Category Archives: GNOME

Looking back at Fedora Workstation so far

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So I have over the last few years blogged regularly about upcoming features in Fedora Workstation. Well I thought as we putting the finishing touches on Fedora Workstation 27 I should try to look back at everything we have achieved since Fedora Workstation was launched with Fedora 21. The efforts I highlight here are efforts where we have done significant or most development. There are of course a lot of other big changes that has happened over the last few years by the wider community that we leveraged and offer in Fedora Workstation, examples here include things like Meson and Rust. This post is not about those, but that said I do want to write a post just talking about the achievements of the wider community at some point, because they are very important and crucial too. And along the same line this post will not be speaking about the large number of improvements and bugfixes that we contributed to a long list of projects, like to GNOME itself. This blog is about taking stock and taking some pride in what we achieved so far and major hurdles we past on our way to improving the Linux desktop experience.
This blog is also slightly different from my normal format as I will not call out individual developers by name as I usually do, instead I will focus on this being a totality and thus just say ‘we’.

  • Wayland – We been the biggest contributor since we joined the effort and have taken the lead on putting in place all the pieces needed for actually using it on a desktop, including starting to ship it as our primary offering in Fedora Workstation 25. This includes putting a lot of effort into ensuring that XWayland works smoothly to ensure full legacy application support.
  • Libinput – A new library we created for handling all input under both X and Wayland. This came about due to needing input handling that was not tied to X due to Wayland, but it has even improved input handling for X itself. Libinput is being rapidly developed and improved, with 1.9 coming out just a few days ago.
  • glvnd – Dealing with multiple OpenGL implementations have been a pain under Linux for years. We worked with NVidia on this effort to ensure that you can install multiple OpenGL implementations on the system and have your system be able to use the correct one depending on which GPU and driver you are using. We keep expanding on this solution to cover more usecases, so for Fedora Workstation 27 we expect to bring glvnd support to XWayland for instance.
  • Porting Firefox to GTK3 – We ported Firefox to GTK3, including making sure it works under Wayland. This work also provided the foundation for HiDPI support in Firefox. We are the single biggest contributor to Firefox Linux support.
  • Porting LibreOffice to GTK3 – We ported LibreOffice to GTK3, which included Wayland support, touch support and HiDPI support. Our team is one of the major contributors to LibreOffice and help the project forward on a lot of fronts.
  • Google Drive integration – We extended the general Google integration in GNOME 3 to include support for Google Drive as we found that a lot of our users where relying on Google Apps at their work.
  • Flatpak – We created Flatpak to lead the way in moving desktop applications into their own namespaces and containers, resolving a lot of long term challenges for desktop applications on Linux. We expect to have new infrastructure in place in Fedora soon to allow Fedora packagers to quickly and easily turn their applications into Flatpaks.
  • Linux Firmware Service – We created the Linux Firmware service to provide a way for Linux users to get easy access to UEFI firmware on their linux system and worked with great vendors such as Dell and Logitech to get them to support it for their devices. Many bugs experienced by Linux users over the years could have been resolved by firmware updates, but with tooling being spotty many Linux users where not even aware that there was fixes available.
  • GNOME Software – We created GNOME Software to give us a proper Software Store on Fedora and extended it over time to include features such as fonts, GStreamer plugins, GNOME Shell extensions and UEFI firmware updates. Today it is the main Store type application used not just by us, but our work has been adopted by other major distributions too.
  • mp3, ac3 and aac support – We have spent a lot of time to be able to bring support for some of the major audio codecs to Fedora like MP3, AC3 and AAC. In the age of streaming supporting codecs is maybe of less importance than it used to be, but there is still a lot of media on peoples computers they need and want access to.
  • Fedora Media Creator – Cross platform media creator making it very easy to create Fedora Workstation install media regardless of if you are on Windows, Mac or Linux. As we move away from optical media offering ISO downloads started feeling more and more outdated, with the media creator we have given a uniform user experience to quickly create your USB install media, especially important for new users coming in from Windows and Mac environments.
  • Captive portal – We added support for captive portals in Network Manager and GNOME 3, ensuring easy access to the internet over public wifi networks. This feature has been with us for a few years now, but it is still a much appreciated addition.
  • HiDPI support – We worked to add support for HiDPI across X, Wayland, GTK3 and GNOME3. We lead the way on HiDPI support under Linux and keep working on various applications to this date to polish up the support.
  • Touch support – We worked to add support for touchscreens across X, Wayland, GTK3 and GNOME3. We spent significant resources enabling this, both on laptop touchscreens, but also to support modern wacom devices.
  • QGNOME Platform – We created the QGNOME Platform to ensure that Qt applications work well under GNOME3 and gives a nice native and integrated feel. So while we ship GNOME as our desktop offering we want Qt applications to work well and feel native. This is an ongoing effort, but for many important applications it already is a great improvement.
  • Nautilus improvements. Nautilus had been undermaintained for quite a while so we had Carlos Soriano spend significant time on reworking major parts of it and adding new features like renaming multiple files at ones, updating the views and in general bring it up to date.
  • Night light support in GNOME – We added support for automatic adjusting the color and light settings on your system based on light sensors found in modern laptops. This integrated functionality that you before had to install extra software like Red Shift to enable.
  • libratbag – We created a library that enable easy configuration of high end mice and other kind of input devices. This has led to increased collaboration with a lot of gaming mice manufacturers to ensure full support for their devices under Linux.
  • RADV – We created a full open source Vulkan implementation for ADM GPUs which recently got certified as Vulkan compliant. We wanted to give open source Vulkan a boost, so we created the RADV project, which now has an active community around it and is being tested with major games.
  • GNOME Shell performance improvements – We been working on various performance improvements to GNOME Shell over the last few years, with significant improvements having happened. We want to push the envelope on this further though and are planning a major performance hackfest around Shell performance and resource usage early next year.
  • GNOME terminal developer improvements – We worked to improve the features of GNOME Terminal to make it an even better tool for developers with items such as easier naming of terminals and notifications for long running jobs.
  • GNOME Builder – Improving the developer story is crucial for us and we been doing a lot of work to make GNOME Builder a great tool for developer to use to both improve the desktop itself, but also development in general.
  • Pipewire – We created a new media server to unify audio, pro-audio and video. First version which we are shipping in Fedora 27 to handle our video capture.
  • Fleet Commander – We launched Fleet Commander our new tool for managing large Linux desktop deployments. This answer a long standing call from many of Red Hats major desktop customers and many admins of large scale linux deployments at Universities and similar for a powerful yet easy to use administration tool for large desktop deployments.

