Hello everybody,
as I see it, we all want the same, but the priorities differ. My several cents (although I will repeat myself):

Let us properly curate the composes in terms of shipped applications (a.k.a essential applications)
Explanation: Our composes ship too many applications. By making a clever selection of applications shipped in the default installation,
we could fix many of our problems. I remember that Windows used to install an empty unusable system without any useful application. Linux distros, on the other hand have plenty of applications by default and newbies do not know which one to use, power users perhaps use a different set of apps, so they need to install extra anyway. What if we made sure that our composes have (this is just an example list, this would need an extra discussion) and nothing more:
  • one terminal emulator
  • standard set of console applications
  • one desktop environment
  • applications that are only based on graphic bindings for that environment -> do not mix GTK with QT apps, for example
  • one text editor
  • one web browser
  • one music and movie player
  • one graphical editor (vector, bitmap)
  • one office suite
  • etc ...
Curating the applications and keeping their count low would:
  • reduce the ISO size
  • reduce the download time
  • reduce the installation time
  • reduce the time needed for testing
  • enable test the small amount of applications far better and more thoroughly
This would help with basically everything.

PS: KDE, especially, is very generous about unnecessary applications. Why do I need three web browsers installed? Why do I need two terminal emulators?
Why do I need the three games and why do I need games at all?

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Lukáš Růžička

FEDORA QE, RHCE

Red Hat

Purkyňova 115

612 45 Brno - Královo Pole

lruzicka@redhat.com