Been some time since my last update, so I felt it was time to flex my blog writing muscles again and provide some updates of some of the things we are working on in Fedora in preparation for Fedora Workstation 35. This is not meant to be a comprehensive whats new article about Fedora Workstation 35, more of a listing of some of the things we are doing as part of the Red Hat desktop team.

NVidia support for Wayland
One thing we spent a lot of effort on for a long time now is getting full support for the NVidia binary driver under Wayland. It has been a recurring topic in our bi-weekly calls with the NVidia engineering team ever since we started looking at moving to Wayland. There has been basic binary driver support for some time, meaning you could run a native Wayland session on top of the binary driver, but the critical missing piece was that you could not get support for accelerated graphics when running applications through XWayland, our X.org compatibility layer. Which basically meant that any application requiring 3D support and which wasn’t a native Wayland application yet wouldn’t work. So over the last Months we been having a great collaboration with NVidia around closing this gap, with them working closely with us in fixing issues in their driver while we have been fixing bugs and missing pieces in the rest of the stack. We been reporting and discussing issues back and forth allowing us a very quickly turnaround on issues as we find them which of course all resulted in the NVidia 470.42.01 driver with XWayland support. I am sure we will find new corner cases that needs to be resolved in the coming Months, but I am equally sure we will be able to quickly resolve them due to the close collaboration we have now established with NVidia. And I know some people will wonder why we spent so much time working with NVidia around their binary driver, but the reality is that NVidia is the market leader, especially in the professional Linux workstation space, and there are lot of people who either would end up not using Linux or using Linux with X without it, including a lot of Red Hat customers and Fedora users. And that is what I and my team are here for at the end of the day, to make sure Red Hat customers are able to get their job done using their Linux systems.

Lightweight kiosk mode
One of the wonderful things about open source is the constant flow of code and innovation between all the different parts of the ecosystem. For instance one thing we on the RHEL side have often been asked about over the last few years is a lightweight and simple to use solution for people wanting to run single application setups, like information boards, ATM machines, cash registers, information kiosks and so on. For many use cases people felt that running a full GNOME 3 desktop underneath their application was either to resource hungry and or created a risk that people accidentally end up in the desktop session. At the same time from our viewpoint as a development team we didn’t want a completely separate stack for this use case as that would just increase our maintenance burden as we would end up having to do a lot of things twice. So to solve this problem Ray Strode spent some time writing what we call GNOME Kiosk mode which makes setting up a simple session running single application easy and without running things like the GNOME shell, tracker, evolution etc. This gives you a window manager with full support for the latest technologies such as compositing, libinput and Wayland, but coming in at about 18MB, which is about 71MB less than a minimal GNOME 3 desktop session. You can read more about the new Kiosk mode and how to use it in this great blog post from our savvy Edge Computing Product Manager Ben Breard. The kiosk mode session described in Ben’s article about RHEL will be available with Fedora Workstation 35.

high-definition mouse wheel support
A major part of what we do is making sure that Red Hat Enterprise Linux customers and Fedora users get hardware support on par with what you find on other operating systems. We try our best to work with our hardware partners, like Lenovo, to ensure that such hardware support comes day and date with when those features are enabled on other systems, but some things ends up taking longer time for various reasons. Support for high-definition mouse wheels was one of those. Peter Hutterer, our resident input expert, put together a great blog post explaining the history and status of high-definition mouse wheel support. As Peter points out in his blog post the feature is not yet fully supported under Wayland, but we hope to close that gap in time for Fedora Workstation 35.

Mouse with HiRes scroll wheel

PipeWire
I feel I can’t do one of these posts without talking about latest developments in PipeWire, our unified audio and video server. Wim Taymans keeps working with rapidly growing PipeWire community to fix issues as they are reported and add new features to PipeWire. Most recently Wims focus has been on implementing support for S/PDIF passthrough support over both S/PDIF and HDMI connections. This will allow us to send undecoded data over such connections which is critical for working well with surround sound systems and soundbars. Also the PipeWire community has been working hard on further improving the Bluetooth support with bluetooth battery status support for head-set profile and using Apple extensions. aptX-LL and FastStream codec support was also added. And of course a huge amount of bug fixes, it turns out that when you replace two different sound servers that has been around for close to two decades there are a lot of corner cases to cover :). Make sure to check out two latest release notes for 0.3.35 and for 0.3.36 for details.

