will F18 allow simultaneous installation of more than one desktop?

[Chris Lumens]

> I think it's much simpler: Just revert the DE radio buttons to the original
> checkboxes, so people can choose more than one, and if someone does that, pop up
> a warning.

We are trying to keep the number of spurious dialogs and confirmations
to a minimum, as we've gotten many complaints over the years that
there's simply too much jumping up in your face.

If you look at the new anaconda UI (for the first time, or more closely
I dunno) you will see there are not any radio buttons.  There's no
reverting to do.

But there's a bigger goal here.  We're trying to not ship and show
Fedora as this giant ball of crud that you just arbitrarily pick stuff
from.  We are trying instead to show Fedora as a core system that you
can customize with sets of add-on packages.  Right now the best we can
do in breaking it down like that is using the desktop environments as
analogs for the core system, and other package groups for the add-on
sets.  However this is likely to change in the future as comps gets
cleaned up (see Bill's talk from a FUDCon or two ago).

Within this core system model, we have dedicated groups of people
working to develop and QA their core.  Think of the desktop team for
GNOME, the KDE SIG for KDE, other spin-specific SIGs, and so forth.
With the giant ball of crud model, we don't really have that.  I don't
think there's any QA done for the multiple desktop case.

This lines up pretty nicely with live installs, by the way, which
currently make up somewhere around half of all installations.  And when
you do a live install, you don't get a choice of installing multiple
desktops.  You've either made the choice of what you want when you
downloaded from the website, or when you decided which to boot from the
multi-desktop DVD.

- Chris