Draft Product Description for Fedora Workstation

[Alberto Ruiz]

On Mon, 2013-11-04 at 12:56 -0500, Matthew Miller wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 04, 2013 at 06:39:54PM +0100, Kevin Kofler wrote:
> > The reason we are so strongly opposed to app stores is that we are fairly 
> > convinced that the mere fact of having them available WILL:
> > * reduce the number of applications actually available in our repositories
> >   (because some upstreams will just upload a bundle and tell you to use
> >   that, and nobody will want to do the work of actually getting the package
> >   through Fedora review),
> 
> If they're easily available to our users, and work just as nicely or better,
> why is this a problem? In fact, it kind of sounds like "everyone wins!" to
> me.

Indeed, this is a relief to the distro community, suddenly you don't
have the burden of maintaining all these apps in your system image,
avoiding any potential problems on upgrades.

It also removes the pressure for the user to have to upgrade his/her
whole system just because they want the latest version of an app.

It also allows for parallel versions of an app, which means that to test
a beta version of, say,  LibreOffice, you don't need the beta version of
your whole operating system.

And the application developer suddenly gains back control on how and
when his app gets delivered to users.

The only downside is that we are going to have to rewire our brains to
stop using yum/dnf to browse/install/remove end user desktop apps.
(This, I think, is why this idea gets so much pushback from the distro
communities)

And, by the way, we've been supporting this kind of model with pip and
gem already, so I really don't get why all the fuss when suddenly we
want to do it with the desktop applications.

-- 
Cheers,
Alberto Ruiz