I am sure I missed something, but this is at least a decent list of Fedora Workstation highlights for the last few years. Next onto working on my Fedora Workstation 27 blogpost :)

AAC support will be available in Fedora Workstation 27!

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So I am really happy to announce another major codec addition to Fedora Workstation 27 namely the addition of the codec called AAC. As you might have seen from Tom Callaways announcement this has just been cleared for inclusion in Fedora.

For those not well versed in the arcane lore of audio codecs AAC is the codec used for things like iTunes and is found in a lot of general media files online. AAC stands for Advanced Audio Coding and was created by the MPEG working group as the successor to mp3. Especially due to Apple embracing the format there is a lot of files out there using it and thus we wanted to support it in Fedora too.

What we will be shipping in Fedora is a modified version of the AAC implementation released by Google, which was originally written by Frauenhoffer. On top of that we will of course be providing GStreamer plugins to enable full support for playing and creating AAC files for GStreamer applications.

Be aware though that AAC is a bit of an umbrella term for a lot of different technologies and thus you might be able to come across files that claims to use AAC, but which we can not play back. The most likely reason for that would be that it requires a AAC profile we do not support. The version of AAC that we will be shipping has also be carefully created to fit within the requirements for software in Fedora, so if you are a packager be aware that unlike with for instance mp3, this change does not mean you can package and ship any AAC implementation you want to in Fedora.

I am expecting to have more major codec announcements soon, so stay tuned :)

Launching Pipewire!

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In quite a few blog posts I been referencing Pipewire our new Linux infrastructure piece to handle multimedia under Linux better. Well we are finally ready to formally launch pipewire as a project and have created a Pipewire website and logo.Pipewire logo

To give you all some background, Pipewire is the latest creation of GStreamer co-creator Wim Taymans. The original reason it was created was that we realized that as desktop applications would be moving towards primarly being shipped as containerized Flatpaks we would need something for video similar to what PulseAudio was doing for Audio. As part of his job here at Red Hat Wim had already been contributing to PulseAudio for a while, including implementing a new security model for PulseAudio to ensure we could securely have containerized applications output sound through PulseAudio. So he set out to write Pipewire, although initially the name he used was PulseVideo. As he was working on figuring out the core design of PipeWire he came to the conclusion that designing Pipewire to just be able to do video would be a mistake as a major challenge he was familiar with working on GStreamer was how to ensure perfect audio and video syncronisation. If both audio and video could be routed through the same media daemon then ensuring audio and video worked well together would be a lot simpler and frameworks such as GStreamer would need to do a lot less heavy lifting to make it work. So just before we starting sharing the code publicaly we renamed the project to Pinos, named after Pinos de Alhaurín, a small town close to where Wim is living in southern Spain. In retrospect Pinos was probably not the worlds best name :)

Anyway as work progressed Wim decided to also take a look at Jack, as supporting the pro-audio usecase was an area PulseAudio had never tried to do, yet we felt that if we could ensure Pipewire supported the pro-audio usecase in addition to consumer level audio and video it would improve our multimedia infrastructure significantly and ensure pro-audio became a first class citizen on the Linux desktop. Of course as the scope grew the development time got longer too.

