Re: F42 Change Proposal: Fedora Plasma Workstation (System-Wide)

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I'm probably not the right person to comment on this, because I completely abandoned Fedora Desktop when it was hit (badly) by Gnome 3. That destroyed my daily workflow and work routines and made it unusable (for me), or at least barely usable for serious professional work not related to software development (and I ended up using MacOS to this day). 

But I have continued to use Fedora Server on all of our servers, have committed to the working group, and still consider Fedora a great distribution, regardless. 


So, nevertheless: 

> == Summary ==
> Switch the default desktop experience for Workstation to KDE Plasma.
> The GNOME desktop is moved to a separate spin / edition, retaining
> release-blocking status.


This is an absolute no-go! It would break everyone’s usage of Fedora Workstation and is in irreconcilable contradiction to the characteristics of an „Edition" as defined with Fedora.next. 

And that is not „just“ a technical issue (the FESCo domain), but a basic Fedora principle. 


Another proposal is to make it an „Edition“. But basically, a merely KDE Desktop is not „edition-able“. Among others, an edition is meant to cover a specific use case and a long-term and (more or less) perfectly designed and engineered solution for this. So we have desktop (Workstation) and server. Among server we have several Editions, the universal Fedora Server, container centric CoreOS, edge centric IoT and Cloud. Each of the server-like Editions covers a destined, specific use case without overlapping. 

For the desktop area I don’t see a non-overlapping use case between Gnome and KDE. It’s just a different tool for the same use case. 

And if we are willing to accept an exception and accept KDE desktop as an Edition, I don’t see that the current SIG qualifies as an edition-capable working group. Given the recent discussion about Wayland / X11, I don’t see any obligation/commitment to ensure long-term reliability and trouble-free usability. Instead, I see in the discussion an unbridled desire to introduce something new (that's good) without regard for backwards compatibility and uninterrupted usability (that's bad, we need both). And obviously the resources to manage both (Wayland and X11) in one working group are also lacking (and given the schism, possibly also the willingness to do so).  

That may change and can change, of course. But that’s nothing for F42, rather for F52.


> There are only two artifacts left on alt.fedoraproject.org that really
> need to be moved to the main site:
> 
> - the Everything netinstall ISO

This is a failure to understand (or to commit to) what we have decided to do with Fedora.next. We don't want to DIY piece together a solution.  

And it is a plain false promise. You can't install CoreOS, IoT, silverblue with it, not even Server, which is offered in the menu (because a lot of presets are missing). 

We should discard it from the website at all, or at least rename it to „All desktop offerings for DIY on your own risk“. And it really belongs to alt.fedoraproject.org <http://alt.fedoraproject.org/> and under no circumstances on the main page, and certainly not on the editions. 



> Am 05.04.2024 um 00:17 schrieb Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek <zbyszek@xxxxxxxxx>:
> 
> ... 
> I’m not sure. I think the getfedora.o page could use some work, but
> just moving one or two things might not be enough. For me, when using
> the website is the huge list semi-orthogonal categories:
> the top-level split is:
>  - editions, as individual items
>  - atomic desktops
>  - spins
>  - labs
>  - alt downloads
> Alt downloads is split into:
>  - Fedora 40 beta
>  - network installer
>  - torrent downloads
>  - alternate architectures (even though download pages also have architectures?)
>  - cloud base images
>  - testing images
>  - rawhide

This is really intentional. It is what we decided with Fedora.next and that resulted in a great success for Fedora. So we should really leave the structure as it is. 

> ...  
> And there are at least three domains:
> getfedora.org, fedoraproject.org, alt.fedoraproject.org.
> ... 
> This is hard to navigate. It seems that each subpage uses a different
> categorization and way to split things. And the different subpages
> use different visual styles.
> 
> I think we should have:
>  a) one domain

Basically, we have one domain *now*: fedoraproject.org 

getfedora.org is a backwards compatible forwarding of the old way of presenting fedora.

alt.fedoraproject.org is a subdomain, which is a widespread way to structure a huge and complex offering as Fedora. Similarly, we have e.g. calendar.fedoraproject.org or lists.fedoraproject.org  


>  b) a flat categorization where you first select the type
>  (one of the editions or the desktops or spins or labs or network
>  installer or cloud image).
> 
>  The editions should be listed prominently, and the other things can
>  lower in the page or require a click to show.

>From a UX perspective, this is too cumbersome and involves too many clicks.

>  c) at all subpages there should be a toggle button to show
>  pre-release

If I see it correctly, this is already available on all pages. But a unified design would probably be better, an automatic hint during a beta phase.


> Am 03.04.2024 um 23:03 schrieb Kevin Kofler via devel <devel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
> 
> I would really like to see what the proportion of users downloading the 
> Server, IoT, Cloud, and CoreOS Editions is compared to Workstation or the 
> Spins. I would not expect it to be very high. Most Fedora users are desktop 
> users.  . . .  just completely niche. 
> So why do you expect those Editions to be more relevant to users downloading 
> Fedora from fedoraproject.org than the Spins?

If you have a look on the statistics Matthew reported on Flock last year, you would know that the numbers for Workstation were declining, whereas the numbers for Server raised steeply and for CoreOS and IoT steadily up. 

<ironie>
To put it in your (Kevin Kofler’s) words (it’s NOT my wording!): 
Why should we see any relevance in a declining Workstation instead of all the steadily growing server variants? Where is to be seen the future of Fedora?
</ironie>

But in fact, the phrasing itself of that paragraph is 'un-fedorian‘.



--
Peter Boy
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Pboy
PBoy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Timezone: CET (UTC+1) / CEST (UTC+2)

Fedora Server Edition Working Group member
Fedora Docs team contributor and board member
Java developer and enthusiast



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