Category Archives: General

GNOME is not the default for Fedora Workstation

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We recently had a Fedora AMA where one of the questions asked is why GNOME is the default desktop for Fedora Workstation. In the AMA we answered why GNOME had been chosen for Fedora Workstation, but we didn’t challenge the underlying assumption built into the way the question was asked, and the answer to that assumption is that it isn’t the default. What I mean with this is that Fedora Workstation isn’t a box of parts, where you have default options that can be replaced, its a carefully procured and assembled operating system aimed at developers, sysadmins and makers in general. If you replace one or more parts of it, then it stops being Fedora Workstation and starts being ‘build your own operating system OS’. There is nothing wrong with wanting to or finding it interesting to build your own operating systems, I think a lot of us initially got into Linux due to enjoying doing that. And the Fedora project provides a lot of great infrastructure for people who want to themselves or through teaming up with others build their own operating systems, which is why Fedora has so many spins and variants available.
The Fedora Workstation project is something we made using those tools and it has been tested and developed as an integrated whole, not as a collection of interchangeable components. The Fedora Workstation project might of course over time replace certain parts with other parts over time, like how we are migrating from X.org to Wayland. But at some point we are going to drop standalone X.org support and only support X applications through XWayland. But that is not the same as if each of our users individually did the same. And while it might be technically possible for a skilled users to still get things moved back onto X for some time after we make the formal deprecation, the fact is that you would no longer be using ‘Fedora Workstation’. You be using a homebrew OS that contains parts taken from Fedora Workstation.

So why am I making this distinction? To be crystal clear, it is not to hate on you for wanting to assemble your own OS, in fact we love having anyone with that passion as part of the Fedora community. I would of course love for you to share our vision and join the Fedora Workstation effort, but the same is true for all the other spins and variant communities we have within the Fedora community too. No the reason is that we have a very specific goal of creating a stable and well working experience for our users with Fedora Workstation and one of the ways we achieve this is by having a tightly integrated operating system that we test and develop as a whole. Because that is the operating system we as the Fedora Workstation project want to make. We believe that doing anything else creates an impossible QA matrix, because if you tell people that ‘hey, any part of this OS is replaceable and should still work’ you have essentially created a testing matrix for yourself of infinite size. And while as software engineers I am sure many of us find experiments like ‘wonder if I can get Fedora Workstation running on a BSD kernel’ or ‘I wonder if I can make it work if I replace glibc with Bionic‘ fun and interesting, I am equally sure we all also realize what once we do that we are in self support territory and that Fedora Workstation or any other OS you use as your starting point can’t not be blamed if your system stops working very well. And replacing such a core thing as the desktop is no different to those other examples.

Having been in the game of trying to provide a high quality desktop experience both commercially in the form of RHEL Workstation and through our community efforts around Fedora Workstation I have seen and experienced first hand the problems that the mindset of interchangeable desktop creates. For instance before we switched to the Fedora Workstation branding and it was all just ‘Fedora’ I experienced reviewers complaining about missing features, features had actually spent serious effort implementing, because the reviewer decided to review a different spin of Fedora than the GNOME one. Other cases I remember are of customers trying to fix a problem by switching desktops, only to discover that while the initial issue they wanted fix got resolved by the switch they now got a new batch of issues that was equally problematic for them. And we where left trying to figure out if we should try to fix the original problem, the new ones or maybe the problems reported by users of a third desktop option. We also have had cases of users who just like the reviewer mentioned earlier, assumed something was broken or missing because they where using a different desktop than the one where the feature was added. And at the same time trying to add every feature everywhere would dilute our limited development resources so much that it made us move slow and not have the resources to focus on getting ready for major changes in the hardware landscape for instance.
So for RHEL we now only offer GNOME as the desktop and the same is true in Fedora Workstation, and that is not because we don’t understand that people enjoy experimenting with other desktops, but because it allows us to work with our customers and users and hardware partners on fixing the issues they have with our operating system, because it is a clearly defined entity, and adding the features they need going forward and properly support the hardware they are using, as opposed to spreading ourselves to thin that we just run around putting on band-aids for the problems reported.
And in the longer run I actually believe this approach benefits those of you who want to build your own OS to, or use an OS built by another team around a different set of technologies, because while the improvements might come in a bit later for you, the work we now have the ability to undertake due to having a clear focus, like our work on adding HiDPI support, getting Wayland ready for desktop use or enabling Thunderbolt support in Linux, makes it a lot easier for these other projects to eventually add support for these things too.

Update: Adam Jacksons oft quoted response to the old ‘linux is about choice meme’ is also a required reading for anyone wanting a high quality operating system

A bold new chapter for Fedora Workstation

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So you have probably seen the announcement that Lenovo are launching a set of Fedora Workstation based laptops. I am so happy and proud of this effort as it comes as the culmination of our hard effort over the last 6 years to drain the swamp and make Linux a more viable desktop operating system.
I am also so happy and proud that Lenovo was willing to work with us on this effort as they provide us with an incredible opportunity to reach both new and old Linux users around the globe with these systems, being the worlds biggest laptop maker with the widest global reach. Because one important aspect of this is that Lenovo will provide these laptops through all their sales channels in all their markets. This means you can of course order them online through their website, but it also means companies can order them through Lenovos business to business channels and it means that in any country where Lenovo is present you can order them, so this is not a North America only or Europe only, this is truly a global offering.

There are a lot of people who has been involved here in helping to make this happen, but special thanks goes to Egbert Gracias from Lenovo who was critical in making this happen and also a special thanks to Alberto Ruiz who spearheaded this effort from our side.

Our engineering team here at Red Hat has also been hard at work ensuring we can support these models very well be that by bugfixes to kernel drivers or by polishing up things like the Linux fingerprint support. As we go forward we hope to build on this relationship to take linux laptops to the next level and I am also very happy to say that we got Jared Dominguez on on team now to help us develop better work practices and closer relationships with our hardware partners and original device manufacturers.


Also a special thanks to Jakub Steiner for putting together the little sizzle video above, it was supposed to be used at our booth at Red Hat Summit next week, but with that going virtual we repurposed it for this announcement.

GStreamer Conference 2019 (including GStreamer and PipeWire hackfests)

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GStreamer Conference 2019 banner

GStreamer Conference 2019 in Lyon France


So the GStreamer Conference 2019 is approaching being held in Lyon, France between 31st October and 1st November 2019. This year is special as it marks the GStreamer projects 20th year of existence. I still remember seeing the announcement of GStreamer 0.0.9 which Erik Walthinsen sent to the GNOME announe mailing list. Back then I felt that multimedia support where one of the big gaps around the Linux operating system that needed filling (no, XAnim was nice for its time, but it was not a long term solution :) and GStreamer seemed like the perfect project to fill it. So I joined the GStreamer IRC channel determined to try to help the project succeed however I could. A little over a year later we all met for the first time at GUADEC in Copenhagen, even posing for this exciting team photo.

GStreamer Team at GUADEC Copenhagen in 2001 (we all looked slightly younger and fresher back then.)


Anyway, 20 years later there will be a talk and presentation by GStreamer co-founder Wim Taymans (wearing blue shirt and black pants in picture above) at the GStreamer Conference commemorating 20 years of GStreamer. Detailing taking the project from idealistic spare time effort to the multimedia industry juggernaut it is today.