Another major usecase for Pipewire for us was that we knew that with the migration to Wayland we would need a new mechanism to handle screen capture as the way it was done under X was very insecure. So Jonas Ådahl started working on creating an API we could support in the compositor and use Pipewire to output. This is meant to cover both single frame capture like screenshot, to local desktop recording and remoting protocols. It is important to note here that what we have done is not just implement support for a specific protocol like RDP or VNC, but we ensured there is an advaned infrastructure in place to support any protocol on top of. For instance we will be working with the Spice team here at Red Hat to ensure SPICE can take advantage of Pipewire and the new API for instance. We will also ensure Chrome and Firefox supports this so that you can share your Wayland desktop through systems such as Blue Jeans.

Where we are now
So after multiple years of development we are now landing Pipewire in Fedora Workstation 27. This initial version is video only as that is the most urgent thing we need supported for Flatpaks and Wayland. So audio is completely unaffected by this for now and rolling that out will require quite a bit of work as we do not want to risk breaking audio on your system as a result of this change. We know that for many the original rollout of PulseAudio was painful and we do not want a repeat of that history.

So I strongly recommend grabbing the Fedora Workstation 27 beta to test pipewire and check out the new website at Pipewire.org and the initial documentation at the Pipewire wiki. Especially interesting is probably the pages that will eventually outline our plans for handling PulseAudio and JACK usecases.

If you are interested in Pipewire please join us on IRC in #pipewire on freenode. Also if things goes as planned Wim will be on Linux Unplugged tonight talking to Chris Fisher and the Unplugged crew about Pipewire, so tune in!

Running Wayland on the Nvidia driver

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I know many of you have wanted to test running Wayland on NVidia. The work on this continues between Jonas Ådahl, Adam Jackson and various developers at NVidia. It is not ready for primetime yet as we are still working on the server side glvnd piece we need for XWayland. That said with both Adam Jackson looking at this from our side and Kyle Brenneman looking at it from NVidia I am sure we will be able to hash out the remaining open questions and get that done.

In the meantime Miguel A. Vico from NVidia has set up a Copr to let people start testing using EGLStreams under Wayland. I haven’t tested it myself yet, but if you do and have trouble make sure to let Miguel and Jonas know.

As a sidenote, I am heading off to GUADEC in Manchester tomorrow and we do plan to discuss efforts like these there. We have team members like Jonas Ådahl flying in from Taiwan and Peter Hutterer flying in from Australia, so it will be a great chance to meet core developers who are far away from us in terms of timezone and geographical distance. GUADEC this year should be a lot of fun and from what I hear we are going to have record level attendance this year based early registration numbers, so if you can make it Manchester I strongly recommend joining us as I think this years event will have a lot of energy and a lot of interesting discussions on what the next steps are for GNOME.

Fedora Workstation 26 is out

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We managed to get Fedora Workstation 26 out the door this week which I am very happy about. In some ways it was far from our most splashy release as it mostly was about us improving on already released features, like improving the Wayland support and improving the Flatpak support in GNOME Software and improving the Qt integration into GNOME through the QtGNOME platform.

One major thing that is fully functional now though and that I have been testing myself extensively is being able to easily install the NVidia binary driver. If you set up the repository from Negativo17 you should be able to go install the Nvidia driver either using dnf on the command line or by searching for NVidia in GNOME Software, and just install it without any further work thanks to all the effort we and NVidia have been putting into things like glvnd. If you have a workstation with an NVidia card I would say that you have a fully functional system at this point without any hacks or file conflicts with Mesa.

For hybrid graphics laptops this also just works, with the only caveat being that your NVidia card will be engaged at all times once you do this, which is not great for your battery life. We are working to improve this, but it will take some time as it both requires us re-architecting some older parts of the stack and get the Nvidia driver updated to support the new solution.

We do plan on listing the NVidia driver in GNOME Software soon without having to manually setup the repository, so soon we will have a very smooth experience where the Nvidia driver is just a click in the Software store away for our users.

