Fedora.NEXT Products and the fate of Spins

Przemek Klosowski przemek.klosowski at nist.gov
Wed Feb 5 17:33:19 UTC 2014


On 02/05/2014 03:34 AM, Stephen Gallagher wrote:
> It's not just that, actually. It has to do with the fact that the
> majority of the scientific-focused applications are built atop the QT4
> and other KDE libraries, making it much better suited to operating
> atop the KDE desktop environment. Certainly it *can* be run in GNOME
> at the cost of additional memory usage and other resources
This doesn't sound right.

yum group info 'Engineering and Scientific'

lists 148 applications, of which 14 require Qt (*). The method I used is 
pretty ad-hoc so perhaps I am missing something, but it seems to me that 
KDE is not really correlated to the 'scientificness'. This reflects my 
personal experience---I have been using Fedora for scientific computing 
for a long time, always under Gnome and I never felt the need to switch 
to KDE. Adam is probably right that KDE might just be a personal 
preference of the spin authors.

This actually illustrates a problem I have with spins: if you treat them 
too much like separate products, they detract from modularity that is 
really the strength of Linux and Fedora. It should work just fine to 
combine Scientific and Security, for instance if someone wanted to do a 
statistical analysis on WiFi security survey scans :). If you look at 
spins as a PR/marketing effort around groupinstall, the modularity is 
easily available. If you look at spins as a customized remixes creating 
a specialized environment, not so much.

Greetings

przemek




(*) as determined by

for a in `yum group info 'Engineering and Scientific'` ; do if repoquery 
--requires $a | grep -iq qt; then echo $a; fi  ; done


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