Of course the conference is not going to be focused on the past, as there is a long line up of great talks talking about modern streaming with DASH, HDR support in GStreamer, latest developments around GStreamer and Rust, Virtual reality, Vulkan and more. Actually on the ‘and more’ topic, Wim Taymans will also do a presentation on PipeWire, the next generation audio and video server, at the GStreamer Conference this year, hopefully demoing some of the great improvements in things like our pro-audio Jack emulation support.
So if you haven’t already, make your way to the GStreamer Conference 2019 website and register for the 10th annual GStreamer Conference!

For those going be aware that there will also be a joint GStreamer fall hackfest and PipeWire hackfest in the two days following the GStreamer Conference. So be sure to sign up for those if interested. They will be co-located with participants flowing freely between the two events.

Fedora Workstation 31 – Whats new

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We are laboring on getting Fedora Workstation 31 out the door next Month, with the beta release being made available last week. So here are some of the highlights of this upcoming release which I and the team hope you will enjoy. Many of these items I already covered in my June blogpost about Fedora Workstation 31, so if you read that one consider this one a status update as there will be some repeats.

Wayland improvements
Fedora has been leading the migration to Wayland since day one and we are not planning to stop. XWayland on demand has been an effort a lot of people contributed to this cycle. The goal is to only need XWayland for legacy X applications, not have it started and running all the time as that is a waste of system resources and also having core functionality still depend on X under Wayland makes the system more fragile. XWayland-on-demand has been a big effort with contributions from a lot of people and companies. One piece of this was the Systemd user session patches that was originally written by Iain Lane from Canonical. They had been lingering for a bit so Benjamin Berg took those patches on for this cycle and helped shepherd them over the finish line and get them merged upstream. This work wasn’t a hard requirement for Wayland-on-demand, but since it makes it a lot easier to do different things under X and Wayland which in turn makes moving towards XWayland-on-demand a little simpler to implement. That work will also allow (in future releases) us to do things like only start services under GNOME that are actually needed for your hardware, so for instance if you don’t have a bluetooth adapter in your computer there is no reason to run the bits of GNOME dealing with bluetooth. So expect further resource savings coming from this work over time.

Carlos Garnacho then spent time going through GNOME Shell removing any lingering X dependencies while Olivier Fourdan worked on cleaning up the control center. This work has mostly landed, but it is hidden behind an experimental flag (gsettings set org.gnome.mutter experimental-features "[...,'autostart-xwayland']") in Fedora 31 as we need to mature it a bit more before its ready for primetime. But we hope and expect to have it running by default in Fedora Workstation 32.

One example of something that was still requiring X that is now gone is the keyboard and mouse accessibility features in GNOME 3, which Olivier Fourdan got re-implemented and improved for this release. So if anyone out there reading this rely on the hover click accessibility feature then that is actually a lot nicer in Fedora Workstation 31. As seen in the screenshot below you now have this nice little pie animation filling up as it prepares to click which is a huge improvement over how it used to work.

Clock on hover

Click on hover in action

Another item we feel is an important part of reducing the need for XWayland is having Firefox running natively on Wayland. Martin Stransky and Jan Horak has been working tirelessly on trying to ensure Firefox works well on Wayland and in the Fedora 31 Beta it is running on Wayland by default. However there are a few bugs discovered that Martin and Jan are trying hard to fix atm so we can keep this default for the GA release, but if they miss the deadline we will ship the X backend version in F31 and then move to the Wayland version later on.

In Fedora Workstation 31 Wayland is still disabled by default if you use the Nvidia binary driver. The reason for this is due to lack of acceleration under XWayland, meaning that any application depending on GLX, like a lot of games, will just get software GL rendering with the binary NVidia driver. This isn’t something we can resolv on our own, Nvidia has to do the work since its their closed source driver, but we been discussing it regularly with them and we been told now that they are looking at the work Adam Jackson some time ago which was specifically aimed at helping them bring their X.org driver to XWayland. We don’t have a timeline yet, but it is being actively looked at and hopefully a proper date can be provided soon. I am actually running Fedora Workstation 31 using the NVidia driver myself at the moment on this laptop, and for those interested in helping dogfood this setup, in preparation for hopefully being able to enable Wayland on NVidia in Fedora Workstation 32, it is fairly simple thing to do. Under /usr/lib/udev/rules.d/ you find a file called 61-gdm.rules, just edit that file and comment out (#) the line that reads ‘DRIVER=="nvidia", RUN+="/usr/libexec/gdm-disable-wayland"‘ and you will revert to a standard setup where your standard session is a Wayland session, but with a x.org session available as a fallback. The more people that run this and report issues the better as it helps us make this rock solid before releasing it upon the world.

Atomic kernel modesetting
Jonas Ådahl has been hard at work this cycle on adding support for atomic mode setting. This work is not done, but the first parts of it has landed, but it has major long term advantages for us. I asked Jonas to provide a short description of the work and what it will eventually achieve as I don’t we articulated that anywhere else yet:

There are two ways for a display server to control the configuration and content of monitors – the old classic Kernel Mode Setting (classic KMS), and newer atomic Kernel Mode Setting (atomic KMS). The main difference between these two modes of operations is that with atomic KMS, the display server posts transactions containing configuration KMS that are then processed atomically by the kernel, while when using the classic KMS, the display server posts configurations command by command, where each monitor is configured by posting multiple commands. The benefits with atomic KMS are for example that the display server will up front know whether a configuration is valid (e.g. enough memory bandwidth), or that the display server can configure multiple aspects of the hardware atomically.

During the cycle leading up to Fedora Workstation 31 the foundations for how mutter (the window manager powering GNOME Shell) can make use of the new atomic KMS API was put in place. What was done was to introduce an internal transactional API for configuring monitors. This will eventually allow us to have much more control over how more advanced monitor features are utilized. For example it will be possible to place client windows directly in hardware overlay planes, meaning we can more often completely bypass full frame compositing when only the content of a single window changes. Another example for what this enables us to do is with color management; we will be able to do seamless switching between managing window color profiles using OpenGL and for instance gamma ramps. Yet another example of what this work opens the door for is framebuffer modifiers, which will among other things potentially result in higher performance with very high resolution monitors.
Finally an important aspect of the work done related to the new internal KMS API is that it aims to be thread safe, meaning eventually it will be possible to put KMS processing completely in a separate thread. This means that together with e.g. moving input device processing to its own thread it will be possible to get very short latency between mouse movement and the cursor
being moved on screen.

QtGNOME improvements
Jan Grulich has continued improved the QtGNOME module to make sure Qt apps integrate as well as possible into Fedora Workstation. His latest updates ensures that the theming keeps up to date with latest upstream changes in Adwaita, that we have a fully working dark theme, that accessibility theming work and that it works with Flatpaks. Below is a screenshot showing Okular running allowing you to see how the QtGNOME module affects the look and feel of Qt applications.

Firmware improvements
The LVFS firmware service keeps going from strength to strength. Richard Hughes presented on it during the Open Firmware Conference recently and was approached by a lot of vendors afterwards both thanking him and Red Hat for the effort, but also asking about getting more of their hardware supported. New vendors are coming onboard at rapid pace, for instance Acer joined recently and are planning to support more of their hardware on the LVFS going forward. It is also worth mentioning the GNOME Firmware tool that can now be downloaded from flathub and which works great on Fedora Workstation 31.

OpenH264 Greatly Improved
The much improved version of OpenH264 will be available soon for Fedora users. This new version adds support for the High and Advanced profiles of H264 which is what most videos found online or produced by your camera would be using. This means you can add H264 playback support to your Fedora Workstation without having to search online for 3rd party repositories like you have had to do up to now. We also are trying to ensure this will be usable by Firefox for video playback eventually. This was work we partnered with Endless, Cisco to hire the multimedia experts at Centricular to do, so another great example of cross company collaboration to bring improved functionality to the community.