EasyEffects is a great example of a cool new application built with PipeWire

Privacy screen
Another feature that we have been working on as a result of our Lenovo partnership is Privacy screen support. For those not familiar with this technology it is basically to allow you to reduce the readability of your screen when viewed from the side, so that if you are using your laptop at a coffee shop for instance then a person sitting close by will have a lot harder time trying to read what is on your screen. Hans de Goede has been shepherding the kernel side of this forward working with Marco Trevisan from Canonical on the userspace part of it (which also makes this a nice example of cross-company collaboration), allowing you to turn this feature on or off. This feature though is not likely to fully land in time for Fedora Workstation 35 so we are looking at if we will bring this in as an update to Fedora Workstation 35 or if it will be a Fedora Workstation 36 feature.

Penny

Zink inside the penny

Zink implements OpenGL in terms of Vulkan, as far as the drawing itself is concerned, but presenting that drawing to the rest of the system is currently system-specific (GLX). For hardware that already has a Mesa driver, we use GBM. On NVIDIA’s Vulkan (and probably any other binary stacks on Linux, and probably also like WSL or macOS + MoltenVK) we download the image from the GPU back to the CPU and then use the same software upload/display path as llvmpipe, which as you can imagine is Not Fast.

Penny aims to extend Zink by replacing both of those paths, and instead using the various Vulkan WSI extensions to manage presentation. Even for the GBM case this should enable higher performance since zink will have more information about the rendering pipeline (multisampling in particular is poorly handled atm). Future window system integration work can focus on Vulkan, with EGL and GLX getting features “for free” once they’re enabled in Vulkan.

3rd party software cleanup
Over time we have been working on adding more and more 3rd party software for easy consumption in Fedora Workstation. The problem we discovered though was that due to this being done over time, with changing requirements and expectations, the functionality was not behaving in a very intuitive way and there was also new questions that needed to be answered. So Allan Day and Owen Taylor spent some time this cycle to review all the bits and pieces of this functionality and worked to clean it up. So the goal is that when you enable third-party repositories in Fedora Workstation 35 it behaves in a much more predictable and understandable way and also includes a lot of applications from Flathub. Yes, that is correct you should be able to install a lot of applications from Flathub in Fedora Workstation 35 without having to first visit the Flathub website to enable it, instead they will show up once you turned the knob for general 3rd party application support.

Power profiles
Another item we spent quite a bit of time for Fedora Workstation 35 is making sure we integrate the Power Profiles work that Bastien Nocera has been working on as part of our collaboration with Lenovo. Power Profiles is basically a feature that allows your system to behave in a smarter way when it comes to power consumption and thus prolongs your battery life. So for instance when we notice you are getting low on battery we can offer you to go into a strong power saving mode to prolong how long you can use the system until you can recharge. More in-depth explanation of Power profiles in the official README.

Wayland
I usually also have ended up talking about Wayland in my posts, but I expect to be doing less going forward as we have now covered all the major gaps we saw between Wayland and X.org. Jonas Ådahl got the headless support merged which was one of our big missing pieces and as mentioned above Olivier Fourdan and Jonas and others worked with NVidia on getting the binary driver with XWayland support working with GNOME Shell. Of course this being software we are never truly done, there will of course be new issues discovered, random bugs that needs to be fixed, and of course also new features that needs to be implemented. We already have our next big team focus in place, HDR support, which will need work from the graphics drivers, up through Mesa, into the window manager and the GUI toolkits and in the applications themselves. We been investigating and trying out some things for a while already, but we are now ready to make this a main focus for the team. In fact we will soon be posting a new job listing for a fulltime engineer to work on HDR vertically through the stack so keep an eye out for that if you are interested in working on this. The job will be open to candidates who which to work remotely, so as long as Red Hat has a business presence in the country you live we should be able to offer you the job if you are the right candidate for us. Update:Job listing is now online for our HDR engineer.

BTW, if you want to see future updates and keep on top of other happenings from Fedora and Red Hat in the desktop space, make sure to follow me on twitter.

