This is a great discussion!
There is risk of fragmenting the Fedora brand where it is no longer clear what Fedora means. I am not fully convinced on custom names for each ostree-based variant either. I feel like it disconnects the brand from Fedora and the upstream communities whose software we package. If I consider both the Fedora brand and the brands of our upstreams, unique names feel like a lose-lose scenario.
However…
This makes me wonder how the KDE Community talks about Fedora and Kinoite. My position on custom names could be swayed if our upstreams were really latched on to the custom names of the Fedora ostree-based variants.
I appreciate this especially because it is right, but the explanation and meaning is also difficult to condense into a name or title. How do we capture this succintly? I’m also not sure whether it is good for Fedora to hedge the Silverblue identity primarily to a group of people. I think we need a more tactical definition of the brand to avoid challenges like we have with Fedora Spins and Labs today.
It is amusing to consider the Fedora Atomic brand here. I would be curious to know what the overall perception of Fedora Atomic was back in its prime. If it was a positive experience and the brand is strong, then it could be effective to revive it. But if there were problems that gave people a lot of trouble and the brand is weak, then I would be cautious to revive it.
I like @fale’s idea, but “Fedora Immutable” could instead be “Fedora Atomic”.
However, we do want a clear default option for Fedora, depending on the kind of Edition someone needs.
Back in the day, it was a pain point when someone downloaded an out-of-date or broken Fedora ISO built with an alternate desktop. Sometimes, a Spin would get out of date from lack of maintainers. Bugs accumulated. This ended up being a bad user experience. When reviewers and publications reviewed Fedora, this bad user experience from an out-of-date Spin ended up being the face of Fedora for them and their readers or viewers.
Introducing Fedora Workstation helped this. People who wanted a Linux desktop with no fuss found it quickly. Fedora could focus its resources better on a single desktop experience instead of trying to equally promote 6-8 different desktop experiences of varying quality. I remembered that Spins and Labs remained published afer Fedora Workstation, but they were made available in a way where more advanced users or those with strong preferences could get their preferred environment pre-built.
In practice though, the way we are promoting Spins and Labs today does not give proper recognition of the great works and steps that a team of specific people goes through to publish a remixed version of Fedora. And when people do good work, we do want to highlight that committment to digital excellence (Freedom, Friends, Features, First).
Somewhere there has to be a middle road.
This is key from an engineering perspective because anyone would want adoption to be smooth, easy, and painless.
But for our brand, we need a middle road that helps us highlight the great work happening with Silverblue and ostree-based variants. This helps us get people excited about both the work itself and the people doing the work. Not just as users, but also as contributors to Fedora.
The ostree-based variants need some kind of separation with the brand, but I’m not sure yet what it could be. I am wondering about the Fedora Atomic brand now though.