I wouldn't have thought virtualisation software was needed by default. What I would call power users that need virtualisation software are likely quite comfortable opening Discover or Konsole to install their preferred solution.

I wouldn't have thought virtualisation software was needed by default. What I would call power users that need virtualisation software are likely quite comfortable opening Discover or Konsole to install their preferred solution.

The problem with GNOME Software and Plasma Discover is that they're actually terrible for discovering solutions to particular problems. In particular, they don't really provide guidance on preferred solutions or anything of that nature. And as we currently lack a mechanism to guide people to applications that are not installed, the method we have to guide people is to preload a reasonable collection of high quality software.

Additionally, virtualization is not a "power user" feature for the contemporary Linux user. It is unfortunately a common requirement for interfacing with applications and services that require Windows, for example. It is also helpful to have a good path for developer-friendly workflows that require using foreign operating systems.

Note that Fedora Workstation does preload GNOME Boxes and it is regularly considered a highlight of the Workstation experience. In many respects, I wish for our spin to be equivalent to the Workstation Edition, just using KDE Plasma instead of GNOME. I would certainly prefer to have a KDE+Qt based solution that works like Boxes, but nobody has desired to develop one, so here we are.

I'm not against this in principle, but I do have a question of size.
There has already been many questions and comments about the size of the KDE Spin.
How much size does this add?

On my system, it added 50MiB. I can check from a fresh install, but I don't expect it to be much more than that.

Just tried gnome-boxes, wasn't impressed. Probably good if you want a quick, simple, virtual machine. It is too restrictive for me.
I prefer virt-manager, because it gives me much more flexibility.

But, beyond my personal opinioin, we do not have any of the virt packages in the KDE Spin.
Thus, adding gnome-boxes or virt-manager add significant space. From a freshly installed F36 KDE Spin install, I get the following.

dnf install gnome-boxes

Install 128 Packages
Total download size: 47 M
Installed size: 185 M

dnf install virt-manager

Install 131 Packages
Total download size: 49 M
Installed size: 193 M

I'm not against this in principle, but I do have a question of size.
There has already been many questions and comments about the size of the KDE Spin.
How much size does this add?

We could make this up by removing some of the "bloat" applications that people generally don't like such as the Akonadi suite (Kontact, Kmail, Korganizer etc), dnfdragora, Qt d-bus viewer etc...

+1 to add "Gnome-boxes" application, based on the conversation we had in kde-sig meeting, It is gonna be also trying to look as "Qt" as possible so I'm positive to see that application until we have proper Qt/Kde based on solution.

+1 as I use GNOME Boxes quite often even though it's not a Qt app.

No opinion. We can include the GNOME Boxes Flatpak on Kinoite easily :).

@feborges and I talked about this and he's also committed to assisting to make sure GNOME Boxes looks and works well on KDE Plasma, so I will probably set aside some time to go through all major functions and do a UI review on it with the Breeze stylesheet so he can do any needed tweaks there to look good on KDE Plasma.

I vote no but I'm also interested (as I know others are) in a minimal Fedora KDE ISO.

A minimal ISO is not in the cards for a couple of reasons:

• "Minimal" is different to everyone, and whatever line we draw will make someone unhappy.
• It adds too much complexity for releases, and I'd rather not stretch Fedora QA more.

Minimal installs are always possible using the netinstall ISO if a user wants that, though.

I've spun one for myself just for my own use just because I was curious.
Do all ISOs have to be sent through Fedora QA?

On 31/1/23 17:01, Neal Gompa wrote:

ngompa added a new comment to an issue you are following:
``
A minimal ISO is not in the cards for a couple of reasons:

• "Minimal" is different to everyone, and whatever line we draw will make someone unhappy.
• It adds too much complexity for releases, and I'd rather not stretch Fedora QA more.

Minimal installs are always possible using the netinstall ISO if a user wants that, though.
``

To reply, visit the link below or just reply to this email
https://pagure.io/fedora-kde/SIG/issue/207

Sort of. Because KDE Plasma is release-blocking, we have to specifically indicate which ones don't need to be tested (like we did for Kinoite), but adding a variant also adds to the compose process (which is not fast and complex) that runs every day. It's also a burden for us because we have to deal with two different KDE Plasma experiences that can result in different bugs.

We already have enough problems as it is, I'd rather not add a "minimal" spin to the mix.

I oppose that. I tried Gnome-Boxes first too, because I wanted something simple, but virt-manager actually is more intuitive. Maybe this "create a machine" and "open connection" is a bit confusing, but in the end its a few clicks, no advanced menus by default, and nice directly accessible things like mounting devices, shutting it down e.g.

I prefer virt-manager a lot now, especially if users need to emulate Windows.

Comment: This discussion also has two sides. On Fedora KDE it makes no sense to me to preinstall that software (I would keep it as small as possible). On Kinoite it is better to have too much than too little, because layering software eats resources.

I could imagine a solution just being to include qemu qemu-kvm and let users choose their GUI frontend to layer.