desktop August 2016

desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org

23 participants
16 discussions

[wayland] Applications are unable to grab input
by Christian Stadelmann 20 Apr '17

20 Apr '17

One main difference between x11 and wayland is that in x11 all applications receive all input whereas in wayland the compositor receives input and decides which application may receive it. This causes a major issue with application which need input grab for running or showing a nested desktop. This affects e.g. GUI virtual machines (SPICE clients), RDP clients, VNC clients, nested kwin/gnome-shell/whatever. See also: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1285770 . Games might also be affected, I don't know. I'm posting this here to raise attention because 1. to fix this we need another protocol (extension) 2. this issue can't be fixed in a single application, it needs the whole stack (wayland library, compositors, affected applications) to change Compared to the other bugs in "WaylandRelated" lists [1] [2], these bugs need architecture design, not just fixing bugs in one package. I don't know whether this mailing list is the right place to discuss an issue like this. If you know better, please tell me. [1] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/showdependencytree.cgi?id=1277927&hide_resolved… [2] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/showdependencytree.cgi?id=757579&hide_resolved=1

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coredumpctl integration for F25
by Michael Catanzaro 14 Oct '16

14 Oct '16

Hi, Currently we have coredumpctl installed by default, but it doesn't work because core dumps are consumed by ABRT instead. I'd like to get coredumpctl working out-of-the-box. We can do this by changing our systemd presets [1] to disable abrt-ccpp.service. ABRT will continue to function thanks to the ABRT developers' work on coredumpctl integration via abrt-vmcore.service. There is a somewhat- reduced feature set, but I've been running this for several months happily and I haven't noticed any issues; my crashes are being reported to FAF, and I can manually report to Bugzilla. See [2] for details. This might be slightly controversial for two reasons. First, the big change here is that core dumps will appear in the magical and super- awesome coredumpctl tool in addition to ABRT, but would no longer be created in the cwd when ulimit is set appropriately (we would need to feature that in the release notes). This aligns us with upstream systemd behavior, but diverges from Debian and Ubuntu, which still create the old-style coredumps in the cwd. Second, my understanding is that the ABRT developers prefer to improve abrt-cli and tell people to use that rather than coredumpctl. But as coredumpctl is very mature (nicer) and cross-distro so it gets many more contributors, I definitely prefer to instruct people to use coredumpctl instead for C/C++ crashes. We could totally do this change for F24 as well as it should be just a one-line change, but in the spirit of beta freeze I figure it's probably best left for F25. Michael [1] https://pagure.io/fedora-release/blob/master/f/90-default.preset [2] https://github.com/abrt/abrt/issues/1108

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Another round of default app discussion
by Michael Catanzaro 25 Sep '16

25 Sep '16

Hi, Recently the Workstation working group agreed to match the GNOME apps we install by default in Fedora with upstream GNOME's core apps. We will by default sync our default apps to upstream's, and make exceptions only for exceptional reasons if when proposed on this list. This adds a bit more cement to our status as the best GNOME distribution with minimal divergence from upstream. I worked upstream with designers and release team to move many desirable apps into core, to better match what we're currently shipping in Fedora. I also created a gnome-incubator metamodule upstream, which is where we'll put apps that we want to be core apps by design, but which we recognize are not yet ready to be installed by default in distributions. Currently that is home to bijiben, gnome-boxes, gnome- calendar, gnome-dictionary, gnome-music, and gnome-photos. Here is how we currently diverge from the new upstream recommendations: Apps missing from Fedora: epiphany, gnome-logs Extra apps in Fedora: bijiben, evolution, gnome-boxes, shotwell, rhythmbox I see little value in discussing Epiphany again right now. Let's make an exception for that. I have added Logs in Fedora just now, as I expect that will be uncontroversial and I don't see any value in diverging from upstream here. Bijiben is just not very good yet, and it's not under active development. There's no good reason for us to diverge from upstream here, and I expect it will be uncontroversial, so I've dropped it. I guess Evolution might be controversial; I use it religiously, and many of you probably do too. But the user interface is complex and confusing; users should not be exposed to this by default, barring drastic UI changes that are outside the scope of the Evolution project. Evolution is a great mail client for power users, but I'm confident that the average user will be better off with webmail services; folks who want a desktop client can simply install one, after all. We intend to replace it with GNOME Mail eventually, but nobody has started developing it yet. I propose we drop Evolution, but I have not done so yet, pending further discussion. Boxes has too many serious bugs right now, so it cannot go into gnome- core yet, but we intend it to eventually. Since this is a significant application, I have not yet removed it from our default install, pending further discussion. My main concern is that it would look odd for us to remove such a significant app from the default install, then bring it back in a year or two. On the other hand, users won't notice a thing unless they make a habit of reinstalling Fedora, and it's not good to include apps we can't fully recommend. It's not clear to me what choice is best here. I propose we make temporary exceptions to keep Shotwell and Rhythmbox, until their intended replacements, Photos and Music, move into upstream's GNOME core moduleset. That will very likely happen for Photos for F25. I'm less certain about Music. Michael

