Entering the DVD age...
I think Fedora should look at the CD crisis as an opportunity rather
than the need to axe a lot of packages in a hurry.
First, the world is moving towards DVD. It's an absolute joy to
install Fedora off a DVD, although I've often found that process of
downloading an manipulating a disk image that big can be challenging.
(BitTorrent anyone?)
My AMD64 has an optical drive that reads and writes every CD and DVD
format (other than double-sided) that cost about $100; in the long
term, the majority of users are going to enjoy that convenience.
It may make sense for Fedora to see itself primarily as a DVD product,
and to see the CDs as a secondary product. The CDs ought to be there
for people who don't have a DVD drive. Also, I like the idea of
being able to "target" Fedora for particular types of installation --
for instance, I can picture a single-disk distribution that brings
the system up with a minimal installation and does a network install
from there. I can also see a "KDE desktop" disk and a "Gnome
desktop"
disk.
Part of Fedora's trouble is that it often packages five or six packages
that almost work instead of one package that really works. (Having a
GUI and being written in Python are two big risk factors.) I'm typing
this on a Mac Mini that I just bought, and I've been quite impressed
with Mac OS X; Mac OS X standardizes on Postfix as an MTA -- it has
one program for organizing music, iTunes, which really works.
Of course, Fedora might not be able to shake that off the way that a
new distribution can, say, Linspire. One some level it's really silly
that Fedora has both the Gnome and KDE desktops, yet there are two
reasons why that can't change:
(1) Neither of those desktops are 100% satisfactory, and even if you're
running one desktop, you're going to want some apps from the other
desktop and libraries to run the other desktop, and
(2) politics.
If Fedora remains a community project, it's likely to suffer from this
"big tent" effect. It's going to be hard to make the decision to
marginalize a project which has made great contributions to the
Linux/Unix world, despite the fact that a real quality consumer OS is,
almost by definition, going to have one MTA and one desktop.
On the other hand, if we see it as an OS for enthusiasts that other
entities can repackage, that might be a good place to be.