On 08/02/2016 05:01 PM, Ludwig Nussel wrote:
Simon Lees schrieb:
On 07/29/2016 04:30 PM, Bo Simonsen wrote:
Ludwig Nussel skrev den 2016-07-28 16:04:
So I wonder if putting LXDE in the spotlight like that still makes sense?
In my opinion it is a bit of lack that openSUSE LEAP does not provide DVD MATE install option, but I assume it is a matter of DVD space. In my optics it seems like there is not a big difference with respect to performance to use MATE or LXDE. And MATE is gaining a lot of popularity. For my use case having a 13" laptop with a resolution of 1920x1080 GNOME is pretty useless, since textscaling above 1.33 makes stuff look wierd (the windows does not scale due to HiDPI scaling support is only integer wise 1,2,3..) so the only DE that will work for me is KDE (my prefered), MATE and Enlightenment. This means I only have one install option from the DVD of a usable system. It is fine, but I would rather have some extra GNOME packages removed (it is really a huge selection on the DVD) than leaving out MATE. Just my $0.02.
Mate, Cinnamon, LXQt and Enlightenment are all currently not on the DVD as they are all relatively new in openSUSE this is also something that I think we should address in some way. When there used to be a smaller KDE iso and Smaller Gnome iso as well as the DVD I was considering putting together an "Alternate DE" image as well, but then the kde/gnome images were dropped so were back to square 1. The reason I started using openSUSE was because it treated all desktops equally which makes it an ideal distro for these users, I think we could play to the strength of this better by squeezing some things off the DVD to make room for more desktops. [...] My argument for why desktops are more important then some other things on the DVD: As a developer its nice being able to install all the various "Dev tool" patterns as part of the install but at the same time
Even if we had free space we will hardly ever fit all desktop environments on the DVD. So how would we decide which ones to leave out?
Yeah including all / more of them was my lazy way of not having to solve this question.
The DVD is probably most useful where bandwidth is limited or for offline use. So I wonder if more desktops are actually relevant in such cases. If we had space on the DVD instead of putting more desktops we could also put more commonly used applications or more language support packages for example.
Yeah I was trying to start a broader discussion about whether what were currently doing is the best way to do it or whether were doing it this way just because its the way its been done for a long time and know one has really thought about it. For example if we wanted to focus on providing more commonly used applications and language packs maybe we could better achieve this goal by providing 2 or 3 DVD's based on there DE but with a core application base, eg a KDE DVD a Gnome DVD and then possibly a other DE DVD. Presumably the users you described above are more likely to only want one DE and know which one they want in advance. But there is probably the further question of how much space that would really save given that for example if the focus is providing more apps the gnome DVD would probably still want to include something like krita which would require parts of kde so maybe for that reason there isn't that great a benefit to splitting. I guess the other thing to consider here is now that we have openQA doing a wide variety of testing which wasn't there in the past having multiple differing main DVD's is probably more manageable from a testing point of view anyway.
Anyways, are we talking about Leap or Tumbleweed here? I'm not sure the DVD plays such a big role for TW, so the discussion might be moot there. Once you install with online repos or from the NET iso all desktops are available via the software selection. The patterns for desktops are listed first.
For Leap I'd prefer to offer a limited set of well polished, working desktops during installation rather than a wide range of choices where none can be recommended without hesitation. But again this raises the question for selection criteria. Maybe scenarios from our test matrix¹ can give some hints.
Yeah i'm mostly talking about Leap here and I agree that they should meet a minimum standard like no serious bugs and further to stuff like if you have a laptop the DE should be setup to make it easy to do stuff like wifi out of the box. I also think that if there were 10 DE's that met the criteria and we had a way of shipping them all (the net ISO I guess) then there is no reason why there shouldn't be a choice for all of them. Tumbleweed on the other hand I think can have a slightly lower standard which could offer more choices, tumbleweed users are probably more likely to know what they want anyway and not be confused by choice, I think that you could almost say that any DE related pattern that shows up in the installer should also be shown on the DE selection page as long as the maintainer things its up to the standard of general usage. Not confusing new users is a reason that I like the installers current setup of showing a couple of selections and then providing a "Other" field where more advanced users can have extra options.
So I think its time we talked about what should or shouldn't be on the DVD I don't think theres been a good discussion in atleast the 5 years i've been paying attention. If its important we have all the software we currently have available on a DVD maybe its time we thought about shipping a second DVD containing all the stuff that can still easily be installed post installation like devel tools or given that 8GB flash drives can be purchased here for the equivalent of $5 US maybe we should ship a larger image as well (I don't remember the last time I used a physical DVD to install something).
Extra DVDs are so last century :-) Maybe an 8 GB image for USB sticks would be an option indeed. The full ftp tree currently has 20GB (TW 32GB) though. It also wouldn't help us with the discussion about what to put on the smaller DVD image. There is demand for a DVD image as DVDs are still useful e.g. as cheap giveaway at events. So I don't think we can get rid of it yet.
Yeah I guess I was thinking if there was no way to solve some of the other issues above if someone wanted DE X or language Y and they knew it wasn't currently on the main DVD then they could try the larger one.
If we decide to do any one of these things i'm happy to volunteer to do some of the work.
If you are interested in how the DVD content is computed based on patterns and package dependencies have a look at https://github.com/openSUSE/package-lists. It's not for the faint-hearted though ;-)
Thanks i'll have a quick look atleast.
cu Ludwig
[1] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1AGKijKpKiJCB616-bHVoNQuhWHpQLHPWCb3m...
-- Simon Lees (Simotek) http://simotek.net Emergency Update Team keybase.io/simotek SUSE Linux Adeliade Australia, UTC+9:30 GPG Fingerprint: 5B87 DB9D 88DC F606 E489 CEC5 0922 C246 02F0 014B