Another item of interest here for the discerning user is that if you are on the NVidia binary driver you will be using X and not Wayland. The reason for this as I have stated in previous blog posts too is that we still have some major gaps on the Wayland side when it comes to dealing with the binary NVidia driver. The biggest one here is that XWayland OpenGL applications doesn’t work, something the team is hard at work trying to resolve. Also the general infrastructure for dealing with hybrid graphics under Wayland is not there yet, but we are working on that too. We have a top notch team looking at the issues here, including Adam Jackson, Jonas Ådahl and Olivier Fourdan, so I am sure we will close this gap as soon as techically possible.

The other big item we have for Fedora Workstation 26 is going to be the formal launch of the Fleet Commander project, with a fully functional release and proper website. We hope to get that set up for next week, so I will blog more about it then. It is a really cool piece of technology which should make deploying Fedora and RHEL in large orgainzations a lot simpler.

As a sidenote, we received our first HDR capable monitor in the office this week, a Dell Ultrasharp UP2718Q. We have another one already ordered and we should be bringing in more in the next Months. This means we can finally seriously kick off figuring out the plumbing work and update the userland stack to have full HDR support under Linux for both media creation and consumption.

Fedora Workstation 26 and beyond

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Felt it been to long since I did another Fedora Workstation update. We spend a lot of time trying to figure out how we can best spend our resources to produce the best desktop possible for our users, because even though Red Hat invests more into the Linux desktop than any other company by quite a margin, our resources are still far from limitless. So we have a continuous effort of asking ourselves if each of the areas we are investing in are the right ones that give our users the things they need the most, so below is a sampling of the things we are working on.

Improving integration of the NVidia binary driver
This has been ongoing for quite a while, but things have started to land now. Hans de Goede and Simone Caronni has been collaboring, building on the work by NVidia and Adam Jackson around glvnd. So if you set up Simones NVidia repository hosted on negativo17 you will be able to install the Nvidia driver without any conflicts with the Mesa stack and due to Hans work you should be fairly sure that even if the NVidia driver stops working with a given kernel update you will smoothly transition back to the open source Nouveau driver. I been testing it on my own Lenovo P70 system for the last week and it seems to work well under X. That said once you install the binary NVidia driver that is what your running on, which is of course not the behaviour you want from a hybrid graphics system. Fixing that last issue requires further collaboration between us and NVidia.
Related to this Adam Jackson is currently working on a project he calls glxmux. glxmux will allow you to have more than one GLX implementation on the system, so that you can switch between Mesa GLX for the Intel integrated graphics card and NVidia GLX for the binary driver. While we can make no promises we hope to have the framework in place for Fedora Workstation 27. Having that in place should allow us to create a solution where you only use the NVidia driver when you want the extra graphics power which will of course require significant work from Nvidia to enable it on their side so I can’t give a definite timeline for when all the puzzle pieces are in place. Just be assured we are working on it and talking regularly to NVidia about it. I will let you know here as soon as things come together.

On the Wayland side the Jonas Ådahl is working on putting the final touches on Hybrid Graphics support

Fleet Commander ready for take-off
Another major project we been working on for a long time in Fleet Commander. Fleet Commander is a tool to allow you to manage Fedora and RHEL desktops centrally. This is a tool targeted at for instance Universities or companies with tens, hundreds or thousands of workstation installation. It gives you a graphical browser based UI (accessible through Cockpit) to create configuration profiles and deploy across your organization. Currently it allows you to control anything that has a gsetting associated with it like enabling/disabling extensions and setting configuration settings in GTK+ and GNOME applications. It allows you to configure Network Manager settings so if your updating the company VPN or proxy settings you can easily push those changes out to all user in the organization. Or quickly migrate Evolution email settings to a new email server. The tool also allows you to control recommended applications in the Software Center and set bookmarks in Firefox. There is also support for controlling settings inside LibreOffice.

All this features can be set and controlled on either a user level or a group level or organization wide due to the close integration we have with FreeIPA suite of tools. The data is stored inside your organizations LDAP server alongside other user information so you don’t need to have the clients connect to a new service for this, and while it is not there in this initial release we will in the future also support Active Directory.

The initial release and Fleet Commander website will be out alongside Fedora Workstation 26.

PipeWire
I talked about PipeWire before, when it was still called Pinos, but the scope and ambition for the project has significantly changed since then. Last time when I spoke about it the goal was just to create something that could be considered a video equivalent of pulseaudio. Wim Taymans, who you might know co-created GStreamer and who has been a major PulseAudio contributor, has since expanded the scope and PipeWire now aims at unifying linux Audio and Video. The long term the goal is for PipeWire to not only provide handling of video streams, but also handle all kinds of audio. Due to this Wim has been spending a lot of time making sure PipeWire can handle audio in a way that not only address the PulseAudio usecases, but also the ones handled by Jack today. A big part of the motivation for this is that we want to make Fedora Workstation the best place to create content and we want the pro-audio crowd to be first class citizens of our desktop.