This weekend the X1 Carbon with Fedora Workstation went live in North America on Lenovos webstore. This is a big milestone for us and for Lenovo as its the first time Fedora ships pre-installed on a laptop from a major vendor and its the first time the worlds largest laptop maker ships premium laptops with Linux directly to consumers. Currently only the X1 Carbon is available, but more models is on the way and more geographies will get added too soon. As a sidenote, the X1 Carbon and more has actually been available from Lenovo for a couple of Months now, it is just the web sales that went online now. So if you are a IT department buying Lenovo laptops in bulk, be aware that you can already buy the X1 Carbon and the P1 for instance through the direct to business sales channel.

Also as a reminder for people looking to deploy Fedora laptops or workstations in numbers, be sure to check out Fleet Commander our tool for helping you manage configurations across such a fleet.

I am very happy with the work that has been done here to get to this point both by Lenovo and from the engineers on my team here at Red Hat. For example Lenovo made sure to get all of their component makers to ramp up their Linux support and we have been working with them to both help get them started writing drivers for Linux or by helping add infrastructure they could plug their hardware into. We also worked hard to get them all set up on the Linux Vendor Firmware Service so that you could be assured to get updated firmware not just for the laptop itself, but also for its components.

We also have a list of improvements that we are working on to ensure you get the full benefit of your new laptops with Fedora and Lenovo, including working on things like improved power management features being able to have power consumption profiles that includes a high performance mode for some laptops that will allow it to run even faster when on AC power and on the other end a low power mode to maximize battery life. As part of that we are also working on adding lap detection support, so that we can ensure that you don’t risk your laptop running to hot in your lap and burning you or that radio antennas are running to strong when that close to your body.

So I hope you decide to take the leap and get one of the great developer laptops we are doing together with Lenovo. This is a unique collaboration between the worlds largest laptop maker and the worlds largest Linux company. What we are doing here isn’t just a minimal hardware enablement effort, but a concerted effort to evolve Linux as a laptop operating system and doing it in a proper open source way. So this is the culmination of our work over the last few years, creating the LVFS, adding Thunderbolt support to Linux, improving fingerprint reader support in Linux, supporting HiDPI screens, supporting hidpi mice, creating the possibility of a secure desktop with Wayland, working with NVidia to ensure that Mesa and Nvidia driver can co-exist through glvnd, creating Flatpak to ensure we can bring the advantages of containers to the desktop space and at the same way do it in a vendor neutral way. So when you buy a Lenovo laptop with Fedora Workstation, you are not just getting a great system, but you are also supporting our efforts to take Linux to the next level, something which I think we are truly the only linux vendor with the scale and engineering ability to do.

Of course we are not stopping here, so let me also use this chance to talk a bit about some of our other efforts.

Toolbox
Containers are popular for deploying software, but a lot of people are also discovering now that they are an incredible way to develop software, even if that software is not going to be deployed as a Flatpak or Kubernetes container. The term often used for containers when used as a development tool is pet containers and with Toolbox project we are aiming to create the best tool possible for developers to work with pet containers. Toolbox allows you to have always have a clean environment to work in which you can change to suit each project you work on, however you like, without affecting your host system. So for instance if you need to install a development snapshot of Python you can do that inside your Toolbox container and be confident that various other parts of your desktop will not start crashing due to the change. And when your are done with your project and don’t want that toolbox around anymore you can easily delete it without having to spend time to figure out which packages you installed can now be safely uninstalled from your host system or just not bother and have your host get bloated over time with stuff you are not actually using anymore.

One big advantage we got at Red Hat is that we are a major contributor to container technologies across the stack. We are a major participant in the Open Container Initiative and we are alongside Google the biggest contributor to the Kubernetes project. This includes having created a set of container tools called Podman. So when we started prototyping Toolbox we could base it up on podman and get access to all the power and features that podman provides, but at the same make them easier to use and consumer from your developer laptop or workstation.

Our initial motivation was also driven by the fact that for image based operating systems like Fedora Silverblue and Fedora CoreOS, where the host system is immutable you still need some way to be able to install packages and do development, but we quickly realized that the pet container development model is superior to the old ‘on host’ model even if you are using a traditional package based system like Fedora Workstation. So we started out by prototyping the baseline functionality, writing it as a shell script to quickly test out our initial ideas. Of course as Toolbox picked up in popularity we realized we needed to transition quickly to a proper development language so that we wouldn’t end up with an unmaintainable mess written in shell, and thus Debarshi Ray and Ondřej Míchal has recently completed the rewrite to Go (Note: the choice of Go was to make it easier for the wider container community to contribute since almost all container tools are written in Go).

