Discussion of Fedora Server use-cases

[Jim Perrin]

On 10/28/2013 02:15 PM, Bill Nottingham wrote:
> "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" (johannbg at gmail.com) said: 
>> You never deploy a desktop on a server so I would say we would limit
>> this to a base/coreOS a set of administrative tools + a single
>> application and or a application stack and the way we would deliver
>> the products would be something that we would limit to netinstall +
>> ks or something that integrades well with provisioning tools
> 
> I wouldn't say "never", given that somewhere around 20% of the users of a
> Fedora-downstream distribution do install a desktop on their server, as of
> a random sampling of a user subset done a while back.

20% actually sounds a bit low, given what we see on the CentOS side.

> Given, that sample should be followed up on to see *why* they do it
> (unfamiliarity with CLI/used to Windows, bad defaults in installer, other
> reasons?). In fact, if we're being forward looking where *everything* is
> deployed at large-scale, then this number should be expected to go down as
> fewer people are doing single-digit deployments. But the need may still
> exist for some people.


We see this also as a dependency requirement for various 3rd party
software. For example, Oracle, some printserver software, ArcGIS, and
several FlexLM intergrated apps all want at least some portion of a gui
to run. Not all of them handle a forwarded display properly. Some link
directly to firefox to display their documentation.




-- 
Jim Perrin
The CentOS Project | http://www.centos.org
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