At the same time we don’t want to make this another painful subsystem transition so PipeWire so we will need to ensure that PulseAudio applications can still be run without modification.

We expect to start shipping PipeWire with Fedora Workstation 27, but at that point only have it handle video as we need this to both enable good video handling for Flatpak applications through a video portal, but also to provide an API for applications that want to do screen capture under Wayland, like web browser applications offering screen sharing. We will the bring the audio features onboard in subsequent releases as we also try to work with the Jack and PulseAudio communities to make this a joint effort. We are also working now on a proper website for PipeWire.

Red Hat developer integration
A feature we are quite excited about is the integration of support for the Red Hat developer account system into Fedora. This means that you should be able to create a Red Hat developer account through GNOME Online accounts and once you have that account set up you should be able to easily create Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtual machines or containers on your Fedora system. This is a crucial piece for the developer focus that we want the workstation to have and one that we think will make a lot of developers life easier. We where originally hoping to have this ready for Fedora Workstaton 26, but atm it looks more likely to hit Fedora Workstation 27, but we will keep you up to date as this progresses.

Fractional scaling for HiDPI systems
Fedora Workstation has been leading the charge in supporting HiDPI on Linux and we hope to build on that with the current work to enable fractional scaling support. Since we introduced HiDPI support we have been improving it step by step, for instance last year we introduced support for dealing with different DPI levels per monitor for Wayland applications. The fractional scaling work will take this a step further. The biggest problem it will resolve is that for certain monitor sizes the current scaling options either left things to small or to big. With the fractional scaling support we will introduce intermediate steps, so that you can scale your interface 1.5x times instead of having to go all the way to 2. The set of technologies we are developing for handling fractional scaling should also allow us to provide better scaling for XWayland applications as it provides us with methods for scaling that doesn’t need direct support from the windowing system or toolkit.

GNOME Shell performance
Carlos Garnacho has been doing some great work recently improving the general performance of GNOME Shell. This comes on top of his earlier performance work that was very well received. How fast/slow GNOME shell is often a subjective thing, but reducing overhead where we can is never a bad thing.

Flatpak building
Owen Taylor has been working hard on putting the pieces in place for start large scale Flatpak building in Fedora. You might see a couple of test flatpaks appear in a Fedora Workstation 26 timeframe, but the goal is to have a huge Flatpak catalog ready in time for Fedora Workstation 27. Essentially what we are doing is making it very simple for a Fedora maintainer to build a Flatpak of the application they maintain through the Fedora package building infrastructure and push that Flatpak into a central Flatpak registry. And while of course this is mainly meant to be to the benefit of Fedora users there is of course nothing stopping other distributions from offering these Flatpak packaged applications to their users also.

Atomic Workstation
Another effort that is marching forward is what we call Atomic Workstation. The idea here is to have an immutable OS image kinda like what you see on for instance Android devices. The advantage to this is that the core of the operating system gets tested and deployed as a unit and the chance of users ending with broken systems decrease significantly as we don’t need to rely on packages getting applied in the correct order or scripts executing as expected on each individual workstation out there. This effort is largely based on the Project Atomic effort, and the end goal here is to have a image based OS install and Flatpak based applications on top of it. If you are very adventerous and/or want to help out with this effort you can get the ISO image installer for Atomic Workstation here.

Firmware handling
Our Linux Firmware project is still going strong with new features being added and new vendors signing on. As Richard Hughes recently blogged about the latest vendor joining the effort is Logitech who now will upload their firmware into the service so that you can keep your Logitech peripherals updated through it. It is worthwhile pointing out here how we worked with Logitech to make this happen, with Richard working on the special tooling needed and thus reducing the threshold for Logitech to start offering their firmware through the service. We have other vendors we are having similar discussions and collaborations with so expect to see more. At this point I tend to recommend people get a Dell to run Linux, due to their strong support for efforts such as the Linux Firmware Service, but other major vendors are in the final stages of testing so expect more major vendors starting to push firmware updates soon.

High Dynamic Range
The next big thing in the display technology field is HDR (High Dynamic Range). HDR allows for deeper more vibrant colours and is a feature seen on a lot of new TVs these days and game consoles like the Playstation 4 support it. Computer monitors are appearing on the market too now with this feature, for instance the Dell UP2718Q. We want to ensure Fedora and Linux is a leader here, for the benefit of video and graphics artists using Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We are thus kicking of an effort to make sure this technology mature as quickly as possible and be fully supported. We are not the only ones interested in this so we will hopefully be collaborating with our friends at Intel, AMD and NVidia on this. We hope to have the first monitors delivered to our office within a few weeks.

