with 3G drive space).
But I do think system requirements should be in a more obvious place,
perhaps virtually impossible not to visit before downloading a copy (or
ordering a CD: haven't used shipit so don't know whether this is the
case already).

Aside from that direct question, though... again, having mono/tomboy or
not has no direct effect on how much memory is needed by the user, so I
don't think that's a valid issue to raise for this concern.

I also don't think overmuch attention to memory concerns in Edgy can be
very fruitful: it seems very likely to me to be at odds with the whole
"bells n' whistles" philosophy in Edgy: that is, I don't see many
practical ways it can be both frugul and bleeding-edge/experimental. One
might question the advisibility of the latter option, but I think it'd
be a bit late for that.

It would be nice, though, to make more frugal options available at
installation. For instance, how hard would it be, as an installation
option, to install just metacity (and not most of the rest of GNOME),
plus a light-weight file-manager, and a non-GNOME-reliant panel? We
might be able to approximate a Xubuntu-like setup for those that need
it, without actually having to make more space on the CD for that
option...? It seems that this could be quite valuable, especially since
Xubuntu is not currently offered via shipit; nor, as far as I'm aware,
via Freedom Toasters.

I'm not entirely sure I agree with your final paragraph, that distro
literacy should not be a prerequisite. I definitely believe that it
should not be incumbent upon the user to obtain such a distro literacy,
though. If it is given that Ubuntu must be for more "mainstream systems"
(whatever that means, but with the implication of a fair number of
resources), and people with lesser resources should use something like
Xubuntu, then we should strive to ensure that it is virtually impossible
not to understand this. I believe this could be accomplished with more
direct statements on the relevant websites; other channels would
probably get the word out automatically, in the same way that
information about Ubuntu at all gets spread.

-- 
Micah J. Cowan
Programmer, musician, typesetting enthusiast, gamer...
http://micah.cowan.name/