Fedora Toolbox
Debarshi Ray has been working on many small improvements and better robustness for Fedora Toolbox going into Fedora Workstation 31. Fedora Toolbox for those not aware of it yet, is our tool to make doing development using pet containers simple and convenient, providing ease of use features on top of traditional container tools and integration with GNOME terminal and the GNOME Shell. The version shipping in F31 will be the last shell script based one as once Fedora Workstation 31 is out we will be going all in on rewritting Fedora Toolbox in Go, in preparation for future development and expansion. I strongly recommend trying it out as it will help open your eyes to the possibilities that using pet containers for development gives you. For instance you can easily set up a RHEL based pet container on your Fedora system to do development work that is mean to be deployed on a RHEL system or grab our special AI/ML development container for easy access to TensorFlow and similar tools.

Improved Classic mode
Another notable change in this release is the updates to GNOME Classic mode. GNOME Classic mode is a set of extensions to GNOME 3 that makes it look and behave a lot more like GNOME 2, which still has many fans out there. With this release we collected feedback from a group of Classic mode users and tried to improve the experience further, mostly be removing some remaining GNOME 3’isms that didn’t really fit the GNOME Classic user experience, like the overview and the hot corner. The session manager is now also easily accessible in the bottom corner. The theming also got cleaned up a little to remove the last bit of the ‘black’ GNOME 3 theming. That said I think it is important to remember that this is still GNOME 3 in the end, we are really just showcasing the power of extensions to tweak the user experience in quite fundamental ways here.

GNOME Classic improved

Improved GNOME Classic mode


Better support for non-English users
Fedora Workstation is used all over the globe, but we have not been happy about how our support for picking languages other than English has worked so far. The thing is that if you choose one or more languages at install time, things tended to just work fine, but if you wanted to add a new language afterwards it required jumping onto the command line and figuring out how to install the needed langpacks. In Fedora Workstation 31 Sundeep Anand have worked hard to improve this, so if you choose a new language in the GNOME Control center in Fedora Workstation 31, the required langpacks should be installed automatically for you.

Fleet Commander
Fleet Commander 0.14.1 is out just in time for Fedora Workstation 31. Fleet Commander is a tool for doing large scale deployments of Fedora and RHEL workstations, allowing you to set system wide profiles. So for instance if you have a GNOME Shell extension everyone in your organization or a specific team inside your organization should have enabled, you can deploy a profile with Fleet commander ensuring that extension is enabled for those users. Basically any setting within GNOME can be set using this, including network configuration options. There is also support for Firefox and LibreOffice settings in Fleet Commander. The big feature addition of 0.14.1 is that Fleet Commander now can be used with Active Directory, which means that even if your company or university use Active Directory for their user management, you can now deploy Fedora and RHEL profiles without needing FreeIPA. Fleet Commander is pretty much finished at this point, at least as far as any piece of software can ever be finished. Oliver Gutierrez Suarez is working on finishing up some last bits of Firefox support currently, but we don’t have any major Fleet Commander items on his todo list after that, so if you been waiting to test it out there are on new major features you need to wait on anymore, it is all there. If you are doing large scale linux desktop deployments I definitely recommend checking out Fleet commander. You will find that Fleet Commander definitely makes Fedora a great choice for doing large scale Linux desktop deployments.

Pipewire
We are not doing a lot of changes to Pipewire for Fedora Workstation 31. Mostly some bugfixes and minor improvements to the video infrastructure it already provides in Fedora 30 for Flatpaks and web browsers. We are planning major changes for Fedora Workstation 32 though, where we in fact plan to ship Pipewire as a tech preview for both Jack and PulseAudio users. The way it will work is that the system will still default to PulseAudio, but we will provide either a script or a UI option to switch over to Pipewire (and back again). There is also a plan to have a core set of ProAudio applications available as Flatpaks for Fedora Workstation 32 tested and verified to work perfectly with Pipewire, the current apps planned to be included are Ardour, Carla, a2jmidid, Hydrogen, Qtractor and Patroneo, but if there is interested contributors joining the effort we could have even more. Then for Fedora Workstation 33 the idea is to ship with Pipewire as the default audio handler, but with some way for users to switch back to PulseAudio if they have a need. Not unlike how the setup is currently with Wayland and X.org in Fedora. Wim Taymans will also be attending the Sonoj conference in Cologne Germany at the end of October to discuss Pipewire with many members of the Linux ProAudio community and hopefully help prepare them for a future where Fedora Workstation is the perfect home for ProAudio users and developers.

Sysprof
Christian Hergert spent some cycles this round on improving the Sysprof tool as it was becoming clear that to keep improving GNOME Shell and general desktop performance going forward we needing better data and ability to find the bottlenecks. Tools like sysprof often ends up being the unsung heroes of the system, but as we continue improving the overall GNOME performance and resource usage of the next few years the revamped sysprof tool will be a big part of that story.

Sysprof

Much improved Sysprof tool

Silverblue
A lot of the items we work on are part of our vision around Silverblue, a Linux desktop OS built on the idea of an immutable core image. We often mention the theoretic advantage that such a setup with an immutable OS brings, but actually as I upgraded from F30 and F31 beta on my RPM based laptop (I got a separate machine where I run Silverblue) I hit the exact kind of issue that Silverblue can help us and our users avoid. What happened was that after my upgrade I suddenly had no Wayland session anymore, just the fallback X.org session. After quite a bit of fault searching I discovered that the reason for this was that I had been testing Valves ACO shader compiler on F30. These packages had a newer version number than the F31 packages and thus where not overwritten as part of the upgrade. Unfortunately the EGL package that came as part of that repository did not work well on F31 and thus the Wayland session failed. Once I did a distro sync and forced all packages to be the actual F31 versions things worked correctly, but it did illustrate the challenges with systems where different parts of the core can and will get updated at different times. With a single well tested core OS image these kind of problems will not happen. That said being able to test such things as ACO is valuable and useful and luckily OStree and Silverblue do offer functionality for installing such things in a clean and non-damaging way through what is known as package layering. When you install new packages like that on using package layering they will only last until your next reboot, after you reboot your back to a clean original state system. Of course if you really want to keep some experimental packages around there are other things you can do too, like overriding, but for simple testing like I did with ACO, package layering will provide you with a simple and safe way to do that.

We realize that Silverblue is a major change in how a Linux distro is ‘supposed’ to work, so we are taking our time with it to ensure we do it right and that we have made sure applications and tools work in a way that functions well on an immutable OS. So if you are interested I do recommend that you grab the Fedora 31 Silverblue image and give it a spin, but we are still working on polishing the experience so don’t expect it to be a seamless experience at this point in time. Of course as things like Flatpaks, Fedora Toolbox and a host of smaller issues get improved upon we do believe this will be such an overall improvement over an ‘old fashioned’ linux distro that you will be asking yourself why the Linux world didn’t do this years ago.

Improved performance
A lot of work has gone into improving the general performance of GNOME 3.34. The GNOME shell team has been very active and is a great example of a large numbers of developers working together from different backgrounds. So this release features a lot of great performance work by Daniel van Vugt from Canonical and by Georges Stavracas from Endless for instance. The Red Hat team has focused on providing patch review and feedback and working on bigger long term changes and enablers, like Christian Hergerts work on Sysprof, Jonas Ådahl work on atomic mode setting and Benjamin Bergs work on systemd-user session support. All in all I think you will find that Fedora Workstation 31 with GNOME 3.34 provides a faster and smoother experience, an experience we will continue to build upon going forward as some of these long term efforts starts paying off.

