On 05/24/2012 09:25 PM, Brendan Jones wrote:
Jorn's posts this week have got me thinking about what we should
be aiming for in terms of install media. As others have noted
before a CD sized spin is kind of outdated, and I wondered whether
we were in fact bound by this. So I raised it with releng on IRC
and we are not.
Thinking is dangerous. That's why we do it!
In light of this I propose that we abandon the idea of a 'lite'
spin complemented by a larger DVD version, and just focus on one
Live image.
It would be nice if its under 1G but that again should not be a
boundary that we need adhere to?
Raising here for comment.
This is a serious issue, and it's related to "who will be using the
spin?" Actually, it's "who wants to use the spin?" and the related
question of whether we're okay with disallowing some of them.
And here's the potentially offensive part...
If we're just going to be stodgy old white men with lots of resources,
then we can forget about a media requirement at all, because everybody
has a 16GB USB drive and high-speed cable Internet nowadays, so why do
we still make CDs?
Of course I'm exaggerating--nobody said it, or was even implying it
(even Brendan's more-than-CD spin was suggested at 1GB, which is
modest compared to the 3.5GiB of Mageia I downloaded yesterday). So
the reality of this is that we have the power and we can do whatever
we want. Because we're The Fedora Project, we have a responsibility to
ensure accessibility for as wide an audience as possible.
But let's take this further. We don't just want to ensure everybody
has access to our spin, we want to ensure everybody has an equally
rich, first-class experience. Especially if we call the CD version
"Lite," it's not going to give that impression, whatever the actual
experience would be.
So... let's have only one version, make it as small as possible, and
certainly ensure it fits on one CD! This obviously means we won't have
many applications installed by default, but I don't see that as a
problem for two reasons:
1.) the applications aren't the reason for the Spin, it's the
integration.
2.) I don't know about you, but I don't use everything we've been
thinking of putting on the spin, so why should everybody have to
download everything?
It's always a question of compromise and balance.
For the sake of argument, lets say size doesn't matter, what then
should we use as the default desktop environment? To me its a
choice between Qt v. GTK environments - personally I'm yet to find
a gnome 3 workflow that works for me, however others may have
different opinions.
XFCE or KDE I think gives us a little more freedom in how we govern
the whole look and feel of the spin (and packaging something like
a customized fedora-audio-panel for example), but that's not to say
we can't write a gnome extension to do the same.
In this case, and because of what I said previously, we might be best
off choosing a GUI toolkit first (Qt, like most of the audio
applications) and the smallest desktop environment next (Qt Razor or
Razor Qt).
Again, it's about access for everybody. Sure thing my computer can run
GNOME 3 and KDE-based applications at the same time while still making
good-quality recordings, but not everybody has my computer.
And while I'm at it, what are we going to call this thing? Fedora
(Audio) studio / Fedora Audio / Free Audio (I'm reaching now)
Let's call it "The Spin." It sounds misguidedly epic.
Christopher.
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