upwards and onwards

[Matthias Clasen]

F12 is almost done !


I think we have produced one of our best releases yet. Thanks to
everybody who has helped making it a great desktop. As always, there are
many exciting new things: Abrt, Bluetooth networking and sound, Dracut,
Empathy, IPv6, Thusnelda, etc. But we have also put a lot of effort into
making this work well and look sharp. And it shows !

There are certainly still bugs to be found and fixed, and we will spend
some time after the release mostly focused on handling incoming bugs,
probably until around the time that GNOME 2.28.2 is released (right
before Christmas).

Even so, there are some changes to the Desktop spin that I want to make
early in the F13 cycle, and that I want to outline here:

- Drop the CD size limitation and target a larger usb stick. We have
discussed this in the past. The main motivation for this is that we have
to fight every release cycle to make things fit on a CD, and we don't
have room to include our default office suite or example content.

- Include OpenOffice instead of abiword. OpenOffice is the premier open
source office suite, and abiword is on the current live CD purely for
size reasons.

- Use shotwell as the default photo management app instead of gthumb.
This may be a bit of a surprise for some. Shotwell is a relatively new
application, that is in Fedora only since F12. I have mentioned it on
this list before. The 0.3.0 release that has just come out is very close
to the feature set that we'd ideally expect to have in a default photo
management app. It also starts very fast.

- Remove remaining Bluecurve icons from fedora-gnome-theme. This will
probably leave some holes in the menus, and we'll need help from artists
to fill those.

- Include example content. We've wanted to do this for a long time, but
CD size limitations have always prohibited it. Now we can do it, but of
course, we still need to collect good material. If you have proposals
for suitably licensed documents, movies, music, etc that are
interesting, cool or just funny, let us know ! It might also be a good
idea to include some promotional material that could be of use for
Fedora ambassadors. If you have proposals in this direction, let us know
as well ! 


Beyond these organizational changes to the live image, I think a focus
of our feature work for F13 will be around software installation and
updates. Some of our thoughts for how installation and updates should
ideally behave can be found on the wiki:

http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/Desktop/Whiteboards/UpdateExperience
http://www.fedoraproject.org/wiki/Desktop/InstallExperience

For application installation, Martin Bacovsky has already started
working on an online application database that is tied to pkgdb:
https://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/2009-October/msg01083.html

Some of us will be at FUDCon in a few weeks, where we can hopefully
discuss these ideas in more depth.


Matthias