desktop February 2014

desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org

60 participants
46 discussions

Re: Underlying DE for the Workstation product
by Alex G.S. 04 Feb '14

04 Feb '14

If you look at desktop market share numbers the vast majority of desktop users are using traditional desktops. Just look a the Valve Hardware & Software survey. This is a useful tool for gauging the #1 Student/Gamer user-base. If we add up the numbers: Windows 7 + Windows XP/Vista + Mac OS = 78% --- traditional desktops Windows 8 = 20% --- "mobile oriented" desktops Linuix = 2% --- mixed link: http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey The same is true if we look at Wikipedia's "Usage share of operating systems" page using Net Application's statistics: Windows 7 + Windows XP/Vista + Mac OS = 87.7% --- traditional desktops Windows 8 = 10.58% --- "mobile oriented" desktops Linux = 1.6% --- mixed desktops link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems Abandoning Gnome 2 was a fatal error on the part of several high profile distributions such as Ubuntu and Fedora. They abandoned Gnome 2 to chase mobile oriented ambitions when in reality the vast majority of Windows and Mac users were still using traditional desktops. This limited the growth of the Linux desktop as a platform and caused unnecessary confusion and chaos in the Linux community. Current Linux desktops that are achieving success such as Google's Chrome OS are still using traditional desktop design patterns. So that leads to certain questions for the Fedora Workstation WG as to what the scope of their project is. Does the Fedora Workstation WG intend on expanding their user-base beyond: 1. Fedora/Gnome developers and current Fedora users? 2. Linux developers and/or users? 3. Mac and Windows developers and mainstream users? If the answer is: #1 "We only intend on targeting Gnome and Fedora developers" then make the default Gnome Shell and ignore Fedora.next and continue the methods and policies of Fedora Desktop and the spins as if nothing has changed. #2 "We would like to consolidate the Linux desktop space" make the default MATE with Gnome Shell and KDE as optional extras at the installation screen. #3 "We would like to market Fedora Workstation outside of the Linux community to Mac and Windows developers" make the default MATE with Gnome Shell and KDE as optional extras at the installation screen. What would it take to get MATE up to current standards to be acceptable as a default for Fedora Workstation? + Have the Gnome project developers provide support resources to the MATE developers to accelerate their transition to GTK3 as well as act as consultants. + Perhaps even offer to make MATE part of the Gnome foundation as a legacy Gnome 2 fork and provide additional support resources? + Configure a MATE desktop that is Fedora branded that uses default Gnome applications currently used in Gnome Shell such as Files and make sure it integrates with MATE. + Bundle MATE with a lightweight compositor such as Compton or integrate Mutter as a MATE compositing window manager. + Replace the default menu in MATE with 'mintmenu' a plugin that replicates the Windows 7 start menu functionality and add additional plugins where necessary. You see it's not that much work at all and well within the scope of something achievable by a distribution with sufficient resources like Fedora and/or provided by Red Hat. It all depends on whether the WG is serious about consolidating the Linux desktop, expanding to Mac/Windows developers and achieving the goals set out in the PRD. I'm beginning to take a cynical view of the whole Fedora Workstation WG process, I don't anything will change and Fedora Desktop will continue to decline in relevance, but please prove me wrong.

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Re: Underlying DE for the Workstation product, Desktop -vs- Workstation
by Alex G.S. 03 Feb '14

