Developers vs Grandmas revisited

[Doug Berry]

Hey guys,

I was wondering about something. I've downloaded every new distribution off of the Live CD. So after everything is loaded, once you get to your desktop, two things seem to happen: 1) PUP opens up and says: "You have updates," and 2) I go on and spend the next couple of hours house-cleaning, icons on the desktop, setting-up the file manager, etc.

So, you know that Desktop icon you click on to write the contents of the Live CD to your hard drive? How about if we come up with several of those? Say, click here to write the two-gig Fedora Office package to your desktop. Or the three-gig Fedora Arts Package? Or Multimedia? And so on....

These packages would have all the core stuff everybody wants, but then be top-heavy with speciality stuff, that would appeal to a certain professions or lively-hoods.

The icon could simply trigger a download script in YUM or PUP to download a pre-determined set of packages. And people would still have the basic stuff to play with while the new packages are downloading. 

Remember that one of the biggest money makers for Daddy Bill is Microsoft Office Suit. People pay a fortune for it, but they are professionals, so it is probably tax deductible. And yet, Open Office has stuff that kicks WOS's butt, but nobody I know of, includes all of OO packages on a distro.

In fact, I believe Fedora 9 didn't even have some of the OO packages listed on their Add/Remove Packages application.  

And this could have the unintended effect of inspiring up-stream development. Since if people know that their stuff is going to be featured on a whole distro, they may buckle down. Seems like a lot of packages are just hanging, and not being worked on or updated. Probably because their developers are to busy, writing the core stuff, or just making a living.

This would also mean we would not need all the DVD's, just Live CDs for everybody, and people could get most of the bulk they want via downloads after they have the core packages in place.

I don't know, maybe this is a developer's nightmare, or maybe not. What does anyone think?
    
-- w Douglas Berry --
slasherzee at fedoraproject.org



      
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