Friday, June 17, 2011

Ground Realities and Trying to Change (Changing) Linux Customer Base

It is time for me to have a pause and see the ground realities and customer behavior and business politics.

I am in defense of change (of course not for Sea Change) for good with lot of nice cute gadgets like ipods, tablets and kindle are coming out cheap to the market now.


As far as promoting Sinhala Linux is concerned, there is nobody willing to change the habits.
I could not download Hanthana Linux and it is stuck around 700 odd MiB with only two seeders with the server switched off at night.
In the mean time I have downloaded (at least 30 distributions with updates for testing) all the Debian 6.0.0 series and currently finishing the 6.0.1 with minor bug fixes.
All Gnome, KDE and xFce, LXDE (which I like the most even though missing K3B ) are fine for Sinhala Linux and they are very stable and one should start using them if we want to Keep Sinhala Unicode as a viable option in the Linux Community.

Having said that, as I stated earlier about Hanthana Linux, my reservations are coming true, sadly since Fedora (this is the reason I stopped using it) is undergoing a Sea of Change (I like the change though in a business like manner not for the sake of change-people who do not change and stop innovating new ideas will fail in any business let alone Linux) with even partition types.

I hope Fedora gives option for old tradition of EXT 3 and 4 to old customers.
In the meantime I downloaded all Fedora Editions (all because of Sinhala Support from 13 upwards for posterity) from 13 and above (I am still struggling to finish CD version of KDE, Fedora 13) and an Old Fedora Bible Book with version 6 for completion.

Redhat was my heartthrob and heartbeat those days.

Hanthana Linux is Fedora 14.5 and probably stuck there not knowing what to do next.

What is striking about the Fedora Community is it has produced a distribution called Synergy Alpha 2 where one has the basic packages including LibreOffice and one can add up other packages after installation.
This is the one that one should download and have a feel (mind you no support for old Graphic Cards) and I have put that image in my Dropbox for sharing with Linux Lovers.

Even package management is changing I prefer the Fedora Community to produce a DVD in the range of 1 GiB to 1.5.

In this background Debian is rock solid and its derivative AVLinux 5 which I downloaded yesterday is fabulous with everything one needs including Blender. 

I did not check whether it has Sinhala Capability.

I decided to look at the downloads at distrowatch for the last month.
The customer habits are revealing.

1. For the first time Linux Mint (1) which is Ubuntu / Debian derivative is on top over 2000 (did not change to Unity) downloads.

2. Fedora second (2) over 2000 (sea of change with most numerous seeders all over the world and with very fast download for Fedora 15)

Fedora 16 is coming soon and thank you very much for seeders.

3. Ubunbtu in third (3) place with under 2000 (changed holistically to Unity). 

4. Debian is the fourth (4) the most stable under 1500 downloads.

5. Significantly PCLinux (My Gold Standard for stable Live / Install) over 1000 for the first time in the seventh (7) place.

6. Puppy is at eight (8) place with just under 1000.


7. CentOs a Redhat base at tenth (10) place. 

 8. Mageia and not Mandriva in the first 10 is a significant observation.


What it proves is that the customer base is mature both wanting stable and rolling versions and also ready for change.

Like me they should use both, new version for testing and giving the feedback to the community and use the old version for day to day working and at the end of the year decide what you like the most and install it and retire for Christmas holidays.
I do not advice one of having several computers like me since my electricity bill is sky rocketing in Sri-Lanka and it is one of the miracles of the presently (not pleasantly) powerful (inside only) government.

At the end the customers are the winners unlike Microsoft base which is trying to change to catch up with the trends but failing significantly.

No comments:

Post a Comment