Matthew Miller wrote:
> It's not an artificial distinction. Editions are particular solutions
> targeting particular key use cases identified by the Fedora Board (and now
> Council). This is different from a desktop Spin, which is focused on
> delivering that particular technology, or from Labs, which are focused on
> more niche use cases.
This is a political/marketing distinction and not a technical one.
For Editions vs. Spins, the Editions are in practice all focusing on a
particular technology: Workstation on GNOME, Server on server software, and
Atomic/Silverblue on atomic updates. Workstation in particular attempts to
simultaneously cater to very different "key use cases": web developers,
gamers using proprietary graphics drivers, etc., so it is pretty much a
general-purpose deliverable and not optimized for any particular use case;
the only set point (not up for discussion) that I can see is that it is
based on GNOME.
For Editions vs. Labs, the distinction between a "key" use case and a
"niche" use case is purely subjective. (The only objective distinction that
I see is that the Labs are actually much more tuned to their use cases than
the Editions, which use them mostly as an alibi.) An ordering by decreasing
download count would suffice to make the distinction between "key" and
"niche" purely objectively (and without having to draw a clear line where
"key" ends and "niche" starts).
I can see the point of the distinction between Spins and Labs (at least as a
terminology – the processes are essentially the same for both anyway), but
Editions claim to be use-case-centric like Labs while really being like
technology-centric like Spins. So the marketing is pretty deceptive.
> Since this is an offshoot of a thread about metrics, I want to emphasize
> that by all the metrics we have, this has been *very* successful. Fedora
> numbers were flat-to-decreasing when we started this, and now they're
> steeply up and growing.
But the setup I propose has never been tried. The pre-"Fedora.Next"
interations of the Fedora download page were also heavily biased towards
GNOME (or "Desktop" as the GNOME-based deliverable used to be called). So
you do not have any usable metrics for comparison.
>> So if that is your concern, the solution would be to define some minimum
>> formal requirements for a Spin to be listed on the get.fp.o front page.
>> But then those requirements should also apply to the 3 "Editions": if
>> they don't fit the criteria, they should be kicked out as well. (I could
>> see that possibly happenening for Server or Atomic/Silverblue at some
>> point. The Fedora user base is clearly desktop-centric. But I am NOT
>> saying that they should necessarily be delisted, just that they should be
>> held to the same maintenance standards as the Spins.)
>
> There *are* "some minimum formal requirements". An Edition is a Fedora
> solution made by a formal Fedora Working Group in response to a strategic
> use case identified by the community through the Fedora Council.
That is not a formal requirement, it's a subjective committee decision. (See
also what happened when the KDE SIG tried to create a science-centered
Edition based on KDE Plasma, capitalizing on the many scientific KDE
(kdeedu) and Qt applications and on the work done by the KDE Scientific and
KDE Astronomy Labs. The Board/Council was just not interested for purely
political reasons.)
> The WG needs formal membership, needs to meet regularly, and needs to have
> a regularly-refreshed requirements document.
These are reasonable criteria for being listed (though I'd also add some
technical usability criteria, to make sure that the WG is actually producing
a usable deliverable), but they should be the same for all
Spins/Labs/Editions independently of whether the Council subjectively
believes that that particular work deserves being an "Edition" or not.
> I really, really, strongly encourage the team behind each spin to
> advertise more prominently. The Council is even willing to allocate funds
> as necessary to help do that.
No amount of advertising we can do is going to be as prominent as the
getfedora download page. All users are driven to that page.
The only option would be to completely rebrand the Spin to an independent
Remix with its own name and domain (so searches for the new name would go
directly to the new domain and not to getfedora), but even then, it would be
very tough to even come close to the brand recognition Fedora has.
> Fedora is a Project. That Project makes an operating system platform and
> various operating system and platform solutions.
Oh no, not the KDE rebranding fiasco here too!
Almost everyone still calls "KDE Plasma" just "KDE", despite all the
insistence that "KDE" is not a particular piece of software (anymore), but a
community. Trying to do the same to the "Fedora" brand is going to flop
exactly the same way.
> Your "choose your Fedora adventure" page is interesting, but not new. We
> talked about this with the design team and they're really not in favor of
> that as the primary user experience for people who don't know what they
> want. It can be overwhelming and potentially full of traps.
The Design team is doubly biased in that several key members are involved
with the GNOME community, which:
1. gives them an incentive to promote the GNOME Workstation at the expense
of all other deliverables (conflict of interest), and
2. means they come from an environment where it is desired to offer as few
options as possible. GNOME is well known in the community for hardcoding
everything and reducing configuration options to a minimum.
Together, these biases led to the current design of promoting only the GNOME
Workstation.
And since it was apparently requested from above that the other options also
show up SOMEWHERE, they were hidden with all possible tricks (below the
scrolling horizon, even with grayed-out icons!). The only thing still
missing is the "Beware of the leopard!" sign.
> I think it's better to not focus so much on the central page or on the
> "getfedora" brochure site, and to instead make the page for each
> particular solution more useful and more discoverable.
But getfedora is the one discoverable place that all new users are being
focused on.
Kevin Kofler
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