We’re working on Fedora Strategy 2028 — our next five-year plan. We are now reviewing those Objectives and their associated Impact. Read this guide for details on the current planning phase.
This Objective is part of the Theme “Fedora leads in Linux distribution development” and the Focus Area Technology Innovation & Leadership. For general discussion of this focus area, please see the topic Fedora Strategy 2028: Focus area review (Technology Innovation & Leadership).
Objective and Impact
Objective: Fedora is a popular source for containers and Flatpaks.
Impact: Fedora is a trusted source of software beyond our own base OS, reaching more users and potential contributors.
Let’s start this off with a comment on the overall introduction of this strategy draft from @howekif647:
That’s exactly what this is about. We’re pretty clearly backing away from Modularity as an approach to solving this problem, but it’s still a real one. It will also help solve the “too fast / too slow” problem — everyone wants different parts of the system to be either newer or older, faster or slower — but no two people have the same needs.
So, we need these things so we can make better Fedora Linux variants. Modularity intentionally did not depend on container technology — it seemed to early. But I don’t think we’re too early now. (If anything, we’re late.)
We could focus on just immutable variants just ignore everything but the base — stop packaging anything above that. We could send people to Flathub and Docker Hub and wherever else for the actual applications. But… we actually have a lot to give here.
I think it’s safe to say that there has been some tendency to use container formats as “skip the distro, dump it all in here!” or “direct from upstream is clearly best”. And, those are fine in some situations. But we know that distribution projects like Fedora provide significant value to end users and to upstreams — better security, better reliability, better integration, and more. We need to clearly show that to the world.
Our goal now
For this Objective and related Impact, validate that:
- If the Impact is achieved, it’s reasonable to expect an increase in active Fedora contributors.
- Success in the Objective logically results in the intended Impact.
- That link is reasonably sufficient — that is, it represents everything needed to have the Impact.
- While there might be other ways to have similar Impact, the chosen Objective is the right one for Fedora right now.
- The wording is precise and clear. The Objective is concrete, and the Impact is (at least a little bit) inspirational. Together, they fit into this Focus Area.
Bonus. If you can improve the longer explanatory paragraphs at the top of this post, that’s helpful too!
As outlined in the roadmap, this post will close in one month.