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Change in WG meeting time
by Paul W. Frields 12 Sep '16

12 Sep '16

I wanted to check on Workstation Working Group members' availability for our meeting time. Our current time, 10:00am Eastern on biweekly Wednesdays, has worked fairly well. However, Michael can't make it for the foreseeable future. In some groups it might be odd to look at times for just one person, but he's a very active contributor to the WG so it makes sense to do here. :-) I posted this WhenIsGood for WG members to answer: http://whenisgood.net/workstation-wg-2016 Please visit this by the end of the week. I'll take a look and post results next Tuesday. -- Paul W. Frields http://paul.frields.org/ gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233 5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717 http://redhat.com/ - - - - http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/ The open source story continues to grow: http://opensource.com

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Wayland by default on F25? Blockers?
by Christian Stadelmann 03 Sep '16

03 Sep '16

I'd like to know whether there are plans to make wayland default in F25. I'm asking because there was no change proposed for this¹, although Fedora Magazine is stating it will become default in F25². I know that there have been some considerations on this before³ and some places where issues are collected⁴. Still, the wiki page is missing some important stuff: How do we handle the fact that even XWayland applications cannot be started as root? I'm ok with dropping the "feature" of starting GUI applications as root, but this might need some discussion and will need some communication. Please note that this would drop any support for at least a dozen applications such as GParted or grub-customizer. And, as Kamil Paral stated on the december thread: > I think we're going to get much worse publicity with this than primary selection. Inexperienced Linux users are used to run "sudo gedit", because terminal editors are unfriendly. Even I, with my years of experience, use "sudo meld" to merge configuration files, because I don't want to learn vimdiff, and graphical apps can simply offer a much superior experience. There was a discussion on devel list about this and everybody talked why running root gui apps is unsafe on X11, but nobody explained why it is unsafe on Wayland. Polkit and fine-grained permissions were proposed, which is a good idea, but it's not going to solve all use cases and it's not the current state of things in many apps. So unless there's a very good reason for deviating from current common practices, I'd put this onto "needs to be fixed" list. The more things we break without a really good reason, the more pushback we're going to get. Maybe this can be improved gradually over time? This point should at least be noted on the wiki list. Can someone please add it? Accessibility is pretty much unusable on wayland right now. The wiki page lets me assume that nobody really worked on this besides some minor bug fixings. Can we disable wayland for people relying on a11y? If not, shipping wayland by default probably is a bad idea. Virtual machine and remote desktop software: Currently, it is impossible for remote desktop and virtual machine GUIs (both under XWayland and Wayland) to grab keys. This is a major regression for all users of these pieces of software.⁵ This point is completely missing on the wiki page. Can someone please add it? Stability: There are more crashers in gnome-shell with wayland than with X11. That's probably ok, but still worth considering. Drivers: Lastly, I don't know anything about support with non-Intel GPUs, because their drivers (especially proprietary ones) used to mess up pretty much last time I used them. ¹ https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/25/ChangeSet ² https://fedoramagazine.org/whats-new-fedora-24-workstation/ ³ See e.g: * "Plan to organize the Wayland-by-default effort" in late 2015, https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/desktop@lists.fedoraproject.o… * "Wayland blockers for F24 default" in februar, https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/desktop@lists.fedoraproject.o… ⁴ See https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=WaylandRelated https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=WaylandRelated and https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=wayland https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Wayland_features ⁵ https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=97333 and https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1285770

