The Steam Machines has arrived! And you should get one!

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So yesterday, the 10th of November, was the official launch day of the Steam Machines. The hardware are meant to be dedicated game machines for the living room taking advantage of the Steam ecosystem, to take on the Xbox One and PS4.

But for us in the Linux community these machines are more than that, they are an important part of helping us break into a broader market by paving the way for even more games and more big budget games coming to our platform. Playing computer games is not just a niche, it is a mainstream activity these days, and not having access to games on our platform has cost us quite a few users and potential contributors over the years. I have for instance met a lot of computer science students who ended up not using Linux as the main operating system during their studies simply due to the lack of games on the platform. Instead Linux got de-regulated to that thing in a VM only run when you needed it for an assignment.

Steam for Linux and SteamOS can and will be important pieces of breaking through that. SteamOS and the Steam Macines are also important for the Linux community for another reason. They can help funnel more resources from hardware companies into Linux drivers and support. I know for instance that all the 3 major GPU vendors have increased their Linux drivers investments due to SteamOS.

So I want to congratulate Valve on the launch of the first Steam Machines and strongly recommend everyone in the community to get a Steam machine for their home!

People who have had a good chance to test the hardware has recommended me to get one of the Alienware SteamOS systems, so I am passing that recommendation onwards.

As a sidenote we are also working on a few features in Fedora Workstation to make it a better host for Steam and Steam games. This includes our work on the GL Dispatch and Optimus support as covered in a previous blog and libratbag, our new library for handling gaming mice under Linux. And finally we are working on a few bug fixes in Fedora to make it an even better host for the Steam client related to C++ ABI issues.

Fedora Workstation 23 and LibreOffice

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Another major piece of engineering that I have covered that we did for Fedora Workstation 23 is the GTK3 port of LibreOffice. Those of you who follow Caolán McNamaras blog are probably aware of the details. The motivation for the port wasn’t improved look and feel integration, there was easier ways to achieve that, but to help us have LibreOffice deal well with a range of new technologies we are supporting in Fedora Workstation namely: Touch support, Wayland support and HiDPI.

That ongoing work is now available in Fedora Workstation 23 if you install the ‘libreoffice-gtk3’ package. You have to install this using a terminal and dnf as this is a early adopter technology, but we would love as many as possible for you to try and report any issues you have either to the upstream LibreOffice bugzilla or the Fedora bugzilla against the LibreOffice component. Testing of how it works under X and how it works under Wayland are both more than welcome. Be aware that it is ‘tech preview’ technology so you might want to remove the libreoffice-gtk3 package again if you find that it hinders your effective use of LibreOffice. For instance there is a quite bad titlebar bug you would exprience under Wayland that we hope to fix with an update.

If you specifically want to test out the touch support there are two features implemented so far, both in Impress. One is to allow you to switch slides in Impress by a swiping gesture and the second is long press, you can bring up the impress slide context menu with it and switch to e.g. drawing mode. We would love feedback on what gestures you would like to see supported in various LibreOffice applications, so don’t be shy about filing enhancement bug reports with your suggestions.

HiDPI it wasn’t a primary focus of the porting effort it has to be said, but we do expect that it should also make improving the HiDPI support in LibreOffice further easier. Another nice little bonus of the port is that the GTK Inspector can now be used with LibreOffice.

A big thanks to Caolán for this work.

Fedora Workstation update

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So as we quickly approach the Fedora Workstation 23 release I been running Wayland exclusively for over a week now. Despite a few glitches it now works well enough for me to not have to switch back into the X11 session anymore.

There are some major new features coming in Fedora Workstation 23 that I am quite excited about. First and foremost it will be the first release shipping with our new firmware update system supported. This means that if your hardware supports it and your vendor uploads the needed firmware to lvfs you can update your system firmware through GNOME Software. So no more struggling with proprietary tools or bootable DVDs. So while this is a major step forward in my opinion it will also be one of those things ramping up slowly, as we need to bring more vendors onboard and also have them ship more UEFI 2.5 ready systems before the old ‘BIOS’ update problems are a thing of the past. A big thanks goes to Richard Hughes and Peter Jones for their work here.