Leading up towards Fedora Workstation 33 we are trying figure out a few things. One is how we can make giving you access to a RHEL based toolbox through the Red Hat Developer Program in an easy and straightforward manner, and this is another area where pet container development shines. You can set up your pet container to run a different Linux version than your host. So you can use Fedora to get the latest features for your laptop, but target RHEL inside your Toolbox to get an easy and quick deployment path to your company RHEL servers. I would love it if we can extend this even further as we go along, to for instance let you set up a Steam runtime toolbox to do game development targeting Steam.
Setting up a RHEL toolbox is already technically possible, but requires a lot more knowledge and understanding of the underlaying technologies than we wish.
The second thing we are looking at is how we deal with graphical applications in the context of these pet containers. The main reason we are looking at that is because while you can install for instance Visual Studio code inside the toolbox container and launch it from the command line, we realize that is not a great model for how you interact with GUI applications. At the moment the only IDE that is set up to be run in the host, but is able to interact with containers properly is GNOME Builder, but we realize that there are a lot more IDEs people are using and thus we want to try to come up with ways to make them work better with toolbox containers beyond launching them from the command line from inside the container. There are some extensions available for things like Visual Studio Code starting to try to improve things (those extensions are not created by us, but looking at solving a similar problem), but we want to see how we can help providing a polished experience here. Over time we do believe the pet container model of development is so good that most IDEs will follow in GNOME Builders footsteps and make in-container development a core part of the feature set, but for now we need to figure out a good bridging strategy.

Wayland – headless and variable refresh rate.
Since switching to Wayland we have continued to work in improving how GNOME work under Wayland to remove any major feature regressions from X11 and to start taking advantage of the opportunities that Wayland gives us. One of the last issues that Jonas Ådahl has been hard at work recently is trying to ensure we have headless support for running GNOME on systems without a screen. We know that there are a lot of sysadmins for instance who want to be able to launch a desktop session on their servers to be used as a tool to test and debug issues. These desktops are then accessed through tools such as VNC or Nice DCV. As part of that work he also made sure we could deal with having multiple monitors connected which had different refresh rates. Before that fix you would get the lowest common denominator between your screens, but now if you for instance got a 60Hz monitor and a 75Hz monitor they will be able to function independent of each other and run at their maximum refresh rate. With the variable refresh rate work now landed upstream Jonas is racing to get the headless support finished and landed in time for Fedora Workstation 33.

Linux Vendor Firmware Service
Richard Hughes is continuing his work on moving the LVFS forward having spent time this cycle working with the Linux Foundation to ensure the service can scale even better. He is also continuously onboarding new vendors and helping existing vendors use LVFS for even more things. We are now getting reports that LVFS has become so popular that we are now getting reports of major hardware companies who up to know hasn’t been to interested in the LVFS are getting told by their customers to start using it or they will switch supplier. So expect the rapid growth of vendors joining the LVFS to keep increasing. It is also worth nothing that many of vendors who are already set up on LVFS are steadily working on increasing the amount of systems they support on it and pushing their suppliers to do the same. Also for enterprise use of LVFS firmware Marc Richter also wrote an article on access.redhat.com about how to use LVFS with Red Hat Satelitte. Satellite for those who don’t know it is Red Hats tool for managing and keeping servers up to date and secure. So for large companies having their machines, especially servers, accessing LVFS directly is not a wanted behaviour, so now they can use Satelitte to provide a local repository of the LVFS firmware.

