Removing Bloat from the next Live CD (Desktop)

[Donald Buchan]

On Sun, 2014-07-13 at 11:31 -0700, quickbooks office wrote:
> PS> I Posted this to the devel mailing list a while back and was told
> to post here instead;
> 
> ---------------
> 
> Removing Bloat from the next Live CD (Desktop) :
> 
> 
> I have noticed alot of packages are included in the Live CD which are
> not really used by users who only speak English.
> 
> 
> I think it really makes sense to split the Live CD into 2 versions.
> 
> 
> The default version will be for English only.
> 
> 
> The second Live CD (not the default) will be English + international
> languages support.
> 
> 
> =============
> 
> Here are the packages which I believe can be removed without any
> adverse effects:

(snipetty snip)

One of my beefs several versions back (0) about the Fedora LiveCD was
that it didn't include OpenOffice.org (now LibreOffice) at the time,
which was no doubt due to space constraints on the physical media.  To
me this was a killer exclusion and, while I understood why, I felt that
the Fedora desktop spin fell flat.  As a marketing tool in order to
attract new users, it was trying to be good for everybody but really
ending up being too general and diluted for most as a desktop, and
frankly at the time I felt that Ubuntu's LiveCD was a far better desktop
out-of-the-box (even though to make the two comparable only took a few
more minutes, but, admittedly, not for a novice with no clue how to do
it.)

A spin should be useful out of the box to its intended target audience.
Yes, I know that in trying to make space you are suggesting that either
the download would become less heavy bandwidth-wise, more broadly
installable on the various limited-sized media available to users, have
more space for "useful" applications in order to be more appealing, or
some mix of these three.

That being said, and without being able to speak for those who actually
do the work from which I benefit, my knee-jerk reaction is that:

- It would create two parallel, distinct spins which would require a lot
of duplicated work to maintain two iso's whose goals would nominally be
to be technically identical to each other save the internationalization;
- The logical conclusion of such a move would be to still have a
dominant spin which would get most of the love and attention --
presumably, the English spin, although who knows, maybe the
international spin -- and end up with a niche spin which may (or may
not) be relegated to oblivion (I can't quickly locate a page I saw a few
years ago on spin download stats; suffice it to say that after the XFCE
download, which was something like the #3 downloaded Fedora Spin, the
numbers dropped from the hundreds if not thousands down to low tens);
- It goes against Fedora's goals of Fedora being accessible to all as
opposed to being an elitist spin reserved for those with a sufficient
grasp of English -- in the case of the English spin were to become the
dominant spin -- and again would be a poor move toward creating a
marketing tool.

In any case, the marketing and technical direction has been moving away
from Fedora being presented -- except, presumably, for the distribution
as a whole, including all the software in the repositories -- as a
"general purpose operating system" and toward a somewhat more technical
distro.  Despite this, internationalization is a core and integral tenet
of Fedora no matter what.

--

(0) http://www.malak.ca/blog/?p=227