Well, technically, I can call any PC I put together/use a workstation, Fedora doesn’t have copyrights to the term I don’t think. But you’re correct in pointing out our documentation around what is released is specific to that name being for Fedora Workstation. And the Spins and Labs were not permitted to use it in their names (which I don’t really see the basis for). I personally think we should start calling it Fedora Platform that can be used to make a Server, or a Workstation, or an Edge Device OS, or whatever.
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I would help out with this if the SIGs are okay with it!
Which has always struck me as presumptious, all the spins are workstations. The favored child gets “Workstation”, while the rest have to identify their DE/WM, it should be Fedora Gnome, not Workstation.
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Agree totally. I like the new Fedora Website but it continues to push GNOME extremely.
I have to say KDE with sddm and all also often just sucks. But I prefer it over GNOME anyways, by FAR
Personally would prefer it be “Fedora X Atomic” rather than “Fedora Atomic X”, but maybe that’s because I look at it as more “this is Fedora Budgie, but Atomic” rather than “this is Fedora Atomic, with Budgie”. I think users typically care more about the spin or desktop experience itself than the underlying technology, with an atomic suffix I view it as more “oh hey I can get my favorite flavor, but in something that we can associate with being more robust”.
Either way it’s more descriptive than the current situation.
I get why some may want to retain Silverblue or Kinoite given all the effort that has been put into brand awareness, but I don’t think that puts everyone on a level playing field. Why should some variants keep their original names while others be punted to “Fedora Atomic X” or “Fedora X Atomic”. I don’t see that being a benefit to end users either, it will continue to create confusion and as a result make the entire rename effort pointless.
I would argue that everyone standardizing on one branding (prefix or suffix) would help with brand awareness and cohesion, as all the spins and SIGs can communicate “Fedora X but with Y experience”. The Fedora pages for Immutables / atomics already basically copy / paste the same “benefits”, with most differing on just screenshots, hero titles, etc.
On a different note, do we have a Fedora Immutables Matrix room? Could there be a benefit in having it for centralizing support on common immutable topics?
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I’d love to see one, it’d be great for all of the teams to collaborate on the underlying issues that stop the atomic editions from becoming the default.
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I was looking at making a SIG for that but haven’t acted on it. If there is interest, we could start with a room.
@mattdm @siosm @joseph what’re next steps on this? There’s no legal blocker according to @jberkus (see mastodon above), and everyone seems to be ok with a change in this thread?
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I’m not sure. I would be nice to put all the stakeholder for this change in a (virtual) room and land on a naming convention.
My proposal:
All (rpm-)ostree based desktop variants become known as “Fedora Atomic desktops” or “Fedora Atomic variants”. We remove “immutable” from the main website pages.
Existing brands can stay as is (Fedora Silverblue, Kinoite, Sericea, Onyx) but new ones can be directly named Fedora XFCE Atomic or Fedora Atomic (with) XFCE, up to each maintainer / SIG.
Fedora CoreOS remains as it, as well as Fedora IoT. They are part of the Fedora Atomic family but are different enough that their branding can stand alone.
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Okay great! @siosm do you have the permissions to open a Fedora Atomic/Immutable channel on Matrix? I don’t - just checked.
I think @walters blog post titled “Immutable → Reprovisionable, Anti-hysterisis” from Aug 2020, where he proposes that "instead of “immutable” or “read-only” when talking about operating systems (such as Fedora CoreOS, Google COOS, Flatcar etc.), we use these terms:
- “fully managed”: The system does not have “unmanaged state” – e.g. an admin interactively doing
sshand making changes not recorded declaratively somewhere else - “image based”: Traditional package managers end up with a lot of “hidden state” (related to above); image based updates avoid that
- “reprovisionable” and not a “pet”: I don’t like the industry “pets vs cattle” term, and I think “reprovisionable” is both nicer and more descriptive
- “Has anti-hysteresis properties”:
I favour reprovisionable over immutable, as it is more descriptive of what Silverblue is.
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I will give my opinion here, as a Fedora contributor who has never used anything but Fedora Workstation
(with personal tweaks of course).
The first thing about branding is that this is Fedora.
For many people, that is a major factor when choosing an OS,
so Fedora should be part of the name.
This is already the case, and nobody seems to suggest otherwise, so this part is already fine.
The second thing is this new way of building and distributing the operating system.
For some people, it may be the main deciding factor.
In any case, it will be the factor that swings the decision from traditional Fedora to this alternative.
The main problem here is that this thing does not have a name yet,
which has led to all the sibling variants coming up with their own name.
From my outside perspective, it is not so important if it is Atomic, Silverblue or Reprovisionable —
but all the variants should definitely have the same tag in their name,
so that everybody can see that these variants are related,
and can look up what it actually means.
The remaining difference is the desktop environment.
While appreciate the work done by various parties to establish their variants,
for me, using anything else but the desktop environment’s name just muddles the message.
In conclusion, I think the best result from this discussion is that Silverblue becomes Fedora Atomic GNOME,
Kinoite becomes Fedora Atomic KDE and so on,
where Atomic can be some other shared designation.
As a personal preference, I think Atomic is the best proposal.
It is a short word with correct enough meaning,
and nicely fits before the desktop environment name.
Some others like Reprovisionable are jargon terms that are not otherwise familiar to me,
and similarly will not be familiar to most others who will look at this.
Using a lot of jargon carries a risk of alienating all but experts,
which, I suppose, is not a goal here.
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Colin’s post: “Immutable” → reprovisionable, anti-hysteresis « Colin Walters
While those are indeed more precise, they are less common and are likely not as widely understood.
From my perspective, the main goal of this change is to get a name with a meaning for non-technical users, not for us developers who know what those terms mean.
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I’ve created https://matrix.to/#/#atomic-desktops:fedora.im. I’ll file a ticket to get a name under the fedoraproject namespace later.
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And I’ve started the discussion to create a SIG: Creating the Fedora Atomic Desktops SIG
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This is would certainly be more understandable for people new to these products.
It is highly unintuitive that Fedora Silverblue and Fedora Kinoite are basically the same thing with different DEs.
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I’ve created the ticket to move the matrix space under Fedora space.
https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/issue/11544
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When we get to this point, my opinion is to use Fedora Atomic DE (and of course, use Workstation for the Gnome edition)
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100% agreed here.
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No why should we ? , why not just call Fedora Atomic Gnome
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