How would you sort/categories all the goodies in the Fedora ecosystem?

[duffy (Máirín Duffy)]

What we call this exercise in interaction / ux design practice is a “card sort.” Card sort Fedora with me!

You might have seen this conceptual model I drew up for Fedora:

I’m working with the team of folks working on the website revamp project. I’m looking at coming up with a category / sort system for all the “end user focused” stuff Fedora produces - not the infrastructure apps/tools/etc., but the stuff users come to our site to download. Like Workstation, Silverblue, IoT, Fedora CoreOS, etc. And I’d like to organize them in a manner related to this diagram. This is going to help use create a good hierarchy for the content on the site, and could even be displayed in the site footer, directory style.

This is my gut instinct after a lot of thinking and playing around:

---

Headline: Fedora Ecosystem or Fedora Offerings
(I’m not happy with either of these headline ideas, halp!)

Desktops
Fedora Workstation [edition]
Fedora Silverblue [emerging edition]
Fedora KDE Plasma
Fedora Kinoite
[… more …]
Fedora XFCE
Fedora LXQT
Fedora Mate-Compiz
Fedora Cinnamon
Fedora SoAS
Fedora i3 Tiling WM

Server / Cloud Deployment
Fedora Server [edition]
Fedora CoreOS [emerging edition]
Fedora Cloud Base Images
Fedora Container Image

IoT Deployment
Fedora IoT [edition]
Fedora ARM downloads

Artist maybe formerly known as Fedora Labs
(note, these are less directly connected to the conceptual model, more on that later)
Fedora Astronomy
Fedora Comp Neuro
Fedora Design Suite
Fedora Games
Fedora Jam
Fedora Python Classroom
Fedora Security Lab
Fedora Robotics Suite
Fedora Scientific

[end list]

Everything & Minimal

Two things I left off not sure where to put them: Fedora Everything, Fedora Minimal.

Why do people use Fedora Everything? I am not sure. Do you know? I could see Fedora Everything on physical media being a way for folks with low or no bandwidth to get a good set of content.

Why do people use Fedora Minimal? If they are trying to build something custom using Fedora as a base I guess - but that’s also the Fedora cloud and container images, right? So why Fedora minimal and not those?

Fedora Labs

Fedora Labs don’t fit within the conceptual model as directly as the desktop and deployment categories. I think that’s OK.

I wonder if the Labs are better classified as user communities within Fedora, that also produce their own version of Fedora. I don’t know if every single one has an active community behind it though. But - a Fedora Lab spin doesn’t honestly require downloading a full OS. You can consume the Lab spins as a package group install, can’t you? (at least on non os-tree versions of Fedora?)

To me, it seems like maybe these versions of Fedora are more akin to “expansion packs” or something like that. Adding specific curated functionality from a specific domain on top of the base Fedora OS. Am I nuts? Does this make sense?

Generally - let me know what you think and if you’d organize things differently, or if I left anything else out that should be there.

(In case it helps, this is my active working footer mockup based on the card sort above so you can see how this thing might manifest visually):

[kylerconway (Kyle Reynolds Conway)]

I’m probably joking. You’re just looking for best categorical sorting of the available downloads?

[thunderbirdtr (Onuralp SEZER)]

Fedora Kinoite(rpm ostree but based on KDE) should be on Desktop list as well.

[duffy (Máirín Duffy)]

Sweet, I’ll put it there.

[duffy (Máirín Duffy)]

I love the design on this! Got an SVG to share :-)?

[t0xic0der (Akashdeep Dhar)]

@duffy, Thanks for following up with the discussion that we had yesterday in the Fedora Websites Revamp channel, with some awesome progress. These look great!

[glb (Gregory Lee Bartholomew)]

@duffy

Headline: Fedora Ecosystem or Fedora Offerings
(I’m not happy with either of these headline ideas, halp!)

Fedora Compositions?

@duffy

Artist maybe formerly known as Fedora Labs
(note, these are less directly connected to the conceptual model, more on that later)

Are you saying that “Labs” is being renamed to “Artist”? If so, maybe your headline could be “Fedora Linux Offerings, Remixes, and Artist” (FLORA).

@duffy

Why do people use Fedora Minimal? If they are trying to build something custom using Fedora as a base I guess - but that’s also the Fedora cloud and container images, right? So why Fedora minimal and not those?

Yeah. I use Fedora Minimal (or “dnf --installroot=/var/lib/machines/<systemd_nspawn_container_name> groupinstall core”) to build custom images. I use that instead of the prepackaged images because I don’t know exactly how all the settings have been optimized on, e.g., the cloud image. If things are changed in ways that I’m unaware of, it can (potentially) cause me confusion somewhere down the line when I’m trying to figure out why something is or is not working. Also, I think people sometimes use the Everything installer because it lets you customize your image from the installer. (I think that was even stated in the documentation somewhere at one time. But I cannot find it just now.)

