Monthly Archives: May 2015

Fedora Workstation 22 is out!

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So we just got the second Fedora Workstation release out the door, and I am quite happy with it, we had quite a few last minute hardware issues pop up, but due to the hard work of the team we where able to get them fixed in time for todays release.

Every release we do is of course the result of both work we do as part of the Fedora Workstation team, but we also rely on a lot of other people upstream. I would like to especially call out Laurent Pinchart, who is the upstream maintainer of the UVC driver, who fixed a bug we discovered with some built in webcams on newer laptops. So thank you Laurent! So for any users of the Toshiba z20t Portege laptop, your rear camera now works thanks to Laurent :)

Having a relatively short development cycle this release doesn’t contain huge amounts of major changes, but our team did manage to sneak in a few nice new features. As you can see from this blog entry from Allan Day the notification area re-design that he and Florian worked on landed. It is a huge improvement in my opinion and will let us continue polishing the notification behavior of applications going forward.

We have a bunch of improvements to the Nautilus file manager thanks to the work of Carlos Soriano. Recommend reading through his blog as there is a quite sizeable collection of smaller fixes and improvements he was able to push through.

Another thing we got properly resolved for Fedora Workstation 22 is installing it in Boxes. Boxes is our easy to use virtual machine manager which we are putting resources into to make a great developer companion. So while this is a smaller fix for Boxes and Fedora, we have some great Boxes features lining up for the next Fedora release, so stayed tuned for more on that in another blog post.

Wayland support is also marching forward with this release. The GDM session you get upon installing Fedora Workstation 22 will now default to Wayland, but fall back to X if there is an issue. It is a first step towards migrating the default session to Wayland. We still have some work to do there to get the Wayland session perfect, but we are closing the gap rapidly. Jonas Ådahl and Owen Taylor is pushing that effort forward.

Related to Wayland we introduce libinput as the backend for both X and Wayland in this release. While we shipped libinput in Fedora 21, when we wrote libinput we did so with Wayland as the primary target, yet at the same time we realized that we didn’t want to maintain two separate input systems going forward, so in this release also X.org uses libinput for input. This means we have one library to work on now that will improve input in both your Wayland session and X sessions.

This is also the first release featuring the new Adwaita theme for Qt. This release supports Qt4, but we hope to support Qt5 in an upcoming Fedora release and also include a dark variant of the theme for Qt applications. Martin Briza has been leading that effort.

Another nice little feature addition this release is the notification of long running jobs in the terminal. It was a feature we wanted to do from early on in the Fedora Workstation process, but it took quite some while to figure out the fine details for how we wanted to do it. Basically it means you no longer need to check in with your open terminals to see if a job has completed, instead you are now getting a notification. So you can for instance start a compile and then not have to think about it again until you get the notification. We are still tweaking the notifications a little bit for this one, to make sure we cut down the amount of unhelpful notifications to an absolute minimum, so if you have feedback on how we can improve this feature we be happy to hear it. For example we are thinking about turning off the notification for UI applications launched from a terminal.

Anyway, we have a lot of features in the pipeline now for Fedora Workstation 23 since quite a few of the items planned for Fedora Workstation 22 didn’t get completed in time, so I am looking forward to writing a blog informing you about those soon.

You can also read about this release in Fedora Magazine.

Summary of Fedora Workstation feedback

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So I composed an email today to the Fedora-desktop mailing list to summarize the feedback we got here on the blog post on
my request for reasons people where not switching to Fedora. Thought I should share it here too for easier access for the
wider community and for the commentators to see that I did take the time to go through and try to summarize the posts.
Of course feel free to comment on this blog if you think I missed something important or if there are other major items we
should be thinking about. We will be discussing this both on the mailing list, in our Workstation working group meetings and at Flock in August. Anyway, I will let you go on to read the email (you can find the thread here if interested.

************************
A couple of weeks ago I blogged about who Fedora Workstation is an integrated system, but also asking for
feedback for why people are not migrating to Fedora Workstation, especially asking about why people would be using
GNOME 3 on another distro. So I got about 140 comments on that post so I thought I should write up a summary and
post here. There was of course a lot of things mentioned, but I will try to keep this summary to what I picked up
as the recurring topics.

So while this of course is a poll consisting of self selected commentators I still think the sample is big enough that we
should take the feedback into serious consideration for our plans going forward. Some of them I even think are already
handled by underway efforts.

Release cadence
Quite a few people mentioned this, ranging from those who wanted to switch us to a rolling release, a tick/tock
release style, to just long release cycles. Probably more people saying they thought the current 6 Month cycle
was just to harrowing than people who wanted rolling releases or tick/tock releases.

3rd Party Software
This was the single most brought up item. With people saying that they stayed on other distros due to the pain of
getting 3rd party software on Fedora. This ranged from drivers (NVidia, Wi-Fi), to media codecs to end user
applications. Width of software available in general was also brought up quite a few times. If anyone is in any doubt
that our current policy here is costing us users I think these comments clearly demonstrates otherwise.

Optimus support
Quite a few people did bring up that our Optimus support wasn’t great. Luckily I know Bastien Nocera is working on
something there based on work by Dave Arlie, so hopefully this is one we can check off soon.

Upgrades
Many people also pointed out that we had no UI for upgrading Fedora.

HiDPI issues
A few comments on various challenges people have with HiDPI screens, especially when dealing with non-GTK3 apps-

Multimonitor support
A few comments that our multimonitor support could be better

SELinux is a pain
A few comments about SELinux still getting in the way at times

Better Android integration
A few people asked for more/better Android device integration features

Built in backup solution
A few people requested we create some kind of integrated backup solution

Also a few concrete requests in terms of applications for Fedora:
http://www.mixxx.org
http://www.vocalproject.net
https://gnumdk.github.io/lollypop/

Variety is an open-source wallpaper changer for Linux


http://foldercolor.tuxfamily.org
choqok for GNOME (microblogging client)