03 Feb '14

Intel actually has a website where it compares Desktop -vs- Workstation. So beyond the marketing and semantics there's actually a real difference between the two. Intel's marketing materials state: "...workload-optimized innovation platform designed to deliver the > processing, graphics and bandwidth capacities artist, animators, analysts, > engineers, scientists and other professional demand in order to accelerate > their innovation." > > "Still not everyone needs a workstation. A typical office worker running > standard office applications such as word processing, e-mail, and > presentation software will get all the performance needed from a standard > business PC." "The Workstation Advantage: workstation's are purpose-built to deliver the > performance, reliability and stability demanded by designers, engineers, > financial analysts, and researchers running large complex applications" link: http://goo.gl/WNFXdm Fedora Workstation does NOT need the latest mobile oriented experimental desktop environment like Gnome Shell or Ubuntu's Unity. Just like a Windows workstation needs Windows 7 and NOT Windows 8. In fact due to the "reliability and stability" purpose of a workstation you should actually go with something older, stable and mature like Gnome 2.0, which would entail making Mate the default using Mutter or Compton as the compositor. My current default setup happens to be Mate (Gnome 2.0) and the Compton compositor. Most traditional Linux workstation users were exposed to Mate already because it's basis Gnome 2.0 was the default on RHEL for quite a while. Mate is also the "safe" choice for adoption of the Fedora Workstation for the Linux community in the political dimension. The Mate desktop was forked from Gnome 2.0 by an Arch Linux developer and is used on all major distributions including Linux Mint and recently Ubuntu 14.04. That means it's respected, independent and has a large following among Linux developers and engineers. "The MATE Desktop Project is dedicated to keeping alive the traditional > GNOME 2 desktop metaphor. Many users liked this desktop, and found it > simple, configurable, and comfortable to use. Our goal is to continue the > development of this desktop environment, adding new features, fixing bugs, > and improving the software as support libraries and other dependent > software improves and changes." link: http://wiki.mate-desktop.org/board:manifesto It would be unfair to the Gnome team to have to hold back their own mobile inspired innovation and creativity because the Workstation product demands a traditional desktop metaphor. We're beginning to see spectacular cutting-edge UI/UX innovations come out of the Gnome project. Perhaps the answer is to maintain a Fedora branded Mate desktop with official Gnome applications and theming. That way the Fedora Workstation team could facilitate the flow of these innovations back into Mate and make sure they find their way upstream to the Mate developers. Compton is based on xcompmgr-dana which is also the basis for Valve's compositor used in SteamOS which speaks volumes about it's performance and reliability. The basis xcompmgr was originally written by Keith Packard. This setup is a mature, reliable and workflow neutral setup that's perfect for a workstation use case. "In digging through the steamos-compositor code, it's a modified version of > xcompmgr." link: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?px=MTU0MzY&page=news_item "Compton is a lightweight, standalone composite manager, suitable for use > with window managers that do not natively provide compositing > functionality. Compton itself is a fork of xcompmgr-dana, which in turn is > a fork of xcompmgr. See the compton github page for further information." link: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Compton This difference in purpose Desktop -vs- Workstation cannot be lost because the end product cannot just be another version of Fedora Desktop with more up to date Gnome Shell components, it should be a TRUE workstation-class product. There's a huge risk that the Desktop use case will creep into the Workstation product. To ensure further separation there should be two different parallel tracks based on which desktop environment is in use: Fedora Desktop = Core + Gnome Shell (Gnome 3) Purpose: "Deliver a cutting-edge mobile inspired and integrated desktop experience for hip tech-savvy consumers and forward thinking modern business users." Fedora Workstation = Core + Mate (Gnome 2 + Compton and/or Mutter) Purpose: "Deliver the performance, reliability and stability demanded by designers, engineers, financial analysts, and researchers running large complex applications." This way both use-cases can evolve to their full potential without any compromises or limitations. Thank you for reading...

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Re: Underlying DE for the Workstation product
by Alex G.S. 03 Feb '14

