On 02/19/2005 10:37:49 PM, Jerone Young wrote:
Since Fedora Core is a general purpose Linux distributions it's size
will actually increase over time. Why you ask? Because with more users
come more use cases. The beautiful part of Fedora is that a user can
install a base system and have just about everything they need. Not
everybody likes playing around finding packages and what not
(especially new users), they want it to be there and ready to use.
The problem comes when a vendor wants to ship fedora core.
Either the vendor needs to spend time and resources stripping fedora core or the vendor needs to support a wide range of software - which has high training costs.
A smaller core operating system means that vendors do not need to support as much software. Addon software that the small core does not come with that the vendor specifically wants can be done through a second CD, add on software could me available as an iso download (or purchased on CDR from any number of college kids with a burner and a paypal account) etc.
A big distro makes it a lot harder for support - that might be one reason why Debian has so many off shoots now that are smaller.
A small distro does not mean that an official repository like Fedora Extras can't exist to provide what users want that a vendor doesn't necessarily want to support. And they could be provided as CD/DVD with an addon installer much like the Anaconda package chooser.
-- Michael A. Peters http://mpeters.us/