PipeWire
One of the changes we been working on that I am personally extremely excited about is PipeWire. For those of you who don’t know it, PipeWire is one of our major swamp draining efforts which aims to bring together audio, pro-audio and video under linux and provide a modern infrastructure for us to move forward. It does so however while being ABI compatible with both Jack and PulseAudio, meaning that applications will not need to be ported to work with PipeWire. We have been using it for a while for video already to handle screen capture under Wayland and for allowing Flatpak containers access to webcams in a secure way, but Wim Taymans has been working tirelessly on moving that project forward over the last 6 Months, focused a lot of fixing corner cases in the Jack support and also ramping up the PulseAudio support. We had hoped to start wide testing in Fedora Workstation 32 of the audio parts of PipeWire, but we decided that since such a key advantage that PipeWire brings is not just to replace Jack or PulseAudio, but also to ensure the two usecases co-exist and interact properly, we didn’t want to start asking people to test until we got the PulseAudio support close to being production ready. Wim has been making progress by leaps and bounds recently and while I can’t 100% promise it yet we do expect to roll out the audio bits of PipeWire for more widescale testing in Fedora Workstation 33 with the goal of making it the default for Fedora Workstation 34 or more likely Fedora Workstation 35.
Wim is doing an internal demo this week, so I will try to put out a blog post talking about that later in the week.

Flatpak – incremental updates
One of the features we added to Flatpaks was the ability to distribute them as Open Container Initiative compliant containers. The reason for this was that as companies, Red Hat included, built infrastructure for hosting and distributing containers we could also use that for Flatpaks. This is obviously a great advantage for a variety of reasons, but it had one large downside compared to the traditional way of distributing Flatpaks (as Ostree images) which is that each update comes as a single large update as opposed to the atomic update model that OStree provides.
Which is why if you would compare the same application when shipping from Flathub, which uses Ostree, versus from the Fedora container registry, you would quickly notice that you get a lot smaller updates from Flathub. For kubernetes containers this hasn’t been considered a huge problem as their main usecase is copying the containers around in a high-speed network inside your cloud provider, but for desktop users this is annoying. So Alex Larsson and Owen Taylor has been working on coming up with a way to do to incremental updates for OCI/Docker/Kubernetes containers too, which not only means we can get very close to the Flathub update size in the Fedora Container Catalog, but it also means that since we implemented this in a way that works for all OCI/Kubernetes containers you will be able to get them too with incremental update functionality. Especially as such containers are making their way into edge computing where update sizes do matter, just like they do on the desktop.

Hangul input under Wayland
Red Hat, like Lenovo, targets most of the world with our products and projects. This means that we want them to work great even for people who doesn’t use English or another European language. To achieve this we have a team dedicated to ensuring that not just Linux, but all Red Hat products work well for international users as part of my group at Red Hat. That team, lead by Jens Petersen, is distributed around the globe with engineers in Japan, China, India, Singapore and Germany. This team contributes to a lot of different things like font maintenance, input method development, i18n infrastructure and more.
One thing this team recently discovered was that the support for Korean input under Wayland. So Peng Wu, Takao Fujiwara and Carlos Garnacho worked together to come up with a series of patches for ibus and GNOME Shell to ensure that Fedora Workstation on Wayland works perfectly for Korean input. I wanted to highlight this effort because while I don’t usually mention efforts which such a regional impact in my blog posts it is a critical part of keeping Linux viable and usable across the globe. And ensuring that you can use your computer in your own language is something we feel is important and want to enable and also an area where I believe Red Hat is investing more than any other vendor out there.

GLX on EGL
We meet with NVidia on a regular basis to discuss topics of shared interest and one thing we been looking at for a while now is the best way to support Nvidia binary driver under XWayland. As part of that Adam Jackson has been working on a research project to see how feasible it would be to create a way to run GLX applications on top of EGL. As one might imagine EGL doesn’t have a 1to1 match with GLX APIs, but based on what we seen so far is that it should be close enough to get things going (Adam already got glxgears running :). The goal here would be to have an initial version that works ok, and then in collaboration with NVidia we can evolve it to be a great solution for even the most demanding OpenGL/GLX applications. Currently the code causes an extra memcopy compared to running on GLX native, but this is something we think can be resolved in collaboration with NVidia. Of course this is still an early stage effort and Adam and NVidia are currently looking at it so there is of course a chance still we will hit a snag and have to go back to the drawing board. For those interested you can take a look at this Mesa merge request to see the current state.

As Fedora Workstation 32 was released today I ended up looking back at our efforts to drain the swamp over the last 6 years. In April of 2014 I wrote a blog post outlining our vision for the Fedora Workstation effort and what we wanted to achieve with it. I hadn’t looked at that blog post in years, but it was interesting going back to it and realize that while some of the details have changed it is still the vision we are pursuing today; to keep draining the swamp and make Fedora Workstation a top notch operating system for developers and makers in general. Which I guess is one of the hallmarks of a decent vision, that it allows for the details to change without invalidating it.

