Response to "Getting Fedora Out of the If-Then Loop"

Matthias Clasen mclasen at redhat.com
Fri Feb 19 23:09:03 UTC 2010


On Fri, 2010-02-19 at 22:43 +0100, Christoph Wickert wrote:

> There is no official document that says this, but there is at least one
> board member who claimed that "spins are a detriment to Fedora". He
> didn't outline why he thinks so, but the statement still stands. And it
> hurts, at least for the people who work on the different spins.
> 

I normally avoid threads like this like the plague, and I'm not on the
board, but I will tell you why _I_ consider spins as currently
implemented to be detrimental to Fedora. And please, don't take this as
a personal attack on the hard work that some of the current spin
maintainers do; I'm trying to say that the decision to adopt spins as
the solution to our direction problem was a strategic mistake.

- Having a bunch of alternative spins and no clear default is poison for
the Fedora brand. It leads to ambassadors handing out their personal
favorite spin instead of the default spin and selling it as 'Fedora'. 
To have any wider success, 'Fedora' must have a very clear meaning.
Currently, 'Fedora' can mean any number of things.

- It splits us into a bunch of small fiefdoms where each group works on
their thing, instead of working on a common product. And knowledge of
what other groups do is often limited to hearsay and second-guessing.

- To a non-geek user, the choice of LXDE vs XFCE vs KDE vs Gnome makes
no sense whatsoever. 'A system tailored for Electrical Engineering' vs
'A system tailored for Astronomy' might make some more sense, but still,
the mostly likely takeaway from a set of choices like that is 'not for
me'.



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