Fedora Linux Set to Build Agile Core

Fedora seems to cling to the optical media model, where everything low-level is packaged as a CD or DVD image - installs, spins, and so forth. Bloat tends to accumulate to fill up to media sizes, and it is as if USB drives and networks did not exist.

I'd be delighted to be able to copy a small image to a USB thumb drive, boot from it, install a very minimal Fedora OS - not even including @Base and @Core by default - basically grub2, kernel, console, and just enough tool-chain to support the yum package manager, then 'yum install' some short lists of packages.

Then all of these spins, rings, bubbles, and similar jargon could just be lists of top-level packages (with dependencies implied, not explicitly listed) to feed to 'yum install'.

The real 'core' of the OS supports whatever the packagers tend to require, the package/dependency engines become critical to all of the flavors, spins, rings, jargon-du-jour, and the users get to have just what they want installed and no more.

No CD or DVD images, less bloat, and and an opportunity for packages to compete on footprint (Foo has 13% fewer dependencies than Bar, Baz installs in half the space of Zap).

And Goldilocks and the 3 Bears lived happily ever after :-)

Fedora does a lot of things really well. I use it daily on my personal laptop. Yum is so much nicer than apt-get and many things Just Work™.

It also does a lot of things really poorly.

-Interacting with the people in their official IRC channel is painful, and many of the power users are outright hostile if not cyberbullies. The community is quite toxic.

-Fedora-modded kernels have seen a massive regression in power consumption in the latest release. My laptop under Fedora 17 and 18 used to idle at a respectable 6.5 Watts. That's up to about 12 Watts now.

-Fedora already moves quickly and as a result some parts of the project don't keep up. A lot of the documentation is for Fedora versions that are EOL.

I don't think the move to Agile will be a positive change.