One of my pet peeves at the time with Linux as a desktop operating system was that so many of the so called efforts to make linux user friendly was essentially duck taping over the problems, creating fragile solutions that often made it harder for us to really move forward. In the yers since we addressed a lot of major swamp issues with our efforts around HiDPI & Bolt (getting ahead of hardware enablement for new monitors and Thunderbolt devices respectively), Flatpaks, GNOME Software and AppStream (making applications discoverable, deployable and maintainable), Wayland (making your desktop secure and future proof), LVFS and firmware handling (making them easily available for Linux users), Finger print reader standard (ensuring your hardware is fully supported) and coming up with ways to improve the lives of developers with improvements to the terminal or Fedora Toolbox, our developer pet container tool.

Working on these and other issues we early realized that a model where hardware gets enabled in a reactive manner, in response to new laptops being sold, was never going to yield a good result for our users. As long as we followed that model people where bound to always hit issues with laptops as they came out and then have to deal with those issues for the first 6-12 Months of its life. This is why I am so excited about our new partnership with Lenovo that we pre-announced on Friday as it is both the culmination of our efforts over the last 6 years, but also the starting point of a new era in terms of how we work with hardware makers. So instead of us spending a ton of time trying to reverse engineers basic drivers we can now rely on our hardware partner and their component vendors providing that and we can instead focus on what I call high level hardware enablement. Meaning that as we see new features coming into laptops and computers we can try to improve the infrastructure in the operating system to be able to take full advantage of said hardware, and we can do so in collaboration with the hardware makers knowing that once we provide the infrastructure they will ensure to provide drivers and similar fitting into that infrastructure. Our work on fingerprint readers and thunderbolt support for instance has been two great early examples of that.

Anyway, you are probably interested to know some of the new things coming in Fedora Workstaton 32, so here are some of my personal highlights:

New lock screen

This is more a cosmetic change, but one that every user will see upon logging into their Fedora system after a new install or upgrade. The new design features a faded version of your desktop background image and it should also feel more smooth as the password dialog now appears on the lock screen page as opposed to before where it sort of replaced it. The dialog now also tries to more discreetly than before inform you if your trying to type in the password while the lock screen is on. A big thanks to Allan Day and the GNOME design team for their work here trying to polish this part of the user interface.

GNOME extension app

GNOME Shell extensions are little tweaks and additional features for the desktop that our user have gotten accustomed to and enjoy greatly. Extensions are also the technology that powers the GNOME Classic session that provides those of our users who want it with a more traditional desktop experience. GNOME Shell extensions have gradually evolved in how we work with them since their inception as something you install through your web browser to now being handled through GNOME Software. With Fedora Workstation 32 we are making the new GNOME Shell extensions management app available as the next step in the evolution of GNOME Shell extensions, making it simple to turn any given extension on of our or quickly see which extensions you have installed.

GNOME Extensions handling app

Fedora Toolbox

Fedora Toolbox is our helper for making working with containers for development and testing as easy it possibly can be. Debarshi Ray and Ondřej Míchal have been hard at work porting the Fedora Toolbox to Go from shell for this release. For those wondering why we choose Go as the language; there was basically two reasons for that. One we felt that the toolbox had gone as far as it could as a shell script, and two that was the language used by all the components we rely on and interact with in the container space, like buildah and podman. We also wanted to make it easy for developers on those projects to contribute by using the same language as they use in their projects.

Fedora Toolbox running on Fedora Workstation 32

Performance improvements

Another area that we always try to give some love is general performance improvement. For example this time around Christian Hergert identified some really bad behavior of GNOME shell when running on a system with very high I/O. At the face of it GNOME Shell didn’t look like it should have been affected, but during some intensive debugging sessions Christian Hergert discovered that I/O was triggered by various API calls to do things like string translation. So he put together a set of patches to resolve the high I/O stalls and can now report that GNOME Shell keeps running smoothly as silk, even under high disk I/O situations.

PipeWire

Wim Taymans keeps making great strides forward with PipeWire, our tool for creating a unified media handler for audio, pro-audio and Video. In Fedora Workstation 32 we will be shipping the 0.3 version which has quite complete Jack support. In fact we are hoping to team up with the Fedora Jam team to finalize the Jack support during the Fedora 32 lifecycle by testing it extensively. We have a lot of Jacks apps already working with PipeWire, including a series of important Jack apps that we have put into Flatpaks in Fedora like Carla. While the support is there in PipeWire in Fedora 32 right now, there are some convenience work we are still needing to do, but we hope to get that pushed out by next week to make replacing Jack with PipeWire becomes very simple to both do and undo for testing purposes.

The PulseAudio support is the last piece that are still in progress. It works for simple music playback, but it is not a drop in replacement for PulseAudio yet, so while we hoped to encourage widespread testing in F32 we will aim at delaying that to F33 in order to polish the PulseAudio support more first. But once ready we will make this available for testing in a simple manner just like the Jack support.

There has also been further work on the video side of PipeWire, adding support for zero copy video capture, this has reduced the overhead of doing things like screen capturing significantly and should be a nice performance/resource usage improvement for everyone.

Firefox on Wayland

Martin Stransky and Jan Horak has been working hard to improve how Firefox runs and works when used as a Wayland native application fixing a truckload of bigger and smaller bugs this cycle. We feel that we crossed the corner now in terms of the Wayland version being just as stable and good as the X11 one. In fact we could move beyond just fixing bugs to actually adding features this time around for instance Martin Stransky worked on WebGL HW acceleration support enabling us to have that enabled by default now for the first time. We also made sure to taking advantage of the Pipewire zero copy support to improve your video conferencing applications running under Firefox which turned out to be even more important than we expected considering Covid-19 has everyone working from home.

Looking forward

We spent a lot of time and energy over the last 6 years to get to where we are now, putting in place a lot of the basic building blocks needed to make Linux a great desktop operating system. And it feels great that just as we kick of the new line of Lenovo laptops running Fedora we are also entering a new phase of development where we can move beyond getting our basic infrastructure in place, but we can really start taking advantage of it to rapidly improve the experience we are providing even more. A good example is the Firefox work mentioned above, where we finally could move on from ‘make it work with Wayland and PipeWire, to ‘lets take advantage of these new pieces to make Firefox on Linux better’. Another example here is that Adam Jackson is currently investigating how we can improve how Fedora Workstation performs for remote usage. This work includes looking at things like VNC and RDP and commercial offerings and figuring out how we can make our stack work better with such tools, on top of the improvements that PipeWire brings for such usecases.

There is some more heavy lifting needed before our next generation OS architecture, Silverblue, is ready to be our default offering, but it is improving leaps and bounds each release and already have a loyal following, personally I am very excited about the fact that we are quickly moving closer the point were we can make it our default and through that offer features like bulletproof OS updates, factory resets and solid version rollbacks.

On the Flatpak side Owen Taylor and Alex Larsson are putting in a lot of final touches on our Red Hat infrastructure. So for RHEL8.2 we will finally be able to build Flatpaks in RHEL infrastructure and provide a runtime and SDK for our RHEL customers to use. But equally exciting is that we will be able to offer these to the community at large, meaning that we can offer a high quality Flatpak Long Term Support runtime and SDK for ISVs that they can use to both target RHEL users, but also Fedora and other Linux distributions with, in a similar vein to how the Red Hat UBI works. We will also be looking at ways to make getting access to these on Fedora very simple for developers, so that developing towards this runtime becomes quick and easy on your Fedora system. Alex and Owen are also working on an incremental updates feature to be shared between Kubernetes containers and OCI Flatpaks, making both technologies better and updates a lot smaller.

We are also looking at a host of other smaller improvements, many of them in collaboration with our friends at Lenovo, like lap detection (so you can be sure the laptop doesn’t burn you), privacy features (like making it harder to read your screen from an angle) and far field microphones. There are also things like Lennarts HomeD idea which we will be looking at as a way to improve the end user experience.

So the future is looking bright and I hope to see many new faces in the Fedora community going forward, be that if you download Fedora Workstation 32 to install on your own system yourself or if you join us through buying a Fedora laptop from Lenovo this summer.