Chapter 3. General ideas

The target user of a Blend may be a specialist of a certain profession, (e.g. a doctor or lawyer,) a person who has not (yet) gathered a certain amount of computer knowledge, (e.g. a child,) or a person with disabilities (e.g. a visually or hearing impaired person.) Moreover, the customisation might deal with peculiarities of certain regions where users have needs that differ from Debian as a whole.

It is not unusual for these target users to be less technically competent than the stereotypical Linux user. These people are often not interested in the computer for its own sake, but just want it to work for them. Imagine the frustration of a doctor who has to move the focus of interest from the patient to his stupid computer that does not work as expected.

Because of limited knowledge or time, the target user is usually unable to install upstream programs. This means that in the first place, they must find out which software packages in their distribution might serve for a certain problem. The next step would be to download and install the packages they choose, perhaps requiring a certain amount of configuration effort. This problem is nearly impossible for a user with limited technical competence and perhaps poor English language comprehension, which prevents the user from understanding the installation manual.

The language barrier in this field is an important issue, because we are targeting everyday users who are not compelled to learn English, like Free Software developers are, for everyday communication. So the installation process has to involve the least possible user interaction, and any such interaction has to be internationalised.

Furthermore, most target users have no or little interest in administration of their computer. In short, the optimal situation would be that he would not even notice the existence of the computer, but just focus on using the application to accomplish the task at hand.

Common to all groups of target users is their interest in a defined subset of available Free Software. None of them would like to spend much time searching for the package that fits his interest. Instead, the target user would prefer to immediately and effortlessly locate and access all material relevant to solving his own problems.

There is an absolute need for easy usage of the programs. This is not to say users expect to not have to learn to use the software. Adults generally accept that they must spend a reasonable amount of time in learning how to use a piece of software before they can do something useful and productive with it. But a simple-to-learn environment greatly enhances the value of the software, and if you consider children as target users, they just want to start using it right away without reading any documentation.

The more important part of the request for easy usage is a professional design that is functional and effective. To accomplish this, the programmers need expert knowledge, or at least a quick communication channel to experts to learn more about their requirements. One task for Debian Pure Blends is to bring programmers and experts who will use those special programs together.

Last, but not least, we find certain requirements beyond just which packages are provided in each target user group. These may differ between different Blends. For instance, while a doctor has to protect his database against snooping by outside attackers, the privacy risk for a child's system are of lesser importance. Thus, the Debian Junior project cares more for ensuring that the user himself does not damage the desktop environment while playing around with it than about remote attacks. So we find a "defined security profile" for each single Blend.

In the field that should be covered by Debian Pure Blends, we have to face also some common problems for system administrators. Often they have limited time in which they must serve quite a number of computers, and thus they are happy about each simplification of the administration process. The time required to make special adaptations for the intended purpose has to be reduced to a minimum.

So, administrators are looking for timesaving in repetitive tasks. While this is a common issue for each general GNU/Linux distribution, this could have certain consequences in the special fields Debian Pure Blends want to address.

Another problem administrators face is that they are often not experts in their clients' special field of work. Thus, they may need some specialist knowledge to explain the use of special programs to their users, or at least need to be able to communicate well with the experts about their special needs, and how the software can be used to address them.