Codecs
While playback these days have moved to streaming where locally installed codecs are of less importance for the consumption usecase, having a wide selection of codecs available is still important for media editing and creation usecases, so we want you to be able to load a varity of old media files into you video editor for instance. Luckily we are at a crossroads now where a lot of widely used codecs have their essential patents expire (mp3, ac3 and more) while at the same time the industry focus seems to have moved to royalty free codec development moving forward (Opus, VP9, Alliance for Open Media). We have been spending a lot of time with the Red Hat legal team trying to clear these codecs, which resulted in mp3 and AC3 now shipping in Fedora Workstation. We have more codecs on the way though, so this effort is in no way over. My goal is that over the course of this year the situation of software patents being a huge issue when dealing with audio and video codecs on Linux will be considered a thing of the past. I would like to thank the Red Hat legal team for their support on this issue as they have had to spend significant time on it as a big company like Red Hat do need to do our own due diligence when it comes to these things, we can’t just trust statements from random people on the internet that these codecs are now free to ship.

Battery life
We been looking at this for a while now and hope to be able to start sharing information with users on which laptops they should get that will have good battery life under Fedora. Christian Kellner is now our point man on battery life and he has taken up improving the Battery Bench tool that Owen Taylor wrote some time ago.

QtGNOME platform
We will have a new version of the QtGNOME platform in Fedora 26. For those of you who have not yet heard of this effort it is a set of themes and tools to ensure that Qt applications runs without any major issues under GNOME 3. With the new version the theming expands to include the accessibility and dark themes in Adwaita, meaning that if you switch to one of these themes under GNOME shell it will also switch your Qt applications over. We are also making sure things like cut’n paste and drag and drop works well. The version in Fedora Workstation 26 is a big step forward for this effort and should hopefully make Qt applications be first class citizens under your Fedora Workstation desktop.

Wayland polish
Ever since we switched the default to Wayland we have kept the pressure up and kept fixing bugs and finding solutions for corner cases. The result should be an improved Wayland experience in Fedora Workstation 26. A big thanks for Olivier Fourdan, Jonas Ådahl and the whole Wayland community for their continued efforts here. Two major items Jonas is working on for instance is improving fractional scaling, to ensure that your desktop scales to an optimal size on HiDPI displays of various sizes. What we currently have is limited to 1x or 2x, which is either to small or to big for some screens, but with this work you can also do 1.5x scaling. He is also working on preparing an API that will allow screen sharing under Wayland, so that for instance sharing your slides over video conferencing can work under Wayland.

Welcoming Ubuntu to GNOME and Wayland

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So as most of you probably know Mark Shuttleworth just announced that they will be switching to GNOME 3 and Wayland again for Ubuntu. So I would like to on behalf of the Red Hat Desktop and Fedora teams to welcome them and say that we look forward to keep working with great Canonical and Ubuntu people like Allison Lortie and Robert Ancell on projects of shared interest around GNOME, Wayland and hopefully Flatpak.

It is worth mentioning that even as we been competing with Unity and Ubuntu we have also been collaborating with them, most recently on working with them to integrate the features they wanted from GNOME Software like the user reviews, but of course now sharing a bigger set of technologies collaboration will be even easier.

I am personally happy to see this convergence of efforts happening because I have for a long time felt that the general level of investment in the Linux desktop has not been great enough to justify the plethora of Linux desktops out there, so by now having reached a position where Canonical, Endless, Red Hat and Suse again share one desktop technology stack and along with consulting companies like Centricular, CodeThink, Collabora and Igalia helping push parts of the stack forward we are at least all pulling in the same direction.
This change should also make life easier for ISV who now have a more clear target if they want to try to integrate their UI with the Linux desktop as ‘the linux desktop’ becomes a more meaningful term with this change.

And to state the obvious, we will continue our effort around Fedora Workstation to continue to lead on innovation and engineering and setting the direction for where Desktop Linux goes in the future.

Hacker News feedback on what they want from their Desktop – We got it

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So there is a thread on Hacker News based on a question from a Canonical employee asking for feedback on what people want from the next version of Ubuntu. I always try to read such threads even when they are not about Fedora or Red Hat. I fact I often read such articles and threads about non-Linux systems too to help understand what people are looking for and thus enable us to prioritize what we do with Fedora Workstation even better.

Fedora Workstation

Over the last few years I do feel we managed to nail down what the major pain points are and crossed them out one by one or gotten people assigned to work on them. So a lot of the items people asked for in that thread we already have in Fedora Workstation or have already in our roadmap. So I thought it would be nice to write them up and maybe encourage people to take a look at Fedora Workstation if you haven’t done so already. The list below is my trying to go through the long thread and pick up important and recurring topics, so I hope I got most of them, but if I missed something feel free to add a comment and I will try to answer.

