Windmill-tilting ... what do you all think about renaming "fedora-35", etc, to "fedora-linux-35"?

I have a long-standing … attempt… to slowly influence people to think of “Fedora” as the project and the community, and “Fedora Linux” as one of the things we produce. (Like, “Red Hat” is not “RHEL”, “Microsoft” is not “Microsoft Windows”, etc.

What do you think about renaming the fedora-## tags on this site to fedora-linux-##? This is easily done in the UI, and will also automatically remap future uses of fedora-## to the corresponding long form.

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What do you think?
  • Yes: I agree his is important! Do it!
  • Yes: Okay, sure, go ahead, Don Quixote.
  • No: It’s too long.
  • No: It’s better as is for some other reason.

0 voters

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I kind of want a “Yes, but it’s too long” option ;-). I agree with the motivation for the change, but it will start adding up in size for threads that are tagged for multiple releases. Would it make any sense to go for something like “fl##”, or is that too far in the other direction?

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Hmmm, interesting. I could be convinced to go in the shorter direction – especially with some automatic remaps so if people try to type “fedora 35” it’ll get redirected.

Complicating everything, though, we’ve never really used fl35 anywhere. We still use F35 as short for “Fedora Linux 35”. And even more confusing, packages still have fc35, which originally meant “Fedora Core ##”, but now ostensibly means “Fedora Collection” … or something.

I voted already, but after thinking about it, I may have voted too soon. I think I understand where you’re coming from but can you elaborate on why you think this is an important distinction to make?

In my head there is already a distinction between the project, community, and the product. Currently though, it seems that the project is referred to as “Fedora Project” (it’s even the domain name). So it seems like at the same time you want to shorten that to just “Fedora”?

If this is the first step to broader changes, I think it’s fine, but it really will need to be very consistent across the board to make it stick. But it seems like there will be a lot of impacts. The various Linux products are just named “Fedora X”, where X is “Workstation” or “IoT” or “Server”. Would these be renamed to “Fedora Linux X”? And the domain “getfedora.org”…to “getfedoralinux.org”?

To be honest, I believe that relatively short labels often lead to more successful use, reducing mostly irrelevant information and saving time and space, so moving to longer labels kind of goes against the natural order. :sweat_smile:

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We’re probably dropping getfedora.org in the new redesign, so I can avoid answering that question. Things like “Fedora Worksation” or “Fedora IoT” already have an individual noun, so they don’t bother me. They are all clearly Fedora things.

Part of the reason is that I want to highlight all of those different things. But also, when people equate the specific distro with what we do as a project, people end up saying things like “Copr isn’t Fedora”, or “ELN isn’t Fedora” or “EPEL isn’t Fedora”… you get the idea. Those things are all "Fedora Project’, but not “Fedora Linux”. This limits us.

So, I want to emphasize the distinction.

That said, in this particular case, one can argue that “Fedora 35” is clearly “Fedora Linux 35”, not “Fedora Project 35”. So it’s not a huge deal to me as some other places (like, our release announcements).

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Okay, so … what about taking that to the logical conclusion?

Given that this is is a Fedora forum, we could do… just numbers? Like, #35 #36 #37?

Just numbers!?
  • That’s crazy
  • Ooh clever
0 voters

That makes sense! I think making the further distinction for Fedora Linux vs Fedora can be worthwhile in changing this perception.

2 Likes

Alright, I’m gonna go ahead and do this based on the poll. Most people think I’m silly, and a few agree that it’s important. I’ll take it. :classic_smiley:

To the not-insignifcant number of you who think it’s too long… let’s try it for a couple of weeks and then see what we think. We can always put it back. I’m setting an :alarm_clock: to remind me to check back with a followup.

Okay, it’s been a couple of weeks. Anyone have any changes in opinion once you’ve seen this in use?

Looks OK, isn’t it?

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Well, I’m not completely happy with the long names, honestly, especially in the #common-issues category. When an issue affects multiple releases (e.g. three), I think the readability quite suffers. This is the Common Issues category currently:

And this is how it’d look with FNN tags:

The topic descriptions are no longer multiline, and just looking at the list of tags, it’s much easier for me to absorb them (compare the very first topic), then when I need to munch through the long names.

I know that FNN might not be obvious for some people. It’s a hard call to make. But we’re on a Fedora forum, and FNN is used just about everywhere, so I hope the number of people not understanding it would be very small. I’d personally prefer the short names.

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I agree. “FNN” is pretty widely recognized as a reference to specific Fedora Linux releases, and your example looks much cleaner to me.

Just going to throw this out there to see if it makes sense: How much value does having the FNN or fedora-linux-## tag have to begin with? Just thinking:

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I’m okay with putting it back to fNN. Or sneak in my agenda with flNN. :classic_smiley:

@guiltydoggy Yeah, that’s good to think about.

I think they’re useful particularly for the common bugs, where the tags are curated. But we could limit them to those categories, if we really wanted.

For general Q&A, I’d like to start automatically archiving older topics — not deleting them, but moving them to a subcategory where they are deprioritized in search results. Could do that just by topic date, but some older things might really be still relevant and not tied to a release. So my idea was to automate that archiving based on the tag, at the time the corresponding release hits end-of-life.

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Well, that would certainly make me confused :slight_smile:

Yes, for #common-issues they are necessary. For other categories I don’t particularly care :slight_smile:

When you say curated, does it mean that for #common-issues we can have completely different tags from the rest of Ask? E.g. add new ones specific to Common Issues, and suppress some tags which already exist elsewhere? Not that I need it right now, just want to know what’s possible.

Yes. We can make tag groups, and there are a variety of related settings on a per-category basis. (Restrict to certain groups, require a number of tags from selected groups, etc.)

One quirk is that while tags can exist in multiple groups, the tag itself doesn’t know what groups it might be in. It’s just a single label — so they can’t really have a different meaning across tag groups.

Okay, this is back to f36, etc.

Thank you everyone for indulging me in this experiment. If every idea succeeds, we’re not trying hard enough! :classic_smiley:

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