On Wed, 2026-01-21 at 10:01 -0800, Erich Eickmeyer wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> Not sure if many of you know this, but I'm a bit of a UX guy, and try to make
> everything I touch a good experience for new and experienced users alike.
> That's kinda my thing.
>
> As an experiment I was just installing using the "Everything" installer in a
> VM and came across an interesting conundrum.
>
> As many of you know, the Everything .iso image just has an Anaconda instance
> where it installs from the comps, meaning one can install the desktop
> environment they want along with whatever package selection they want from
> the
> comps. This is all well and good, except I was noticing something.
>
> My wife is in education, and when I went to install the "Education" group to
> show her, everything worked just fine until I looked at what it *actually*
> installed in addition to the DE: nothing. So, upon inspecing the group I
> noticed that *every package is optional* and, despite installing the group,
> nothing got installed.
>
> I would say that, therefore, this didn't go as expected, and we can't expect
> everyday or new users to open the command line and go `sudo dnf group install
> {comp} --with-optional`.
>
> I can see three solutions:
>
> 1) Anaconda installs selected comps "--with-optional"
> 2) If a comp has nothing but optional packages, Anaconda installs "--with-
> optional".
> 3) If a comp has only optional components, those components should be changed
> from "optional" to "default".
>
> I'd love to hear some discussion about this.
As Stephen mentioned in his reply, all-optional groups are mostly an
artifact from two installer interfaces ago - the one that looked like
https://techgage.com/viewimg/?img=/articles/linux/fedora_15_lovelock_review/fedora_15_installer_23.png&desc=Installing%20Fedora%2015
You could click "Optional packages" there. These groups mostly existed
in order to populate that interface.
They may also have been relevant to older package management GUIs like
gnome-packagekit, at this point I honestly don't recall. dnfdragora may
show them too, I'm not sure.
You *can* access them to some degree using dnf, but I'm not sure anyone
actually does. You can do `dnf group install --with-optional <group>`,
which will include *all* optional packages in the group. It doesn't
seem terribly useful to me, but maybe somebody likes it?
My personal preference would be to throw out about 90% of comps, but
I'm not sure how popular that would be. :D
--
Adam Williamson (he/him/his)
Fedora QA
Fedora Chat: @adamwill:fedora.im | Mastodon: @[email protected]
https://www.happyassassin.net
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