1. Handling of DPI scaling and HiDPI
This has been something we been working on for quite a while. I think we where the first distribution to implemented general HiDPi and put a lot of engineering time into updating Wayland and GNOME to make it happen. That said things are not perfect yet. But we are working on resolving those. Jonas Ådahl and Rui Matos are currently trying to resolve the two main issues we still see. The first item is non-integer UI scaling. Currently we only offer integer scaling meaning that we only offer 2x scaling. This is to much however so we are working on a solution to offer fractional scaling like 1.5 for instance. We are certain to have that ready for Fedora Workstation 27, but there is a small hope we can finalize it already for Fedora Workstation 26. The other item is dealing with applications relying on XWayland because they do not support DPI scaling across two or more monitors, unlike native Wayland applications. We are dealing with that in two ways, one being working with upstreams to get their applications Wayland native like the work we been doing with LibreOffice and Firefox. We are also trying to come up with a scaling solution for XWayland using applications, but we haven’t been able to come up with a solution there yet.

2. Multitouch gestures like 3-finger swipe to change workspace.
This is another item we have put significant effort into. Over the last few years we made sure that we went from almost no touch support in the desktop to now supporting touch throughout the stack. The one big remaining item that was holding items like proper gestures back is that until kernel 4.12 is out the Synaptics touchpads are using PS/2. This causes only 2 touches to be reported, which is not great when you want 3 fingers gestures. With the new kernel, we will be using a different bus for those Synaptics touchpads, and we will have proper 5 fingers support. Benjamin Tissoires on our team has spent 4 years to get this code upstream but it’s finally here. We plan on backport this code to Fedora Workstation 26. Of course application developers will need to make use of the infrastructure in their applications for this feature to be fully realized everywhere.

Multitouch

3. Battery life
This is something we realize is a major issue and it has been on our agenda for a long time. It is a really hard issue to resolve because it is tied into a lot of things outside of control, like hardware used and in some cases third party drivers. That said, as many of you might know we recently set up a Laptop team here inside the bigger Red Hat desktop team and battery life is one of their top priorities. Christian Kellner is our point man on battery life and he has taken over the GNOME Battery bench tool that was originally created by Owen Taylor when we starting looking at battery life. He is currently working on improving GNOME battery bench and talking to hardware vendors to figure out what we can do. We are also actively speaking with NVidia to ensure that we can provide good battery life for hybrid graphics users when the binary NVidia driver is installed. We hope to agree with them on interfaces that should allow us to provide top notch battery life for such systems, but we are beholden to changes in the binary drivers to make that happen so it is also an example of the limits of what we can do on our own here.

GNOME Battery bench

GNOME Battery bench

4. UEFI issues
There where people on the Hacker News thread talking about issues with UEFI. Once again this is an area where we have a dedicated engineer assigned to UEFI and making sure it works great. In fact Peter Jones who is our UEFI point man is on the UEFI standards commitee doing ongoing work to ensure the standard is open source friendly and well supported by Linux. It is also worth mentioning that we created the Linux Vendor Firmware Service to make updating UEFI firmware and easy process. So if you see firmware updates offered in GNOME Software for your laptop or other devices that is because of the work we put into this service. We expect to have most of the major vendors signed up by the end of the year, so if your system is currently not supported that is hopefully a temporary thing. So this is both something that works well under Fedora and RHEL due to having someone dedicated to the effort and it is another example us doing the heavy lifting to make things actually happen.

UEFI firmware updates

UEFI Firmware updates

5. We got Wayland
A lot of people in the thread asked about Wayland support and well, we got Wayland! And this is another area where we dedicated serious engineering resources to it and are continuing to do so. For instance in addition to the above mentioned multi-DPI system work we are working on items such as HDR (High dynamic range) and next generation hybrid graphics support in Wayland. We are also working with NVidia to ensure their binary driver works well with Wayland.

Wayland Graphics

6. Something like Redshift
Some time ago we picked up on the growing popularity of tools such as Redshift and f.lux and this was another often repeated request in that Hacker News thread. Well we once again invested our resources into this and thus in the newly released GNOME 3.24 there is built in support for this feature, called Night Light. We drove this feature work and it will of course be available alongside GNOME 3.24 in Fedora Workstation 26.