03 Feb '14

cshalle wrote: --- Improving touch screen support is a goal for both GNOME and Fedora, simply because laptops are heading that way and if we offer something that doesn't even try to use the touchscreen where it makes sense, users will go elsewhere. --- Linux based solutions oriented towards tablets, hybrids and touch-screen-laptops already exist: Chrome OS and Android. Realistically nobody in the Linux community has the resources that Google does or the mainstream market-share. Everyone knows the obvious, Google will dominate that space. In the technology press everyone is saying the "Year of the Linux Desktop" will be because of Google and Chrome OS as well as Android. Please, don't waste your time and resources, leave this use-case alone. Red Hat and Fedora as well as similar platforms thrive in the more traditional desktop space and specifically workstations. If you walk into Pixar, NASA or CERN you'll find Fedora/RHEL on workstations and servers. Look at Ubuntu at Google or Facebook. If I call up any major OEM I can get workstations with two different operating systems: Windows 7 and RHEL. Not surprisingly the product is called Fedora Workstation. There's a theme at play here that if you focus 100% on traditional workstations you can having a winning product that will even compete on equal footing against Mac OS and Windows. Linux distributions and desktop projects have been chasing the hybrid and tablet and it's had the effect of throwing their workstation users off of the bus. When Ubuntu and Fedora abandoned Gnome 2 and focused on Unity and Gnome 3 this caused major disruption and chaos. Around the same time many developers and engineers ended up going with Mac OS because Apple provided a conservative traditional desktop experience that was highly polished and professional. Last night I was looking at Gnome Shell extensions and I realized that most of them had the effect of turning Gnome 3 back into Gnome 2. The fact is that the community and specifically the workstation use-case is desperately seeking a Gnome 2 replacement that's why we have XFCE, LXDE and Cinnamon. This is why MATE exists and is rising in popularity. The Linux community still loves Gnome 2 and wants it back. This is why I propose a compromise that will work for both Gnome and Fedora Workstation: Have both Gnome 2 (MATE) and Gnome 3 (Gnome Shell) be parallel but related branches of the same Gnome product. 1. Have the Gnome Foundation adopt MATE as a Gnome 2 legacy project. Provide development and support resources to accelerate MATE's efforts to transition to GTK3, systemd and Wayland. Make sure that both Gnome 2 and Gnome 3 are based on the same modern infrastructure. 2. Modify Mutter so that it can become the official compositor of MATE and replace the practice of bundling Gnome 2 with Compiz which is now an Ubuntu product. This would ensure that Gnome 2 and Gnome 3 have similar look, behavior and feel. Another option is to use Compton but that could be seen as a short-term fix until Mutter was fully integrated into Gnome 2. 3. Keep Gnome 3 as is in the present and don't interfere with that project or dictate design to them. Gnome 3 will exist as a development project focused on innovation, experimentation and creativity. Their focus would continue to be on pushing desktop boundaries and exploring alternative paradigms. If appropriate, innovations developed in the Gnome Shell would be occasionally fed back into Gnome 2. This will create a healthy Gnome innovation cycle. 4. Make Gnome 2 the default desktop for Fedora Workstation with Fedora branding and themes as well as the current Gnome default applications. Have Gnome 3 be an optional extra at installation. Also offer KDE as well for diversity. 5. Promote Gnome 3 to Gnome 2 users. When the user runs Gnome 2 for the first time have a prompt that says "Would you like to see the future? Try out Gnome 3". And it would be installed side-by-side with Gnome 2. That way the traditional desktop can be addressed by Gnome 2 (MATE) and Fedora Workstation doesn't have to interfere and disrupt the activities happening over at Gnome with Gnome 3 (Gnome Shell). Both projects can happily cooperate and coexist. This sort of collaboration is what Linux is famous for and Fedora Workstation should epitomize.

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Re: Underlying DE for the Workstation product
by Alex G.S. 03 Feb '14

03 Feb '14

cschalle wrote: --- ...I am well aware of this, I meet or call with a lot of these customers on a regular basis. And I also spend time working with them to prepare their transition to GNOME 3 as part of their RHEL 7 transition. ...I am generally negative to any such solutions as they tend to suck resources away from advancing something over to trying to keep multiple options sorta working together... --- As a long time former Mac user I can tell you that Apple has had retained the same desktop design from it's early days and has continued to develop and refine it over decades. In fact Apple has launched a new MacPro specifically for workstation users to use on their traditional desktop Mac OS showing they're committed to the traditional desktop metaphor and see a bright future ahead. Just because Apple launched iOS on the iPhone and iPad didn't mean it totally abandoned Mac OS and decided to force it's MacBook, iMac and MacPro customers to use iOS. They keep both interfaces separated as two different products in parallel. Both have the same core and regularly share innovations in a very healthy innovation cycle. Why can't Gnome, Fedora and Red Hat do the same? Unfortunately what Ubuntu, Fedora and others have done defies commercial logic. They think that "being like Apple" means pursuing innovation no matter the cost even to the point of being reckless. As a result abandoning Gnome 2 was single biggest business mistake the commercial Linux distributions made and has cost them the equivalent of billions of dollars in growth and market-share. The point is Gnome 2 can sync in parallel with Gnome 3 and the restrictions and policies in place are purely artificial and it hurts the business. Apple kept it's traditional desktop product and is actually expanding it's Unix workstation user-base by catering to the traditional desktop workstation user. Mac OS is what the Linux desktops should have been, a stable traditional desktop metaphor that's supported and maintained for decades. Microsoft is suffering because it made this decision. They attempted to force their workstation users to adopt a mobile oriented interface in Windows 8, the hated Metro interface. Now third parties are selling Start Menu replacements. In a major updated planned for post-Windows-8.1 Microsoft will enable "boot to desktop" mode so users can go directly to the desktop and bypass the Metro interface. It's very simple, Gnome as a single product with two different interfaces Gnome 2 (Mate) and Gnome 3 (Gnome Shell) relying on the same modern core infrastructure as well as a collection of default applications and toolkits. The combined communities of MATE and Gnome Shell would be a force in the open source world. They could easily unify the Linux desktop space and provide a single coherent product. In the end you have to drive Red Hat subscription revenues. You are accountable to Red Hat shareholders. To that end you have to follow the leaders in the high-end workstation space Apple and Microsoft and match their traditional desktop products, avoid their mistakes and exceed expectations.