Another major feature that we spent a lot of time to get right is the new Google Drive backend for the file manager. This means that as long as you have internet access you can manage your google drive files through Nautilus along with all your other local and remote file systems. I know a lot of Fedora users are wither using Google drive personally or as part of their work, so I think this is a major new feature we managed to land. A big thanks to Debarshi Ray for working on this item.

Thirdly we now have support for ambient light sensors support. This was a crucial step in our ongoing effort to improve battery life under Fedora and can have very significant impact on how long your battery lasts. It is very easy to keep running the screen with more backlight than you actually need and thus drain your battery quickly, so with this enabled you might often squeeze out some extra hours of your battery. A big thanks to Bastien Nocera and Benjamin Tissoires for their work on this feature.

And finally this is the first release where we are shipping our current xdg-app tech preview as part of Fedora, instead of just making it available in a COPR. So for those of you who don’t know, xdg-app is our new technology for packaging desktop applications. While still early stage it provides a way for software developers to package their software in a way that is both usable across multiple distributions and with improved security through the use of the LXC container technology. In fact as we are trying to make this technology as usable and widely deployed as possible Alexander Larsson is currently trying to work with the Open Container Initiative to make xdg-apps be OCI compliant.

This is important for a multitude of reasons, but mainly xdg-app fills an important gap in the container technology landscape, because while Docker and Rocket are great for packaging server software, there is no real equivalent for the desktop. The few similar efforts that has been launched are usually tied to a specific distribution or operating system, while xdg-app aims to provide the same level of cross system compatibility for desktop applications that Docker and Rocket offers for server applications.

Fedora Workstation 24
Of course with Fedora Workstation 23 almost out the door we have been reviewing our Fedora Workstation tasklist to make sure it reflects what we currently have developers working on and what we expect to be able to land in Fedora Workstation 24. And let me use this opportunity to remind community members that if you are working on a cool feature for Fedora Workstation 24, make sure to let the Workstation working group know on the Fedora Desktop mailing list, so that we can make sure your feature gets listed and tracked in the tasklist too.

Anyway, I sent out this email to the working group this week, to outline what I see on the horizon in terms of major Fedora Workstation features lined up for 24.

You can get the full details in the email, and the tasklist has also been updated with these items, but I want to go into a bit more details on some of them.

xdg-app for world domination

As some of you might be aware of, Christian Hergert, of GNOME Builder fame, recently joined our team. Christian will be doing a lot of cool stuff for us, but one thing he has already started on is working with Alexander Larsson to make sure we have a great developer story for xdg-app. If we want developers to adopt this technology we need to make it dead simple to create your own xdg-app packages and Christian will make sure that GNOME Builder supports this in a way that makes transitioning your application into an xdg-app becomes something you can do without needing to read a long howto. We hope to have the initial fruits of this labour ready for Fedora Workstation 24.

Another big part of this of course is the work that Richard Hughes and Kalev Lember are doing on GNOME Software to make sure we have the infrastructure in place to be able to install and upgrade xdg-apps. As we expect xdg-apps to come from a wide variety of sources as opposed to the current model of most things being in a central repository we need to develop good ways for new sources to be added and help users make more informed choices about the software they are installing. Related to this we are also looking at how we can improve labeling of the applications available,
to make it easier to make your decisions based on a variety of criteria. The current star system in GNOME Software is not very obvious in what it tries to convey so we will try looking at better ways to do this kind of labeling and what information we want to be able to provide through it.

Another major item is what I blogged about before is our effort to finally make dealing with the binary graphics drivers less of a pain. I wrote a longer blog post about this before, but to summarize we want to make sure that if you need to install the binary drivers this is a simple operation that doesn’t conflict with your installation of Mesa and also that if you have an Optimus enabled laptop, it is easy and pleasant to use.

Anyway, there are some further items in the email I sent, but I will go more into detail about some of them at a later stage.

