On Thu, 22 Feb 2018 13:38:31 +0100
John Paul Adrian Glaubitz
The largest manufacturer of CD-Rs and DVDs and also the inventor of CD-R media, Taiyo Yuden, stopped making them. Same for TDK.
Other manufacturers are following suit. These companies wouldn't stop making media if people were still buying them. Also, more and more computers you buy these days don't even ship with an optical drive anymore.
So, while there are certainly people still using optical media, they are becoming a minority as the market is declining.
That may be true and fair, but it slightly misses the core point, I think. It's not really about what the actual physical media are. It's about the focus that results from aiming for a particular size of medium. If a group or community producing a Linux distro decides to aim for a particular size -- say a CD, at approximately 2/3 of a gigabyte -- then that means that it becomes necessary to really pare down the included software to get it to fit. That's one of the places Ubuntu started from. Back then, the commercial boxed version of SUSE responded to the issue of expensive limited bandwidth by bundling at first multiple CDs, then a DVD and CDs, and then multiple DVDs of software. Whatever you wanted, it was probably on the media somewhere. Result, something very complete but with a very complex install procedure that asked lots of questions, many of which were very difficult for a non-techie to answer. Ubuntu's response was in essence quite simple. It was "we will do a 1-CD distro which asks _as few questions as possible_ and gives you a curated set of the essentials." 1 desktop, 1 browser, 1 text editor, 1 email client, 1 chat app, 1 office suite, and so on. No choices. No decisions. They picked only all-FOSS stuff -- so back then, Qt was still dual-licensed, I think, so no KDE. No choice of anything: you got what they considered the single best app in each category. This was diametrically opposed to SUSE's method, which was to basically offer you as much choice as possible. If you wished you could install a distro with half a dozen different desktops, 6 web browsers, 843 text editors, 7 office suites, 37 email clients, etc. (These are made-up numbers to illustrate a point.) Well, it must be said, the Ubuntu approach has worked very well for them. It's been a wildly successful desktop, and that itself has gained them mindshare and that has led to lots of young techies coming into the Linux world and trying Ubuntu first... and later, those people get jobs in tech, and they pick the distro they know, and that's Ubuntu. And _that_ has let to the wide use of Ubuntu Server. It's a good tactic. It has worked well for them. Of course it's been controversial. Lots of groups were annoyed that _their_ preferred tools were left out, so that's led to the rise of lots of alternate "remixes" -- mainly, ones based on different desktops, with selections of tools to suit. That's what the size-of-a-CD point is about. Not the numbers of machine with CD drives these days. Ubuntu no longer fits on a CD. That itself is part of what led to the creation of Lubuntu, which tries to be the lightest-weight version, and does still fit on a CD. Rightly or wrongly, _that's_ the relevance of CD-sized images. It led to focus, simplification, removal of confusion questions, and to a smaller, simpler type of Linux distro with an easier installer. Overall, I'd say that's been a good thing for the Linux market in general. No? -- Liam Proven - Technical Writer, SUSE Linux s.r.o. Corso II, Křižíkova 148/34, 186-00 Praha 8 - Karlín, Czechia Email: lproven@suse.com - Office telephone: +420 284 241 084 -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org