Fedora Deciding Whether CD/DVD Installation Issues Should Still Hold Up Releases

Fedora will continue producing ISO images of their distribution that can be installed to a DVD (or CD in the case of some lightweight spins) or more commonly these days copied to USB flash drives, but they are debating whether any CD/DVD optical media issues should still be considered blocker bugs in 2020 and beyond.

Fedora optical media and any issues pertaining to that would be considered non-blocking for Fedora releases. This reflects the fact a majority of Linux users these days are copying their Linux distributions to USB flash drives and installing from there rather than still burning CDs/DVDs. Particularly with many computers these days lacking CD/DVD drives, not having to worry about optical install issues as blocker bugs would free up resources to deal with more pressing bugs around release time.

The change proposal is still being debated and needs to be approved by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee. The hope is the DVD optical media support will not regress and continue working fine, but formalizing that it's considered more of a niche case these days for installing modern Fedora releases.

Do you still install #Linux distributions via CD/DVD media?

— Phoronix (@phoronix) December 13, 2019

This change would go into effect with Fedora 32 due for release at the end of April.