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Re: Underlying DE for the Workstation product, Desktop -vs- Workstation
by Máirín Duffy 03 Feb '14

03 Feb '14

You want the workstation wg to take over all of the desktop spins? Wow, no conspiracy fodder there, eh? ~m Sent from my phone, which is not an iphone.

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Re: Underlying DE for the Workstation product
by Dan Mashal 02 Feb '14

02 Feb '14

Hi, Please don't take this reply personally, but I found these emails brought up some really important points to respond to. I'm not here to say that the workstation should or shouldn't be Gnome because I'd be wasting my time. I'm just going to bring up some points that I think are important to think about and should be thought about. On 01/30/2014 11:16 PM, Kalev Lember wrote: >I personally feel that a single default offering is a must, if Fedora is >to be successful in the desktop market. We have been losing market share >to Ubuntu that has one single default desktop product, and I think this >is a lesson to learn from. With all due respect can we stop and just think about this for a second? Exactly what lessons have we learned? Has anyone actually thought about exactly why Fedora has lost a massive amount of market share to Ubuntu? Or forget Ubuntu, any other distribution for that matter? What do people look for when choosing a desktop or a distribution for that matter? Why do people currently choose Fedora? Maybe we should think about these things first before moving forward. In general, for a desktop, people want something that "just works" and is "easy, simple and intuitive" to use. Overall, can we say that about the current "workstation" offering? Does anyone really think that taking Fedora, slicing it up in to 3 products called "Workstation", "Cloud", and "Server" is really going to make any difference in adoption of Fedora itself? In my opinion it's going to be a case of "the more things change the more they stay the same". >When I joined the Workstation WG, I did that to help build a successful >product. To build a base system system that user can rely on; a base >system that 3rd party vendors can reliably target with their software. >Most other WG members I've talked to are also here to help build a >single product. Building a reliable product goes FAR deeper than just a working desktop. I know that you do spend time in #Fedora on the front lines as I have seen you there before. I hope that you would agree with me that there is still a lot to be desired from the current "workstation offering" (which is DE independent). For example, disaster recovery needs a lot of work. How can we say Fedora is reliable when it is extremely difficult for a novice user to recover a broken system? At this exact moment I am trying to help someone with this. It's a lot easier just to tell the person (who doesn't even understand how to boot into single user mode) to reinstall. We don't even have an updated rescue mode document. The last time it was updated was Fedora 16. >I do not want to downplay the value of Spins and alternative offerings, >but I personally do not want to spend my time developing them, and I'd >rather see if they were developed elsewhere and the Workstation WG was >limited to putting together one product. Who says you have to? There are people out there that are doing so already. On 01/31/2014 8:50 PM, Adam Williamson wrote: >If I look at it this way, things start looking kind of awesome. For >instance, it *is* an interesting idea to say "if you meet the rules of >"running Fedora Workstation", you can expect that third party software >that complies with (these standards) will work". Looked at as an *extra* >expectation that we provide via this "Product" space, that starts >looking like a cool new thing. I now get the thinking behind your blog which was referenced on the Phoronix forums after reading this email. http://phoronix.com/forums/showthread.php?94869-Future-Of-Fedora-Spins-Is-Q… 3rd parties develop software for things that are popular. Unfortunately, it has been quite proven that Fedora/Gnome is not one of them. I for one really don't think that third parties are going to now jump at the opportunity to create software because we took Gnome and put a sticker that says "workstation" on it. I'm sorry but I really just don't see it happening. Dan

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desktop February 2014