Fedora Workstation Next Steps: Wayland and Graphics

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So I realized I hadn’t posted a Wayland update in a while. So we are still making good progress on Wayland, but the old saying that the last 10% is 90% of the work is definitely true here. So there was a Wayland BOF at GUADEC this year which tried to create a TODO list for major items remaining before Wayland is ready to replace X.

  • Proper menu positioning. Most visible user issue currently for people testing Wayland
  • Relative pointer/confinement/locking. Important for games among other things.
  • Kinetic scroll in GTK+
  • More work needed to remove all X11 dependencies (so that desktop has no dependency on XWayland being available.
  • Minimize main thread stalls (could be texture uploads for example)
  • Tablet support. Includes gestures, on-screen keyboard and more.

A big thank you to Jonas Ådahl, Owen Taylor, Carlos Garnacho, Rui Matos, Marek Chalupa, Olivier Fourdan and more for their ongoing work on polishing
up the Wayland experience.

So as you can tell there is a still lot of details that needs working out when doing something as major as switching from one Display system to the other, but things are starting to looking really good now.

One new feature I am particularly excited about is what we call multi-DPI support ready for Wayland sessions in Fedora 23. What this means is that if you have a HiDPI laptop screen and a standard DPI external monitor you should be able to drag windows back and forth between the two screens and have them automatically rescale to work with the different DPIs. This is an example of an issue which was relatively straightforward to resolve under Wayland, but which would have been a lot of pain to get working under X.

We will not be defaulting to Wayland in Fedora Workstation 23 though, because as I have said in earlier blog posts about the subject, we will need to have a stable and feature complete Wayland in at least one release before we switch the default. We hope Fedora Workstation 23 will be that stable and feature complete release, which means Fedora Workstation 24 is the one where we can hope to make the default switchover.

Of course porting the desktop itself to Wayland is just part of the story. While we support running X applications using XWayland, to get full benefit from Wayland we need our applications to run on top of Wayland natively. So we spent effort on getting some major applications like LibreOffice and Firefox Wayland ready recently.

Caolan McNamara has been working hard on finishing up the GTK3 port of LibreOffice which is part of the bigger effort to bring LibreOffice nativly to Wayland. The GTK3 version of LibreOffice should be available in Fedora Workstation 23 (as non-default option) and all the necessary code will be included in LibreOffice 5 which will be released pretty soon. The GTK3 version should be default in F24, hopefully with complete Wayland support.

For Firefox Martin Stransky has been looking into ensuring Firefox runs on Wayland now that the basic GTK3 port is done. Martin just reported today that he got Firefox running natively under Wayland, although there are still a lot of glitches and issues he needs to figure out before it can be claimed to be ready for normal use.

Another major piece we are working on which is not directly Wayland related, but which has a Wayland component too is to try to move the state of Linux forward in the context of dealing with multiple OpenGL implementations, multi-GPU systems and the need to free our 3D stack from its close ties to GLX.

This work with is lead by Adam Jackson, but where also Dave Airlie is a major contributor, involves trying to decide and implement what is needed to have things like GL Dispatch, EGLstreams and EGL Device proposals used across the stack. Once this work is done the challenges around for instance using the NVidia binary driver on a linux system or using a discreet GPU like on Optimus laptops should be a thing of the past.

So the first step of this work is getting GL Dispatch implemented. GL Dispatch basically allows you to have multiple OpenGL implementations installed and then have your system pick the right one as needed. So for instance on a system with NVidia Optimus you can use Mesa with the integrated Intel graphics card, but NVidias binary OpenGL implementatioin with the discreet Optimus GPU. Currently that is a pain to do since you can only have one OpenGL implementation used. Bumblebee tries to hack around that requirement, but GL Dispatch will allow us to resolve this without having to ‘fight’ the assumptions of the system.

We plan to have easy to use support for both Optimus and Prime (the Nouveau equivalent of Optimus) in the desktop, allowing you to choose what GPU to use for your applications without needing to edit any text files or set environment variables.