[duffy (Máirín Duffy)]

Would it be accurate to consider minimal and everything “build your own Fedora” options?

(allowing that theres an arm build of minimal that might have some other purpose for IoT)

[glb (Gregory Lee Bartholomew)]

@duffy

Would it be accurate to consider minimal and everything “build your own Fedora” options?

That sounds right to me. It looks like the Everything image is listed under “net install” images. The following excerpt is from the net install section of Downloading Fedora.

The netinstall image boots directly into the installation environment, and uses the online Fedora package repositories as the installation source. With a netinstall image, you can install any Fedora Edition or select a wide variety of packages to create a customized installation of Fedora.

I think minimal is actually a dnf install group, not an image right? So the main difference between the two would be that one would use the Everything image if they wanted to install from a bootable image. But one would use the “minimal” dnf group if they were creating an image from an already booted/running Fedora Linux installation. Otherwise, yeah, I think both of those are basically used as starting points to “build your own Fedora”.

[duffy (Máirín Duffy)]

minimal is an installable image. see alt.fpo

[bcotton (Ben Cotton)]

@duffy

Headline: Fedora Ecosystem or Fedora Offerings
(I’m not happy with either of these headline ideas, halp!)

Fedora Variants? (I don’t necessarily love that, but it’s a term we use in some contexts already, so that’s nice)

@duffy

Why do people use Fedora Everything? I am not sure. Do you know? I could see Fedora Everything on physical media being a way for folks with low or no bandwidth to get a good set of content.

Why do people use Fedora Minimal? If they are trying to build something custom using Fedora as a base I guess - but that’s also the Fedora cloud and container images, right? So why Fedora minimal and not those?

Your guess is as good as mine re: Everything. I used to use “minimal” a lot as a netinstaller. I’d boot that and then customize my desktop/server (there needs to be a word for this) installation from it. Nowadays, I generally go with the KDE Plasma spin and let Ansible handle the rest of the work post-install.

Where I’d most likely use minimal is in a former job where we were using PXE to install hundreds of compute nodes in short order. Basically it was a small image to pass over the network in order to get anaconda going so that the kickstart (and the local repo mirror) could do the hard work.

@duffy

Fedora Labs don’t fit within the conceptual model as directly as the desktop and deployment categories. I think that’s OK.

I wonder if the Labs are better classified as user communities within Fedora, that also produce their own version of Fedora. I don’t know if every single one has an active community behind it though. But - a Fedora Lab spin doesn’t honestly require downloading a full OS. You can consume the Lab spins as a package group install, can’t you? (at least on non os-tree versions of Fedora?)

To me, it seems like maybe these versions of Fedora are more akin to “expansion packs” or something like that. Adding specific curated functionality from a specific domain on top of the base Fedora OS. Am I nuts? Does this make sense?

This makes a lot of sense, and I’ve never thought of it that way. I don’t know if all of our Labs have comps groups, but your general understanding is correct. The main reason we produce images for those is so that they can be used trivially. For example, you could do a class from the Python Classroom Lab without having to configure every machine in the room. Or you can do neat astronomy stuff directly from the live image.

Thinking of them as curated content sets that just happen to be directly installable is good for this exercise. They’re definitely more targeted at a use case instead of an experience (for lack of a better term) than the Spins are.

[bookwar (Aleksandra Fedorova)]

In the previous thread on Labs and Spins we came up the Fedora with vs Fedora for difference for Spins and Labs. I liked that approach very much so I wonder can it somehow be incorporated in the design.

[abitrolly (Anatoli Babenia)]

I wish I found this thread before writing this reply elsewhere.

Website refresh next steps!

All these Editions, Spins, Labs (and perhaps Downloads) are badly need visualization. After spending few years with Fedora I can probably tell the difference (but not for Silverblue). I imagine the viz as a kernel being the core (Sun), then have some salad added on top to get specific Fedora flavor that is common to all these concepts, then parallel branches leading to specific variants. Clicking on a variant gives visualization that explains the particular structure for this variant.

So yea. I would actually let people diff the goodies. For that they need to be represented in a structured format, like JSON. Then even non directly comparable concepts can be shown side by side. Finding a good name for a goodie type is still a problem.

I’d repeate that it’d be nice to clarify that Linux is a kernel (unpatched, right?) with stuff areound it that creates a Linux distro. And the combination of that stuff for specific purpose is that makes a distribution unique and useful.

That being said, Fedora is not just the same kernel + GNOME, but also an engineering process.