Sonic Boom

Performance is better than ever

Summary
So this has been a roundup of some of the core items you should look forward to in Fedora Workstation 31. There are other items coming too in this release, like the Miracast GNOME Network Display application that Benjamin Berg has written, more Fedora Flatpaks available than ever before and more. We also have a lot of interesting items coming up in Fedora Workstation 32 like Bastien Noceras work improving low memory handling. So stay tuned.

On the Road to Fedora Workstation 31

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So I hope everyone is enjoying Fedora Workstation 30, but we don’t rest on our laurels here so I thought I share some of things we are working on for Fedora Workstation 31. This is not an exhaustive list, but some of the more major items we are working on.

Wayland – Our primary focus is still on finishing the Wayland transition and we feel we are getting close now, and thank you to the community for their help in testing and verifying Wayland over the last few years. The single biggest goal currently is fully removing our X Windowing System dependency, meaning that GNOME Shell should be able to run without needing XWayland. For those wondering why that has taken so much time, well it is simple; for 20 years developers could safely assume we where running atop of X. So refactoring everything needed to remove any code that makes the assumption that it is running on top of X.org has been a major effort. The work is mostly done now for the shell itself, but there are a few items left in regards to the GNOME Setting daemon where we need to expel the X dependency. Olivier Fourdan is working on removing those settings daemon bits as part of his work to improve the Wayland accessibility support. We are optimistic that can declare this work done within a GNOME release or two. So GNOME 3.34 or maybe 3.36. Once that work is complete an X server (XWayland) would only be started if you actually run a X application and when you shut that application down the X server will be shut down too.

Wayland logo

Wayland Graphics


Another change that Hans de Goede is working on at the moment is allowing X applications to be run as root under XWayland. In general running desktop apps as root isn’t considered adviceable from a security point of view, but since it always worked under X we feel it should continue to be there for XWayland too. This should fix a few applications out there which only works when run as root currently. One last item Hans de Goede is looking at is improving SDLs Wayland support in regards to how it deals with scaling of lower resolution games. Thanks to the great effort by Valve and others we got a huge catalog of games available under Linux now and we want to ensure that those keep running and runs well. So we will work with the SDL devs to come up with a solution here, we just don’t know the exact shape and and form the solution will take yet, so stay tuned.

Finally there is the NVidia binary driver support question. So you can run a native Wayland session on top of the binary driver and you had that ability for a very long time. Unfortunately there has been no support for the binary driver in XWayland and thus and X applications (which there are a lot of) would not be getting any HW accelerated 3D graphics support. Adam Jackson has worked on letting XWaylands load the binary NVidia x.org driver and we are now waiting on NVidia to review that work and hopefully be able to update their driver to support it.

Once we are done with this we expect X.org to go into hard maintenance mode fairly quickly. The reality is that X.org is basically maintained by us and thus once we stop paying attention to it there is unlikely to be any major new releases coming out and there might even be some bitrot setting in over time. We will keep an eye on it as we will want to ensure X.org stays supportable until the end of the RHEL8 lifecycle at a minimum, but let this be a friendly notice for everyone who rely the work we do maintaining the Linux graphics stack, get onto Wayland, that is where the future is.

PipeWire – Wim Taymans keeps improving the core features of Pipewire, as we work step by step to be ready to replace Jack and PulseAudio. He has recently been focusing on improving existing features like the desktop sharing portal together with Jonas Adahl and we are planning a hackfest for Wayland in the fall, current plan is to do it around the All Systems Go conference in Berlin, but due to some scheduling conflicts by some of our core stakeholders we might need to reschedule it to a little later in fall.
A new user for the desktop sharing portal is the new Miracast support that Benjamin Berg has been steadily working on. The Miracast support is shaping up and you can grab the Network Displays test client from his COPR repository while he is working to get the package into Fedora proper. We would appreciate further users testing and feedback as we know there are definitely devices out there where things do not work properly and identifying them is the first step to figuring out how to make our support in the desktop more robust. Eventually we want to make the GNOME integration even more seamless than the standalone app, but for early testing and polish it does the trick. If you are interested in contributing the code is hosted here on github.

Network Display

Network Display application using Miracast

Btw, you still need to set the enable Pipewire flag in Chrome to get the Pipewire support (chrome://flags). So I included a screenshot here to show you where to go in the browser and what the key is called:

Chrome Pipewire Flag

Chrome Pipewire Flag

Flatpak – Work on Flatpak in Fedora is continuing. Current focus is on improving the infrastructure for building Flatpaks from RPMS and automating what we can.This is pre-requisite work for eventually starting to ship some applications as Flatpaks by default and eventually shipping all applications as Flatpaks by default. We are also working on setting things up so that we can offer applications from flathub.io and quay.io out of the box and in accordance with Fedora rules for 3rd party software. We are also making progress on making a Red Hat UBI based runtime available. This means that as a 3rd party developer you can use that to build your applications on top of and be certain that it will be stay around and be supported by Red Hat for the lifetime of a given RHEL release, which means around 10 years. This frees you up as a developer to really update your application at your own pace as opposed to have to chase more short lived runtimes. It will also ensure that your application can be certified for RHEL which gives you access to all our workstation customers in addition to Fedora and all other distros.

Fedora Toolbox – Work is progressing on the Fedora Toolbox, our tool for making working with pet containers feel simple and straightforward. Debarshi Ray is currently looking on improvements to GNOME Terminal that will ensure that you get a more natural behaviour inside the terminal when interacting with pet containers, for instance ensuring that if you have a terminal open to a pet container and create a new tab that tab will also be inside the container inside of pointing at the host. We are also working on finding good ways to make the selection of containers more discoverable, so that you more easily can get access to a Red Hat UBI container or a Red Hat TensorFlow container for instance. There will probably be a bit of a slowdown in terms of new toolbox features soon though as we are going to rewrite it to make it more maintainable. The current implementation is a giant shell script, but the new version will most likely be written in Go (so that we can more easily integrate with the other container libraries and tools out there, mostly written in Go).

Fedora Toolbox

Fedora Toolbox in action

GNOME Classic – We have had Classic mode available in GNOME and Fedora for a long time, but we recently decided to give it a second look and try to improve the experience. So Allan Day reviewed the experience and we decided to make it a more pure GNOME 2 style experience by dropping the overview completely when you run classic mode.
We have also invested time and effort on improving the Classic mode workspace switcher to make life better for people who use a very workspace centric workflow. The goal of the improvements is to make the Classic mode workspace switcher more feature complete and also ensure that it can work with standard GNOME 3 in addition to Classic mode. We know this will greatly improve the experience for many of our users and at the same time hopefully let new people switch to Fedora and GNOME to get the advantage of all the other great improvements we are bringing to Linux and the Linux desktop.

Sysprof & performance – We have had a lot of focus in the community on improving GNOME Shell performance. Our particular focus has been on doing both some major re-architecting of some core subsystems that where needed to make some of the performance improvements you seen even possible. And lately Christian Hergert has been working on improving our tooling for profiling the desktop, so let our developers more easily see exactly where in the stack bottlenecks are and what is causing them. Be sure to read Christians blog for further details about sysprof and friends.

Fleet Commander – our tool for configuring large deployments of Fedora and RHEL desktops should have a release out very soon that can work with Active Directory as your LDAP server. We know a lot of RHEL and Fedora desktop users are part of bigger organizations where Linux users are a minority and thus Active Directory is being deployed in the organization. With this new release Fleet Commander can be run using Active Directory or FreeIPA as the directory server and thus a lot of organizations who previously could not easily deploy Fleet Commander can now take advantage of this powerful tool. Next step for Fleet Commander after that is finishing of some lose ends in terms of our Firefox support and also ensure that you can easily configure GNOME Shell extensions with Fleet Commander. We know a lot of our customers and users are deploying one or more GNOME Shell extensions for their desktop so we want to ensure Fleet Commander can help you do that efficiently across your whole fleet of systems.

Fingerprint support – We been working closely with our hardware partners to bring proper fingerprint reader support to Linux. Bastien Nocera worked on cleaning up the documentation of fprint and make sure there is good sample code and our hardware partners then worked with their suppliers to ensure they provided drivers conforming to the spec for hardware supplied to them. So there is a new drivers from Synaptics finger print readers coming out soon thanks to this effort. We are not stopping there though, Benjamin Berg is continuing the effort to improve the infrastructure for Linux fingerprint reader support, making sure we can support in-device storage of fingerprints for instance.

Fingerprint image

Fingerprint readers now better supported

Gamemode – Christian Kellner has been contributing a bit to gamemode recently, working to make it more secure and also ensure that it can work well with games packaged as Flatpaks. So if you play Linux games, especially those from Ferral Interactive, and want to squeeze some extra performance from your system make sure to install gamemode on your Fedora system.

Dell Totem support – Red Hat has a lot of customers in the fields of animation and CAD/CAM systems. Due to this Benjamin Tissoires and Peter Hutterer been working with Dell on enabling their Totem input device for a while now. That works is now coming to a close with the Totem support shipping in the latest libinput version with the kernel side of things being merged some time ago. You can get the full details from Peters blog about Dell Totem.

Dell Totel

The Dell Totem input device

Media codec support – So the OpenH264 2.0 release is out from Cisco now and Kalev Lember has been working to get the Fedora packages updated. This is a crucial release as it includes the support for Main and High profile that I mentioned in an earlier blog post. That work happened due to a collaboration between Cisco, Endless, Red Hat and Centricular with Jan Schmidt at Centricular doing the work implementing support for these two codecs. This work makes OpenH264 a lot more useful as it now supports playing back most files found in the wild and we been working to ensure it can be used for general playback in Firefox. At the same time Wim Taymans is working to fix some audio quality issues in the AAC implementation we ship so we should soon have both a fully working H264 decoder/encoder in Fedora and a fully functional AAC decoder/encoder. We are still trying to figure out what to do with MPEG2 video as we are ready to ship support for that too, but are still trying to figure out the details of implementation. Beyond that we don’t have any further plans around codecs atm as we feel that with H264, MPEG2 video, AAC, mp3 and AC3 we have them most critical ones covered, alongside the growing family of great free codecs such as VP9, Opus and AV1. We might take a look at the status of things like Windows Media and DivX at some point, but it is not anywhere close to the top of our priority list currently.

Preparing for Fedora Workstation 30

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I just installed the Fedora Workstation 30 Beta yesterday and so far things are looking great. As many others have reported to, with the GNOME 3.32 update things definitely feels faster and smoother. So I thought it was a good time to talk about what is coming in Fedora Workstation 30 and what we are currently working on.

Fractional Scaling: One of the big features that landed, although still considered experimental was the fractional scaling feature that has been a collaboration between Jonas Ådahl here at Red hat and Marco Trevisan at Canonical. It has taken quite some time since the initial hackfest as it is a complex task, but we are getting close. Fractional scaling is a critical feature for many HiDPI screen laptops to get a desktop size that perfectly fits their screen, not being to small or to large.

Screen sharing support for Chrome and Firefox under Wayland. The Wayland security model doesn’t allow any application to freely grab images or streams of the whole desktop like you could under X. This is of course a huge improvement in security, but it did cause some disruption for valid usecases like screen sharing with things like BlueJeans and Google Hangouts. We been working on resolving that with the help of PipeWire. We been at it for some time and things are now coming together. Chrome 73 ships with everything needed to make this work with Chrome, although you have to turn it on manually (got to this URL to turn it on: chrome://flags/#enable-webrtc-pipewire-capturer). The reason it needs to be manually enabled is not that it is unreliable, it is because the UI is still a little fugly due to a combination of feature overlap between the browser and the desktop and also how the security feature of the desktop is done. We are trying to come up with ways for the UI to be smoother without sacrificing your privacy/security. For Firefox we will keep shipping with our downstream patch until we manage to get it landed upstream.

Firefox for Wayland: Martin Stransky has been hard at work making Firefox be able to run Wayland-native. That work is tantalizingly near, but we decided to postpone it for Fedora Workstation 31 in the end to make sure it is really well polished before releasing it upon the world. The advantage of Wayland native Firefox is that in addition to bring us one step closer to not needing to run an X server (XWayland) all the time it also enables things like fractional scaling mentioned above to work for Firefox.

OpenH264 improved: As many of you know Firefox relies on a library called OpenH264, provided by Cisco, for its H264 video codec support for WebRTC. This library is also provided to Fedora users from Cisco free of charge (you can install it through GNOME Software). However its usefulness have been somewhat limited due to only supporting the baseline profile used for video calling, but not the Main and High profiles used by most online video content. Well what I can tell you is that Red Hat, Endless and Cisco partnered with Centricular some time ago to add support for decoding those profiles to OpenH264 and that work is now almost complete. The basic code enabling them is already merged, but Jan Schmidt at Centricular is working on fixing a few files that are still giving us problems. As soon as that is generally shipping we hope to get Firefox to be able to use OpenH264 also for things like Youtube playback and of course also use OpenH264 to playback any H264 using GStreamer applications like Totem. So a big thank you to Endless, Cisco and Centricular for working with us on this and thus enabling us to have a legal way to offer H264 support to our users.

NVidia binary driver support under Wayland: We been putting it quite a bit of effort trying to tie off the lose ends for using the NVidia binary driver with Wayland. We did manage to fix a long list of bugs like dealing with various colorspace issues, multimonitor setups and so on. For Intel and AMD graphics users things should actually be pretty good to go at this point. The last major item holding us back on the NVidia side is full support for using the binary driver with XWayland applications (native Wayland applications should work fine already). Adam Jackson worked diligently to get all the pieces in place and we do think we have a model now that will allow NVidia to provide an updated driver that should enable XWayland. As it stands though that driver update is likely to only come out towards the fall, so we will keep defaulting to X for NVidia binary driver users for some time more.

Gaming under Wayland. Olivier Fourdan and Jonas Ådahl has trying to crush any major Wayland bug reported for quite some time now and one area where we seem to have rounded the corner is for games. Valve has been kind enough to give us the ability to install and run any steam game for testing purposes, so whenever we found a game giving us trouble we have been able to let Olivier and Jonas reproduce it easily. So on my own gaming box I am now able to run all the Steam games I have under Wayland, including those using Proton, without a hitch. We haven’t tested with the full Steam catalog of course, there are thousands, so if your favourite game is giving you trouble under Wayland still, please let us know. Talking about gaming one area we will try to free up some cycles going forward to look deeper at is Flatpaks and gaming. We already done quite a bit of work in this area, with things like the NVidia binary driver extension and the Steam package on Flathub. But we know from leading linux game devs that there are still some challenges to be resolved, like making host device access for gamepads simpler from within the Flatpak sandbox.

Flatpak Creation in Fedora. Owen Taylor has been in charge of getting Flatpaks building in Fedora, ensuring we can produce Flatpaks from Fedora packages. Owen set up a system to track the Fedora Flatpak status, we got about 10 applications so far, but hope to greatly grow that number of time as we polish up the system. This enables us to start planning for shipping some applications in Fedora Workstation as Flatpaks by default in a future release. This respository will be available by default in Fedora workstation 30 and you can choose the flatpak version of the package through the new drop down box in the top right corner of GNOME Software. For now the RPM version of the package is still the default, but we expect to change that in later releases of Fedora Workstation.

Gedit in GNOME Software with Source drop down box

Gedit in GNOME Software with Source drop down box

Fedora Toolbox – Debarshi Ray is leading the effort we call Fedora Toolbox, which is our starting point for our goal to revitalise and revolutionize development on Linux. Fedora Toolbox is trying to take the model of a pet container for development and make it seamless and natural. Our goal is to make it dead simple to create pet containers for your projects, so you can for instance have a Fedora pet container where you develop against the leading edge libraries and tools in Fedora, and you can have a RHEL based container where you develop against the library versions and tools shipping in RHEL (makes updating and fixing in production applications a lot easier) and maybe a SteamOS container to work on your little game project. Currently the model is that you have one pet container per OS your targeting, but we are pondering if maybe having one pet container per project would be even better if we can find good ways to avoid it being a lot of extra overhead (by for example having to re-install all your favourite command line tools in the container) or just outright confusing (which container got what tools and libraries again). Our goal here though is to ensure Fedora becomes the premier container native OS out there and thus a natural home for developers doing container development.
We are also working with the team inside Red Hat focusing on AI/ML and trying to ensure that we have a super smooth way for you to get a pet container with things like TensorFlow and CUDA up and running quickly.

Being an excellent platform for Openshift and Kubernetes development: We are putting effort into together with the Red Hat developer tools organization to bringing the OpenShift and CodeReady Studio and CodeReady Workspaces tools to Fedora. These tools have so far been very focused on RHEL support, but thanks to Flatpak for CodeReady Studio and web integration for CodeReady Workspaces we now have a path for making them easily available in Fedora too. In the world of Kubernetes OpenShift is where you want to be, and we want Fedora Workstation to be the ultimate portal for OpenShift development.

Fleet Commander with Active Directory support – So we are about to hit a very major milestone with Fleet Commander our large scale desktop management tool for Fedora and RHEL. Oliver Gutierrez has been hard at work making it work with Active Directory in addition to the existing FreeIPA support. We know that a majority of people interested in Fleet Commander are only using Active Directory currently, so being able to use Active Directory with Fleet Commander should make this great tool available to a huge number of new users. So if you are managing a University computer lab or a large number of Fedora or RHEL clients in your company we should soon have a Fleet Commander release out that you can use. And if you are not using Fedora or RHEL today well Fleet Commander is a very big reason for switching over!
We will do a proper announcement with further details once the release with Active Directory support is out.

PipeWire – I don’t have a major development to report, just a lot of steady work being done to stabilize and improve PipeWire. As mentioned earlier we now have Wayland screen sharing and recording working smoothly in the major browsers which is the user facing feature I think most of you will notice. Wim is still working on pushing the audio side it forward, but that is also a huge task. We have started talking about organizing a new hackfest soon to see if we can accelerate the effort further again. Likely scenario at this point in time is that we start enabling the JACK side of PipeWire first, maybe as early as Fedora Workstation 31, and then come back and do the PulseAudio replacement as a last stage.

Improved Input handling Another area we keep focusing on is improving input in Fedora. Peter Hutterer and Benjamin Tissoires are working hard on improving the stack. Peter just sent an extensive RFC out for how to deal with high resolution mice under Linux and Benjamin has been trying to get support for the Dell Totem landed. Neither will be there unfortunately for Fedora Workstation 30,but we expect to land this before Fedora Workstation 31.

Flicker-free boot
Hans de Goede has continued working on his effort to create a flicker-free boot experience with Fedora. The results of this work is on display in Fedora Workstation 30 and will for most of you now provide a seamless bootup experience . This effort is not so much about functionality as it is about ensuring you have an end-to-end polished experience with your Linux desktop. Things like the constant mode changes we seen in the past contribute to giving Linux an image of being unpolished and we want Fedora to be the vehicle that breaks down that image.

Ramping up Silverblue

For those of you following Fedora you are probably aware of Silverblue, which is our effort to re-think the Linux desktop distribution from the ground up and help us take the Linux desktop to a new level. The distribution model hasn’t really changed much over the last 20 years and we probably polished up the offering as far as we can within the scope of that model. For instance I upgraded my system to Fedora 30 beta yesterday and it was a long and tedious process of looking at about 6000 individual packages get updated from the Fedora 29 version to the Fedora 30 version one by one. I didn’t hit a lot of major snags despite this being a beta, but it is screamingly obvious that updating your operating system in this way is both slow and inherently fragile as anyone of those 6000 packages might hit a problem during upgrade and leave the system in a unknown state, especially since its common for packages to run scripts and similar as part of their upgrade.

Silverblue provides a revolutionary replacement for that process. First of all since it ships as a unified image we make life a lot easier for our QE team who can then test and verify against a single image which is in a known state. This in turn ensures that you as a user can feel confident that the new OS version will not break something on your system. And since the new version is just an image stored on your system next to the old one, upgrading is just about rebooting your system. There is no waiting for individual packages to get upgraded, as everything is already there and ready. Compare it to booting into a different kernel version on Fedora, it is quick and trivial.
And this also means that in the unlikely case that there is a problem with the new OS version you can just as easily go back to the previous version, by rebooting again and choosing to boot into that version. So you basically have instant upgrades with instant rollback if needed.
We believe this will radically change the way you look at OS upgrades forever, in fact you might almost forget they are happening.

And since Silverblue will basically be a Flatpak (and other containers) only OS you will have a clean delimitation between OS and applications. This means that even if we do major updates to the host, your applications should remain unaffected by the host OS update.
In fact we have some very interesting developments underway for Flatpak, with some major new efforts underway, efforts that I would love to talk about, but they are tied to some major Red Hat announcements that will happen at this years Red Hat Summit which will happen on May 7th – May 9th, so I will leave it as a teaser and then let you all know once the Summit is underway and Red Hats related major announcements are done.

There is a lot of work happening around Silverblue and as it happens Matthias Clasen wrote a long blog entry about it today. That blog goes into a lot more details on some of the Silverblue work items we been doing.

Anyway, I feel really excited about Silverblue and as we continue to refine the experience and figure out how everything will look in this brave new world I am sure everyone else will get excited too. Silverblue represents the single biggest evolution of the Linux desktop since the original GNOME and KDE releases back in the late nineties. It is not just about trying to tweak the existing experience, but an attempt at taking a big leap forward and provide an operating system that embodies all that we learned over these last 20 years and provide a natural home for developers and creators of all kind in our container centric computing future. Be sure to grab the Silverblue image of Fedora 30 beta and give it a test run. I recommend activating flathub.org repo to get started in order to get a decent range of applications available. As we move forward we are working hard to ensure that you have the world of applications available out of the box, so no need to go an enable any 3rd party repositories, but there are some more work that needs to happen before we can do that.

Summary
So Fedora Workstation 30 is going to be another exiting release of both of traditional RPM based Workstation version and of Silverblue, and I hope they will encourage even more people to join our rapidly growing Fedora community. Be sure to join us in -workstation on freenode IRC to talk!

PipeWire Hackfest

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So we kicked off the PipeWire hackfest in Edinburgh yesterday. We have 15 people attending including Arun Raghavan, Tanu Kaskinen and Colin Guthrie from PulseAudio, PipeWire creator Wim Taymans, Bastien Nocera and Jan Grulich representing GNOME and KDE, Mark Brown from the ALSA kernel team, Olivier Crête,George Kiagiadakis and Nicolas Dufresne was there to represent embedded usecases for PipeWire and finally Thierry Bultel representing automotive.

The event kicked off with Wim Taymans presenting on current state of PipeWire and outlining the remaining issues and current thoughts on how to resolve them. Most of the first day was spent on a roadtable discussion about what are and should be the goals of PipeWire and what potential tradeoffs there would be going forward. PipeWire is probably a bit closer to Jack than PulseAudio in design, so quite a bit of the discussion went on how that would affect the PulseAudio usecases and what is planned to ensure PipeWire works very well for consumer audio usecases.

Personally I ended up spending quite some time just testing and running various Jack apps to see what works already and what doesn’t. In terms of handling outputing audio with Jack apps I was positively surprised how many Jack apps I was able to make work (aka output audio) using PipeWire instead of Jack, but of course we still have some gaps to cover before PipeWire is ready as a drop-in Jack replacement, for instance the Jack session management protocol needs to be implemented first.

The second day we outlined the areas that need work before we are ready to replace PulseAudio and came up with the following list:

  • Mixers – This is basically dealing with hardware mixers. Arun and Wim started looking at a design for this during the hackfest.
  • PulseAudio services – This is all the things in PulseAudio that is not very suitable for putting inside PipeWire. The idea is instead to put them in a separate daemon. This includes things like network streaming, ROAP, DBus apis and so on.
  • Policy/Session handling – We plan to move policy and session handling out of PulseAudio to make it easier for different usecases to set their own policies. PipeWire will still provide some default setup, but the idea here is to have a separate daemon(s) to provide this. Bastien Nocera started prototyping a setup where he could create policy and session handling using Lua scripting.
  • Filters
  • Bluetooth – Ensuring we have great bluetooth support with PipeWire. We would want to move Bluetooth handling to its own daemon, and not have it inside like in PulseAudio to allow for more flexibility with various embedded bluetooth stacks for instance. This could also mean looking at the Linux Bluetooth stack more widely as things are not ideal atm, especially from a security viewpoint.
  • Device reservation – We expect to replace Jack and PulseAudio in steps, starting with PulseAudio. So dealing well with hardware reservation is important to allow people to for instance keep running Jack alongside PipeWire until we are ready for full replacement.
  • Stream Monitoring – Important feature from Jack and PulseAudio that still needs implementing to allowing monitoring audio devices and streams.
  • Latency handling – Improving ways we can deal with hardware latency in for instance consumer devices such as TVs

It is still a bit hard to have a clear timeline for when we will be ready to drop in PipeWire support to replace PulseAudio and then Jack, but we feel the Wayland migration was a good example to follow where we held off doing the switch until we felt comfortable the move would be transparent to most users. There will of course always be corner cases and bugs, but we hope that in general people agree that the Wayland transition was done in a responsible manner and thus could be a good example to follow for us here.

We would like to offers big thanks to the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring travel for some of the community attendees and to Collabora for sponsoring dinner for all attendees the first night.

If you want to take a look at PipeWire, Wim updated the wiki page with PipeWire build intructions to be up-to-date. The hackfest attendees tested them out so we are sure they work, just be aware that you want the ‘Work’ branch and not the Master branch, as that is the one where all the audio work is happening. The Master branch is the video focused branch we use in Fedora for desktop remoting support in browsers and VNC under Wayland.

Supporting developers on Patreon (and similar)

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For some time now I been supporting two Linux developers on patreon. Namely Ryan Gordon of Linux game porting and SDL development fame and Tanu Kaskinen who is a lead developer on PulseAudio these days.

One of the things I often think about is how we can enable more people to make a living from working on the Linux desktop and related technologies. If your reading my blog there is a good chance that you are enabling people to make a living on working on the Linux desktop by paying for RHEL Workstation subscriptions through your work. So a big thank you for that. The fact that Red Hat has paying customers for our desktop products is critical in terms of our ability to do so much of the maintenance and development work we do around the Linux Desktop and Linux graphics stack.

That said I do feel we need more venues than just employment by companies such as Red Hat and this is where I would love to see more people supporting their favourite projects and developers through for instance Patreon. Because unlike one of funding campaigns repeat crowdfunding like Patreon can give developers predictable income, which means they don’t have to worry about how to pay their rent or how to feed their kids.

So in terms of the two Patreons I support Ryan is probably the closest to being able to rely on it for his livelihood, but of course more Patreon supporters will enable Ryan to be even less reliant on payments from game makers. And Tanu’s patreon income at the moment is helping him to spend quite a bit of time on PulseAudio, but it is definitely not providing him with a living income. So if you are reading this I strongly recommend that you support Ryan Gordon and Tanu Kaskinen on Patreon. You don’t need to pledge a lot, I think in general it is in fact better to have many people pledging 10 dollars a Month than a few pledging hundreds, because the impact of one person coming or going is thus a lot less. And of course this is not just limited to Ryan and Tanu, search around and see if any projects or developers you personally care deeply about are using crowdfunding and support them, because if more of us did so then more people would be able to make a living of developing our favourite open source software.

Update: Seems I wasn’t the only one thinking about this, Flatpak announced today that application devs can put their crowdfunding information into their flatpaks and it will be advertised in GNOME Software.

Some thoughts on smart home technology

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A couple of Months ago we visited IKEA and saw the IKEA Trådfri smart lighting system. Since it was relatively cheap we decided to buy their starter pack and enough bulbs to make the recessed lights in our living rooms smartlight. I got it up and running and had some fun switching the light hue and turning the lights on and off from my phone.
A bit later I got a Google Assistant speaker at Google I/O and the system suddenly became somewhat more useful as I could control the lights by calling out to the google assistant. I was also able to connect our AC system thermostats to the google assistant so we could change the room temperature using voice commands.
As a result of this I ended up reading up on smart home technologies and found that my IKEA hub and bulbs was conforming to the ZigBee standard and that I should be able to buy further Zigbee compatible devices from other vendors to extend it. So I ordered a Zigbee compatible in-wall light switch from GE and I also ordered a Zigbee compatible in-ceiling switch from a company called Nue through Amazon. Once I got these home and tried to get them up and running I found that my understanding was flawed as there are two Zigbee standards, the older Zigbee HA and the newer Zigbee LightLink. The IKEA stuff is Zigbee LightLink while at least the GE switch was Zigbee HA and thus the IKEA hub could not control it. So I ended up ordering a Samsung SmartThings hub which supports Zigbee HA, Zigbee LL and the competing system called Z-Wave. At which point I got both my IKEA lights and my two devices working with it.
In the meantime I had also gotten myself a Google Assistant compatible portable aircon from FrigidAire for my home office (no part of main house) and a Google Assistant compatible fire alarm from Nest for the same office space.

So having lived in my new smarter home for a while now what are my conclusions? Well first of all that we still have some way to go before this is truly seamless and obvious. I consider myself a fairly technical person, but it still took quite a bit of googling for me to be able to get everything working. Secondly a lot of the smart home stuff feel a bit gimmicky in the end. For instance the Frigidaire portable air conditioner integration with the Google Assistant is more annoying than useful. It basically requires me to start by asking to talk to Frigidaire and then listen to a ton of crap before I can even start trying to do anything. As for the lights we do actually turn them on and off quite a bit using the voice commands (at least I try to until I realize my wife has disconnected the google assistant in order to use its cable to charge her phone :). I also realized that while installing and buying the in-wall switches are a bit more costly and complicated than just getting some smart bulbs it does work a lot better as I can then control the lights using both voice and switch. Because the smart bulbs can not be turned on using voice if you have a normal switch turned off (obviously, but not something I thought about before buying). So getting something like the IKEA bulbs is a nice and cheap way to try this stuff out I don’t see it as our long term solution here. The thermostat we haven’t controlled or queried once since I did the initial testing of its connection to Google assistant.

All in all I have to say that the smart home tech is cute, but it is far from being essential. I might end up putting in more wall switches for the light going forward, but apart from that, having smart home support in a device is not going to drive my purchasing decisions. Maybe as the tech matures and becomes more mainstream it will also become more useful, but as it stands it mostly solves first world problems (although of course there are real gains here for various accessibility situations).

Warming up for Fedora Workstation 28

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Been some time now since my last update on what is happening in Fedora Workstation and with current plans to release Fedora Workstation 28 in early May I thought this could be a good time to write something. As usual this is just a small subset of what the team has been doing and I always end up feeling a bit bad for not talking about the avalanche of general fixes and improvements the team adds to each release.

Thunderbolt
Christian Kellner has done a tremendous job keeping everyone informed of his work making sure we have proper Thunderbolt support in Fedora Workstation 28. One important aspect for us of this improved Thunderbolt support is that a lot of docking stations coming out will be requiring it and thus without this work being done you would not be able to use a wide range of docking stations. For a lot of screenshots and more details about how the thunderbolt support is done I recommend reading this article in Christians Blog.

3rd party applications
It has taken us quite some time to get there as getting this feature right both included a lot of internal discussion about policies around it and implementation detail. But starting from Fedora Workstation 28 you will be able to find more 3rd party software listed in GNOME Software if you enable it. The way it will work is that you as part of the initial setup will be asked if you want to have 3rd party software show up in GNOME Software. If you are upgrading you will be asked inside GNOME Software if you want to enable 3rd party software. You can also disable 3rd party software after enabling it from the GNOME Software settings as seen below:

GNOME Software settings

GNOME Software settings

In Fedora Workstation 27 we did have PyCharm available, but we have now added the NVidia driver and Steam to the list for Fedora Workstation 28.

We have also been working with Google to try to get Chrome included here and we are almost there as they merged for instance the needed Appstream metadata some time ago, but the last steps requires some tweaking of how Google generates their package repository (basically adding the appstream metadata to their yum repository) and we don’t have a clear timeline for when that will happen, but as soon as it does the Chrome will also appear in GNOME Software if you have 3rd party software enabled.

As we speak all 3rd party packages are RPMs, but we expect that going forward we will be adding applications packaged as Flatpaks too.

Finally if you want to propose 3rd party applications for inclusion you can find some instructions for how to do it here.

Virtualbox guest
Another major feature that got some attention that we worked on for this release was Hans de Goedes work to ensure Fedora Workstation could run as a virtualbox guest out of the box. We know there are many people who have their first experience with linux running it under Virtualbox on Windows or MacOSX and we wanted to make their first experience as good as possible. Hans worked with the virtualbox team to clean up their kernel drivers and agree on a stable ABI so that they could be merged into the kernel and maintained there from now on.

Firmware updates
The Spectre/Meltdown situation did hammer home to a lot of people the need to have firmware updates easily available and easy to update. We created the Linux Vendor Firmware service for Fedora Workstation users with that in mind and it was great to see the service paying off for many Linux users, not only on Fedora, but also on other distributions who started using the service we provided. I would like to call out to Dell who was a critical partner for the Linux Vendor Firmware effort from day 1 and thus their users got the most benefit from it when Spectre and Meltdown hit. Spectre and Meltdown also helped get a lot of other vendors off the fence or to accelerate their efforts to support LVFS and Richard Hughes and Peter Jones have been working closely with a lot of new vendors during this cycle to get support for their hardware and devices into LVFS. In fact Peter even flew down to the offices one of the biggest laptop vendors recently to help them resolve the last issues before their hardware will start showing up in the firmware service. Thanks to the work of Richard Hughes and Peter Jones you will both see a wider range of brands supported in the Linux Vendor Firmware Service in Fedora Workstation 28, but also a wider range of device classes.

Server side GL Vendor Neutral Dispatch
This is a bit of a technical detail, but Adam Jackson and Lyude Paul has been working hard this cycle on getting what we call Server side GLVND ready for Fedora Workstation 28. Currently we are looking at enabling it either as a zero-day update or short afterwards. so what is Server Side GLVND you say? Well it is basically the last missing piece we need to enable the use of the NVidia binary driver through XWayland. Currently the NVidia driver works with Wayland native OpenGL applications, but if you are trying to run an OpenGL application requiring X we need this to support it. And to be clear once we ship this in Fedora Workstation 28 it will also require a driver update from NVidia to use it, so us shipping it is just step 1 here. We do also expect there to be some need for further tuning once we got all the pieces released to get top notch performance. Of course over time we hope and expect all applications to become Wayland native, but this is a crucial transition technology for many of our users. Of course if you are using Intel or AMD graphics with the Mesa drivers things already work great and this change will not affect you in any way.

Flatpak
Flatpaks basically already work, but we have kept focus this time around on to fleshing out the story in terms of the so called Portals. Portals are essentially how applications are meant to be able to interact with things outside of the container on your desktop. Jan Grulich has put in a lot of great effort making sure we get portal support for Qt and KDE applications, most recently by adding support for the screen capture portal on top of Pipewire. You can ready more about that on Jan Grulichs blog. He is now focusing on getting the printing portal working with Qt.

Wim Taymans has also kept going full steam ahead of PipeWire, which is critical for us to enable applications dealing with cameras and similar on your system to be containerized. More details on that in my previous blog entry talking specifically about Pipewire.

It is also worth noting that we are working with Canonical engineers to ensure Portals also works with Snappy as we want to ensure that developers have a single set of APIs to target in order to allow their applications to be sandboxed on Linux. Alexander Larsson has already reviewed quite a bit of code from the Snappy developers to that effect.

Performance work
Our engineers have spent significant time looking at various performance and memory improvements since the last release. The main credit for the recently talked about ‘memory leak’ goes to Georges Basile Stavracas Neto from Endless, but many from our engineering team helped with diagnosing that and also fixed many other smaller issues along the way. More details about the ‘memory leak’ fix in Georges blog.

We are not done here though and Alberto Ruiz is organizing a big performance focused hackfest in Cambridge, England in May. We hope to bring together many of our core engineers to work with other members of the community to look at possible improvements. The Raspberry Pi will be the main target, but of course most improvements we do to make GNOME Shell run better on a Raspberry Pi also means improvements for normal x86 systems too.

Laptop Battery life
In our efforts to make Linux even better on laptops Hans De Goede spent a lot of time figuring out things we could do to make Fedora Workstation 28 have better battery life. How valuable these changes are will of course depend on your exact hardware, but I expect more or less everyone to have a bit better battery life on Fedora Workstation 28 and for some it could be a lot better battery life. You can read a bit more about these changes in Hans de Goedes blog.