GNOME Night light

Nightlight

7. Improved GPU driver update
This is another item we be spending significant time and resources on. We have a team dedicated to work on the linux graphics stack, which includes people like the graphics subsystem kernel maintainer and RADV creator Dave Airlie, Nouveau maintainer Ben Skeggs, core X, Mesa and Wayland dev Adam Jackson, Freedreeno creator and maintainer Rob Clark and more. This team is pushing the linux graphics stack forward alongside their colleagues at Intel, AMD and NVidia. The one thing we recently been working on for instance is dealing with the NVidia binary driver which has been a pain for a long time due to the file level conflict with Mesa. We didn’t want to do a workaround or hack, so what we did was work with NVidia on their glvnd proposal to make that a reality. This included supporting glvnd in Mesa in addition to the NVidia driver, but also working with the OS level tools to ensure fallbacks and autodetection worked fine. We got the basics of glvnd support already in Fedora and are polishing it up. Hans de Goede who took over that work from Adam Jackson has recently be working with the fine folks at rpmfusion and negativo17 to make sure we have some good packages available taking full advantage of his work, and thus enabling easy install and upgrade of these drivers. We are also planning to start offering a COPR with the latest and greatest Mesa drivers going forward to ensure you can always have the latest drivers available if you want to test and try them out.

NVidia driver install

NVidia driver install

8.Improved printer support
Even in this digital work printing is still important and thus we got people dedicated to this task too. So Marek Kasik is working on ensuring we keep CUPS working well and Felipe Borges recently wrote a blog entry talking about the redesigned printer control panel. So this is another area we are spending serious resources on and continuously trying to improve.

New Printer panel

New Printer Panel

9. Improve Bluetooth
Bastien Nocera on our team is probably the person who has done the single most to make sure desktop bluetooth is working at all. We decided to boost that effort by having Christian Kellner work on this too, so he has been working on patches for various bluetooth related issues with Bastien providing guidance and code review. We are also working on coming up with some kind of bluetooth testing harness to allow us to catch regressions more easily and verify support on new hardware. Christian focus currently is improving the handling of Bluetooth Audio.

Summary
If you are contemplating giving Fedora a try I think the items above illustrate one thing very strongly and that is how many of these issues we are the primary force behind, so by using Fedora you are not only getting access to them first and at the same time have some assurance that the integration work has been done right, but you are also supporting the effort of moving these technologies forward and also putting yourself in a position to more directly interact with the engineers working on these and a long slew of other important technologies in the desktop and beyond. And our efforts are not just limited to writing code, like for example our current effort to clear the legal hurdles blocking Linux systems from supporting various media codecs. So if you haven’t already I strongly suggest you go to the Get Fedora website and grab our convenient Fedora installer or an ISO image. And as I said initially if you have other pressing items I didn’t cover here, feel free to post a comment and I will be happy to try to answer any questions I get.

Another media codec on the way!

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One of the thing we are working hard at currently is ensuring you have the codecs you need available in Fedora Workstation. Our main avenue for doing this is looking at the various codecs out there and trying to determine if the intellectual property situation allows us to start shipping all or parts of the technologies involved. This was how we were able to start shipping mp3 playback support for Fedora Workstation 25. Of course in cases where this is obviously not the case we have things like the agreement with our friends at Cisco allowing us to offer H264 support using their licensed codec, which is how OpenH264 started being available in Fedora Workstation 24.

As you might imagine clearing a codec for shipping is a slow and labour intensive process with lawyers and engineers spending a lot of time reviewing stuff to figure out what can be shipped when and how. I am hoping to have more announcements like this coming out during the course of the year.

So I am very happy to announce today that we are now working on packaging the codec known as AC3 (also known as A52) for Fedora Workstation 26. The name AC3 might not be very well known to you, but AC3 is part of a set of technologies developed by Dolby and marketed as Dolby Surround. This means that if you have video files with surround sound audio it is most likely something we can playback with an AC3 decoder. AC3/A52 is also used for surround sound TV broadcasts in the US and it is the audio format used by some Sony and Panasonic video cameras.

We will be offering AC3 playback in Fedora Workstation 26 and we are looking into options for offering an encoder. To be clear there are nothing stopping us from offering an encoder apart from finding an implementation that is possible to package and ship with Fedora with an reasonable amount of effort. The most well known open source implementation we know about is the one found in ffmpeg/libav, but extracting a single codec to ship from ffmpeg or libav is a lot of work and not something we currently have the resources to do. We found another implementation called aften, but that seems to be unmaintaned for years, but we will look at it to see if it could be used.
But if you are interested in AC3 encoding support we would love it if someone started working on a standalone AC3 encoder we could ship, be that by picking up maintership of Aften, splitting out AC3 encoding from libav or ffmpeg or writting something new.

If you want to learn more about AC3 the best place to look is probably the Wikipedia page for Dolby Digital or the a52 ATSC audio standard document for more of a technical deep dive.