On 02/05/2014 03:34 AM, Stephen Gallagher wrote:

It's not just that, actually. It has to do with the fact that the
majority of the scientific-focused applications are built atop the QT4
and other KDE libraries, making it much better suited to operating
atop the KDE desktop environment. Certainly it *can* be run in GNOME
at the cost of additional memory usage and other resources

This doesn't sound right.

yum group info 'Engineering and Scientific'

lists 148 applications, of which 14 require Qt (*). The method I used is pretty ad-hoc so perhaps I am missing something, but it seems to me that KDE is not really correlated to the 'scientificness'. This reflects my personal experience---I have been using Fedora for scientific computing for a long time, always under Gnome and I never felt the need to switch to KDE. Adam is probably right that KDE might just be a personal preference of the spin authors.

This actually illustrates a problem I have with spins: if you treat them too much like separate products, they detract from modularity that is really the strength of Linux and Fedora. It should work just fine to combine Scientific and Security, for instance if someone wanted to do a statistical analysis on WiFi security survey scans :). If you look at spins as a PR/marketing effort around groupinstall, the modularity is easily available. If you look at spins as a customized remixes creating a specialized environment, not so much.

Greetings

przemek

(*) as determined by

for a in `yum group info 'Engineering and Scientific'` ; do if repoquery --requires $a | grep -iq qt; then echo $a; fi ; done