Better sorting / display of Fedora Variants

Project Discussion
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I did a draft of how we could sort the Fedora Editions better

Currently, I find them completely confusing (and even after that differentiation I don’t get the difference between IOT and CoreOS).

Sorting them better could help a lot. And integrating this into the website, for example how uBlue did this for the variant selection:

(Under “try it out”)

We get a lot of confused users all the time. It helps that most get guided to Workstation, but the rest is not that clear. The server editions are all displayed as parallel options, while they are for specific purposes.

The difference between all the atomic and the regular editions is also not shown enough, like in my proposed tree. There you always have 2 variants (apart from some spins and labs) that are roughly equivalent but with dnf or rpm-ostree respectively.

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I would say that the Spins navigation is more difficult. I just type the URL now, but a new user looking for i3WM will find it difficult to navigate or give up.

As we have recently seen with a user not knowing Fedora has a i3WM spin.

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This is the current state.

If you look at the uBlue chooser, I think this would be great!

In my sorting, Spins are between “flagships” (currently GNOME and Silverblue, hopefully soon KDE and Kinoite) and the Labs.

I would also like if Fedora directed towards downstream images like uBlue. Big “not managed by us” etc. but

  1. Bazzite gets more attention than Fedora Atomic Desktops
  2. Showing how many downstreams Fedora has, helps the community and shows its value.

Because currently there are no Labs and not a lot of Spins for Fedora Atomic Desktops.

And I see no reason to push people to use legally crippled images if they can just use uBlue instead.

(I switched back to upstream Kinoite, but wouldnt recommend that for NVIDIA users for example, at all)

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IANAL, but I’d think that being overt about saying “We can’t distribute software X, but wink wink, just look over there” would be problematic.

At that point, I think one could fairly question why the Project is even promoting its own work to end users - it would feel analogous to Canonical directing folks on their Flavours page to just use Linux Mint?

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I think this is fine.

The regular images are not usable without layering at least libavcodec-freeworld. Issue. This includes the preinstalled Firefox, where the Flatpak has no namespace isolation, and thumbnails for many media types in the file managers.

For NVIDIA or other images of uBlue “HWE” this is even more drastic, as they may require large deviations, which often cause breakages.

Doing this on the local OS breaks a big purpose of these variants, while not all. Having them done by uBlue centralizes the issues and helps to always get good updates.

I requested a lot of packages and many were rejected for design decisions, but these ones are simply legal reasons.

And yes, Ubuntu could totally advertize the snapfree Mint. But thats off topic :slight_smile: