Fedora's Scientific & Audio/Music Spins Could Be On Their Last Leg

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Fedora's Scientific & Audio/Music Spins Could Be On Their Last Leg

Fedora 32 could be two spins lighter with two little known variants of Fedora Linux set to be removed unless maintainers step up...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Fedora-Jam-Scientific-EOL

[Britoid]

I never really understood the point of these. The people who download them usually know what they want before hand and can install it from the various software sources.

[StandaSK]

I honestly don't see the point of these variants. Seems like it's just Fedora with some preinstalled software, which the user could install themselves. Seems like those variants might as well be regular Fedora, but with a textfile with installation instructions or something like that.

[skeevy420]

KDE and Jack OOTB...dizamn, kinda wish I knew about that earlier...

The Scientific ones, and I say ones because the distribution is irrelevant in this instance, not so much.

OK, full disclosure -- everything above is my initial assumption. Went to distrowatch, did a search for Active + Scientific distributions and got CAELinux. Fedora didn't even get an honorable mention; nor did anything else. I could have swore that there were more Scientific distributions out there........where'd they all go?

You know, the Scientific Spin can't be anything more than the default install with some extra programs. If that's the case then **bam** fedora-scientific-meta. That problem is solved. I'll give y'all that one free of charge. Would also explain where they all went.

The Audio/Music Spin being based on a different desktop with a different audio framework...that might still deserve its own spin. I know that can be meta'd, but, well, y'all know as well as I do that changing audio frameworks via **just a package** isn't very reasonable and it would need an accompanying guide combined with an active forum user to assist people following that guide or to assist people who installed an interesting sounding meta package and didn't know the guide exists....or stick with the current Spin...either method for the Audio/Music Spin plus maintaining the scientific-meta package sounds like a $20K/yr part-time internship if they're serious about finding someone to step up and take them over.

[skeevy420]

I never really understood the point of these. The people who download them usually know what they want before hand and can install it from the various software sources.

The Audio/Music spin I understand being its own thing, but the Scientific one, yeah, that's a meta package. I can imagine a struggling musician needing an open source recording platform for whatever reason, needing an easy-to-use platform, and not wanting to learn Linux or Fedora to record a song and use some programs.

Some of y'all really need to remember that most of the world isn't like us and doesn't have 10 or 20 or more years of experience with open source software and operating systems on top of 20 or 30 or more years experience with computers and operating systems in general. We know to install these packages, to edit that crap under /etc, actually know the difference between Pulseaudio and ALSA and JACK and which one to pick for audio recording, we know what a real-time kernel is and how to set one up for audio recording, we know how to actually exit visudo when we edit those files...or Google "how to exit visudo" because at least we know the damn name of the program ...fuck y'all...I never clicked with modal...but at least I know what its called ...and then run "sudo nano" to finally fucking edit that file under /etc . What was I talking about?

[c117152]

I honestly don't see the point of these variants. Seems like it's just Fedora with some preinstalled software, which the user could install themselves. Seems like those variants might as well be regular Fedora, but with a textfile with installation instructions or something like that.

Specialized distributions make sense for (old) domain-specific languages that don't have their own built-in package management and conflict resolution. e.g. Latex typesetting in TeX Live...

[archkde]

Specialized distributions make sense for (old) domain-specific languages that don't have their own built-in package management and conflict resolution. e.g. Latex typesetting in TeX Live...

What do you mean here? Is there anything wrong with something like "apt install texlive"?

[c117152]

What do you mean here? Is there anything wrong with something like "apt install texlive"?

Tex Live is a software distribution containing thousands of packages that are "pinned" (to use apt terminology) once a year and aren't updated even if there's serious security / functionality / performance issues. So, if that's not a candidate for a VM specialized spin, I don't know what is.

[MadeUpName]

KDE and Jack OOTB...dizamn, kinda wish I knew about that earlier...

The Scientific ones, and I say ones because the distribution is irrelevant in this instance, not so much.

OK, full disclosure -- everything above is my initial assumption. Went to distrowatch, did a search for Active + Scientific distributions and got CAELinux. Fedora didn't even get an honorable mention; nor did anything else. I could have swore that there were more Scientific distributions out there........where'd they all go?

You know, the Scientific Spin can't be anything more than the default install with some extra programs. If that's the case then **bam** fedora-scientific-meta. That problem is solved. I'll give y'all that one free of charge. Would also explain where they all went.

Seems like that was where Scientific Linux went. Base Centos install and then add what you need. As a musician and recording engineer that never got the Linux mixing, recording tools working properly I understand the need for that spin. Having said that any recording/mixing I need to do these days I will do in Davinci Resolve and avoid all the jack/Aurdor hassle. .

"Scientific Linux is driven by Fermilab's scientific mission and focused on the changing needs of experimental facilities. Fermilab is looking ahead to DUNE[1] and other future international collaborations. One part of this is unifying our computing platform with collaborating labs and institutions. Toward that end, we will deploy CentOS 8 in our scientific computing environments rather than develop Scientific Linux 8. We will collaborate with CERN and other labs to help make CentOS an even better platform for high-energy physics computing."

https://listserv.fnal.gov/scripts/wa...E;11d6001.1904

[wizard69]

I never really understood the point of these. The people who download them usually know what they want before hand and can install it from the various software sources.

That is what went through my mind when reading this. The whole idea of spins seem to just create confusion. I would imagine most do what I do which is to install workstation and then download what you need. I’d rather that maintainers focus on RPMs that work well with the current distribution.