Updated Fedora Workstation PRD draft

[Rui Tiago Cação Matos]

Hi,

I pretty much agree with what Adam replied. I'll just address one
point, generalizing it:

On 1 December 2013 20:01, Marcel Oliver <m.oliver at jacobs-university.de> wrote:
> - At higher levels in the stack, distributions should choose
>   best-of-breed default applications, not necessarily those who are
>   the "official" desktop environment champions.  Case in point: I have
>   always been biased toward using Gnome rather than KDE applications
>   when both exist, with one exception: As a document viewer (and
>   that's a pretty central complex application), okular is such an
>   advance over evince that IMO it really deserves the "Document
>   Viewer" name in the defaults.  (The main points: using the "trim
>   margin" feature of okular, most PDF documents which occur in the
>   wild can actually be read at an acceptable magnification without
>   in-page scrolling on modern screens; the page caching of okular is
>   notably better than evince's which is unacceptably slow with
>   bitmapped, i.e. scanned documents even on good hardware.)
>
> So Fedora should bundle what is the best, not what is the "politically
> correct" application for a given desktop.

The distribution concept just needs to go. Leave it in the 1990s where
it belongs and let's instead build an OS shall we?

To get on your point, what you need is not for the best document
viewer to be bundled. You need a damn good document viewer for your
use case. And it shouldn't be the distribution's business to find one
for you. Why? Because at this level in the software stack (i.e.
applications) users have very specific needs, and why should someone
throwing together a distro know what's the best document viewer for
you?

Yes, what we need is to let applications flourish (or not) on their
own merits, build a brand for themselves. If they are good, users will
find them.

What the OS should do is provide a solid and well defined base for
application developers to target *and* make it really easy for users
to install applications.

To get on your case again, perhaps something like Mendeley would be a
good fit? Let's try it. We go to [1] and what do we see? We have
Ubuntu/Debian packages (awesome, linux is supported!) and for other
linuxes we get a .tar.bz2 and these instructions:

"
1. Open the downloaded archive
2. Extract the contents to any folder
3. Run the application

Within the extracted folder, open a terminal and run the following command:

./bin/mendeleydesktop
"

Not really nice, is it? At least the .deb package is nicer to install
with just a few clicks. Unfortunately, it runs a little script as root
that adds to your apt repositories, which is convenient, but is the
distribution update channel a good fit for applications? Clearly not,
given all the reports around the web of failed updates due to 3rd
party repositories creeping in onto users systems.

Rui

[1] http://www.mendeley.com/download-mendeley-desktop
PS: I just googled this up, I didn't even know about it before, nor
did I try it. You might argue it's not free software but there's no
reason a free software alternative couldn't be doing the same.