<div dir="ltr">Intel actually has a website where it compares Desktop -vs- Workstation. So beyond the marketing and semantics there's actually a real difference between the two. Intel's marketing materials state:<br>
<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);border-left-style:solid;padding-left:1ex">"...workload-optimized innovation platform designed to deliver the processing, graphics and bandwidth capacities artist, animators, analysts, engineers, scientists and other professional demand in order to accelerate their innovation."</blockquote>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);border-left-style:solid;padding-left:1ex">"Still not everyone needs a workstation. A typical office worker running standard office applications such as word processing, e-mail, and presentation software will get all the performance needed from a standard business PC."</blockquote>
<div><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);border-left-style:solid;padding-left:1ex">"The Workstation Advantage: workstation's are purpose-built to deliver the performance, reliability and stability demanded by designers, engineers, financial analysts, and researchers running large complex applications" </blockquote>
</div><div><br></div><div>link: <a href="http://goo.gl/WNFXdm">http://goo.gl/WNFXdm</a><div><br></div><div>Fedora Workstation does NOT need the latest mobile oriented experimental desktop environment like Gnome Shell or Ubuntu's Unity. Just like a Windows workstation needs Windows 7 and NOT Windows 8. In fact due to the "reliability and stability" purpose of a workstation you should actually go with something older, stable and mature like Gnome 2.0, which would entail making Mate the default using Mutter or Compton as the compositor. My current default setup happens to be Mate (Gnome 2.0) and the Compton compositor. </div>
<div><br></div><div>Most traditional Linux workstation users were exposed to Mate already because it's basis Gnome 2.0 was the default on RHEL for quite a while. Mate is also the "safe" choice for adoption of the Fedora Workstation for the Linux community in the political dimension. The Mate desktop was forked from Gnome 2.0 by an Arch Linux developer and is used on all major distributions including Linux Mint and recently Ubuntu 14.04. That means it's respected, independent and has a large following among Linux developers and engineers.</div>
<div><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);border-left-style:solid;padding-left:1ex">"The MATE Desktop Project is dedicated to keeping alive the traditional GNOME 2 desktop metaphor. Many users liked this desktop, and found it simple, configurable, and comfortable to use. Our goal is to continue the development of this desktop environment, adding new features, fixing bugs, and improving the software as support libraries and other dependent software improves and changes."</blockquote>
</div><div> <div>link: <a href="http://wiki.mate-desktop.org/board:manifesto">http://wiki.mate-desktop.org/board:manifesto</a></div><div><br></div><div>It would be unfair to the Gnome team to have to hold back their own mobile inspired innovation and creativity because the Workstation product demands a traditional desktop metaphor. We're beginning to see spectacular cutting-edge UI/UX innovations come out of the Gnome project. Perhaps the answer is to maintain a Fedora branded Mate desktop with official Gnome applications and theming. That way the Fedora Workstation team could facilitate the flow of these innovations back into Mate and make sure they find their way upstream to the Mate developers.<br>
</div><div><br></div><div>Compton is based on xcompmgr-dana which is also the basis for Valve's compositor used in SteamOS which speaks volumes about it's performance and reliability. The basis xcompmgr was originally written by Keith Packard. This setup is a mature, reliable and workflow neutral setup that's perfect for a workstation use case.</div>
<div><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);border-left-style:solid;padding-left:1ex">"In digging through the steamos-compositor code, it's a modified version of xcompmgr."</blockquote>
<div><br></div><div>link: <a href="http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?px=MTU0MzY&page=news_item">http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?px=MTU0MzY&page=news_item</a><br></div><div><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);border-left-style:solid;padding-left:1ex">
"Compton is a lightweight, standalone composite manager, suitable for use with window managers that do not natively provide compositing functionality. Compton itself is a fork of xcompmgr-dana, which in turn is a fork of xcompmgr. See the compton github page for further information."</blockquote>
</div><div><div><br></div><div>link: <a href="https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Compton">https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Compton</a></div><div><div><br></div><div>This difference in purpose Desktop -vs- Workstation cannot be lost because the end product cannot just be another version of Fedora Desktop with more up to date Gnome Shell components, it should be a TRUE workstation-class product. There's a huge risk that the Desktop use case will creep into the Workstation product. To ensure further separation there should be two different parallel tracks based on which desktop environment is in use:</div>
<div><br></div><div>Fedora Desktop = Core + Gnome Shell (Gnome 3)</div><div>Purpose: "Deliver a cutting-edge mobile inspired and integrated desktop experience for hip tech-savvy consumers and forward thinking modern business users."</div>
<div><br></div><div>Fedora Workstation = Core + Mate (Gnome 2 + Compton and/or Mutter)</div><div>Purpose: "Deliver the performance, reliability and stability demanded by designers, engineers, financial analysts, and researchers running large complex applications."</div>
<div><br></div><div>This way both use-cases can evolve to their full potential without any compromises or limitations. </div></div></div><div><br></div><div>Thank you for reading...</div></div>