The final step then is getting the EGL Device and EGLStreams proposal implemented so we can have something to run Wayland on top of. And while GL Dispatch are not directly related to those we do feel that having it in place should make the setup easier to handle as you don’t risk conflicts between the binary NVidia driver and the Mesa driver anymore at that point, which becomes even more crucial for Wayland since it runs on top of EGL.

An Open Letter to Apache Foundation and Apache OpenOffice team

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A couple of weeks ago I visited my mother back home in Norway. She had gotten a new laptop some time ago that my brother-in-law had set up for her. As usual when I come for a visit I was asked to look at some technical issues my mother was experiencing with her computer. Anyway, one thing I discovered while looking at these issues was that my brother-in-law had installed OpenOffice on her computer. So knowing that the OpenOffice project is all but dead upstream since IBM pulled their developers of the project almost a year ago and has significantly fallen behind feature wise, I of course installed LibreOffice on the system instead, knowing it has a strong and vibrant community standing behind it and is going from strength to strength.

And this is why I am writing this open letter. Because while a lot of us who comes from technical backgrounds have already caught on to the need to migrate from OpenOffice to LibreOffice, there are still many non-technical users out there who are still defaulting to installing OpenOffice when they are looking for an open source Office Suite, because that is the one they came across 5 years ago. And I believe that the Apache Foundation, being an organization dedicated to open source software, care about the general quality and perception of open source software and thus would share my interest in making sure that all users of open source software gets the best experience possible, even if the project in question isn’t using their code license of preference.

So I realize that the Apache Foundation took a lot of pride in and has invested a lot of effort trying to create an Apache Licensed Office suite based on the old OpenOffice codebase, but I hope that now that it is clear that this effort has failed that you would be willing to re-direct people who go to the openoffice.org website to the LibreOffice website instead. Letting users believe that OpenOffice is still alive and evolving is only damaging the general reputation of open source Office software among non-technical users and thus I truly believe that it would be in everyones interest to help the remaining OpenOffice users over to LibreOffice.

And to be absolutely clear I am only suggesting this due to the stagnant state of the OpenOffice project, if OpenOffice had managed to build a large active community beyond the resources IBM used to provide then it would have been a very different story, but since that did not happen I don’t see any value to anyone involved to just let users keep downloading aging releases of a stagnant codebase until the point were bit rot chase them away or they hear about LibreOffice through mainstream media or friends. And as we all know it is not about just needing a developer or two to volunteer here, maintaining and developing something as large as OpenOffice is a huge undertaking and needs a very sizeable and dedicated community to be able to succeed.

So dear Apache developers, for the sake of open source and free software, please recommend people to go and download LibreOffice, the free office suite that is being actively maintained and developed and which has the best chance of giving them a great experience using free software. OpenOffice is an important part of open source history, but that is also what it is at this point in time.

GStreamer Conference 2015

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Wanted to let everyone know that the GStreamer Conference 2015 is happening for the 6th time this year. So if you want to attend the premier open source multimedia conference you can do so in Dublin, Ireland between the 8th and 9th of October. If you want to attend I suggest registering as early as possible using the GStreamer Conference registration webpage. Like earlier years the GStreamer Conference is co-located with other great conferences like the Embedded Linux Conference Europe so you have the chance to combine the attendance into one trip.

The GStreamer Conference has always been a great opportunity to not only learn about the latest developments in GStreamer, but about whats happeing in the general Linux multimedia stack, latest news from the world of codec development and other related topics. I strongly recommend setting aside the 8th and the 9th of October for a trip to Dublin and the GStreamer Conference.

Also a heads up for those interested in doing a talk. The formal deadline for submitting a proposal is this Sunday the 9th of August, so you need to hurry to send in a proposal. You find the details for how to submit a talk on the GStreamer Conference 2015 website. While talks submitted before the 9th will be prioritized I do recommend anyone seeing this after the deadline to still send in a proposal as there might be a chance to get on the program anyway if you get your proposal in during next week.

Fedora Workstation next steps : Introducing Pinos

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So this will be the first in a series of blogs talking about some major initiatives we are doing for Fedora Workstation. Today I want to present and talk about a thing we call Pinos.

So what is Pinos? One of the original goals of Pinos was to provide the same level of advanced hardware handling for Video that PulseAudio provides for Audio. For those of you who has been around for a while you might remember how you once upon a time could only have one application using the sound card at the same time until PulseAudio properly fixed that. Well Pinos will allow you to share your video camera between multiple applications and also provide an easy to use API to do so.

Video providers and consumers are implemented as separate processes communicating with DBUS and exchanging video frames using fd passing.

Some features of Pinos

  • Easier switching of cameras in your applications

    • It will also allow you to more easily allow applications to switch between multiple cameras or mix the content from multiple sources.

  • Multiple types of video inputs

    • Supports more than cameras. Pinos also supports other type of video sources, for instance it can support your desktop as a video source.

  • GStreamer integration

    • Pinos is built using GStreamer and also have GStreamer elements supporting it to make integrating it into GStreamer applications simple and straightforward.

  • Pinos got some audio support

    • Well it tries to solve some of the same issues for video that PulseAudio solves for audio. Namely letting you have multiple applications sharing the same camera hardware. Pinos does also include audio support in order to let you handle both.

What do we want to do with this in Fedora Workstation?

  • One thing we know is of great use and importance for many of our users, including many developers who wants to make videos demonstrating their software, is to have better screen capture support. One of the test cases we are using for Pinos is to improve the built in screen casting capabilities of GNOME 3, the goal being to reducing overhead and to allow for easy setup of picture in picture capturing. So you can easily set it up so there will be a camera capturing your face and voice and mixing that into your screen recording.
  • Video support for Desktop Sandboxes. We have been working for a while on providing technology for sandboxing your desktop applications and while we with a little work can use PulseAudio for giving the sandboxed applications audio access we needed something similar for video. Pinos provides us with such a solution.

Who is working on this?
Pinos is being designed and written by Wim Taymans who is the co-creator of the GStreamer multimedia framework and also a regular contributor to the PulseAudio project. Wim is also the working for Red Hat as a Principal Engineer, being in charge of a lot of our multimedia support in both Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora. It is also worth nothing that it draws many of its ideas from an early prototype by William Manley called PulseVideo and builds upon some of the code that was merged into GStreamer due to that effort.

Where can I get the code?
The code is currently hosteed in Wim’s private repository on freedesktop. You can get it at cgit.freedesktop.org/~wtay/pinos.

How can I get involved or talk to the author
You can find Wim on Freenode IRC, he uses the name wtay and hangs out in both the and IRC channels.
Once the project is a bit further along we will get some basic web presence set up and a mailing list created.

FAQ

If Pinos contains Audio support will it eventually replace PulseAudio too?
Probably not, the usecases and goals for the two systems are somewhat different and it is not clear that trying to make Pinos accommodate all the PulseAudio usescases would be worth the effort or possible withour feature loss. So while there is always a temptation to think ‘hey, wouldn’t it be nice to have one system that can handle everything’ we are at this point unconvinced that the gain outweighs the pain.

Will Pinos offer re-directing kernel APIs for video devices like PulseAudio does for Audio? In order to handle legacy applications?
No, that was possible due to the way ALSA worked, but V4L2 doesn’t have such capabilities and thus we can not take advantage of them.

Why the name Pinos?
The code name for the project was PulseVideo, but to avoid confusion with the PulseAudio project and avoid people making to many assumptions based on the name we decided to follow in the tradition of Wayland and Weston and take inspiration from local place names related to the creator. So since Wim lives in Pinos de Alhaurin close to Malaga in Spain we decided to call the project Pinos. Pinos is the word for pines in Spanish :)

Fedora Workstation 22 is out!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can also read about this release in Fedora Magazine.

Summary of Fedora Workstation feedback

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Variety is an open-source wallpaper changer for Linux


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