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Another Ars review
by Michael Catanzaro 03 Sep '16

03 Sep '16

Hi, We should all read today's featured Ars article: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/08/fedora-24-review-the-… There's a few inaccuracies, but no more than normal for distro reviews. It's good feedback at any rate. Highlights: * Author plainly states that he thinks Fedora is better than Ubuntu and Mint * Author thinks we released too soon, should have waited for a kernel upgrade. (I don't think it makes sense to consider the kernel in the schedule....) * Author mentions the Skylake fiasco in recommending that users wait a couple months before updating to the new release; familiar suggestions that our distro is unstable. In a sense it's Intel's fault for the bad update, but other distros did not ship this broken update. This could probably have been avoided if our update system was more conservative. It's nuts that we have important packages going from testing to stable in less than a day and we should fix this. * Author praised GNOME Photos and GNOME Calendar... even though they're not installed by default. (Let's change that!) He also praised Maps. * Author says Flatpak support in Software is still unstable. That's being worked on. * Author is disappointed that Flatpaks don't use the system fontconfig settings, says it makes Flatpak apps look inconsistent. * Author heaped praise on the new font settings. He didn't notice the changes that went into Freetype, though, so GNOME got perhaps more praise than deserved, but I can live with that. ;) * Author is also pleased with QGnomePlatform Some inaccuracies I found: * Author dinged us for not having Chromium, but we do have Chromium in our repos. It's because it (presumably) has no appdata file, so it doesn't appear in Software. Who wants to fix it? * Author dinged us for not having VLC, but this is really unfair; he's probably not aware of the legal issues. * Author doesn't realize that our graphical upgrades are already working for F23 -> F24, suggests users must wait until F25 to see how well the upgrade works. * Author thinks the PackageKit command-not-found helper we've had for years is new and related to dnf. * Author thinks spins are variants of WorkStation... and somehow decided to camel-case our name * Author thinks we're on an eight-month release cycle (sad!) Michael

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Workstation WG meeting recap 2016-Aug-31
by Paul W. Frields 31 Aug '16

31 Aug '16

Minutes: https://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting/2016-08-31/workstation.201… Minutes (text): https://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting/2016-08-31/workstation.201… Log: https://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting/2016-08-31/workstation.201… * * * =============================== #fedora-meeting: Workstation WG =============================== Meeting started by stickster at 14:00:20 UTC. The full logs are available at https://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting/2016-08-31/workstation.201… . Meeting summary --------------- * Roll call (stickster, 14:00:23) * Meeting time (stickster, 14:05:06) * ACTION: stickster put whenisgood on list after this meeting, and finalize decision by no later than next WG meeting (stickster, 14:09:30) * Wayland by default (stickster, 14:10:33) * LINK: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/WaylandByDefault (stickster, 14:11:00) * ACTION: mclasen make a proposed "real blocker" list for Wayland default, triaging the WaylandRelated tracker, and send to list (stickster, 14:37:45) * Blocker list will be the way we make a decision next meeting on keeping to Wayland by default (stickster, 14:38:19) * ACTION: stickster make sure WaylandRelated tracker is referenced in Common Bugs page for F25 (stickster, 14:39:21) * Shotwell / GNOME Photos (stickster, 14:40:25) * LINK: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=680834 says that https://git.gnome.org/browse/tracker/commit/?id=614589d was pushed (stickster, 14:42:49) * Shotwell is actively maintained, and has two new releases in the past month already (stickster, 14:49:46) * AGREED: Drop the "change default" discussion for photo handling in F25, revisit for F26 based on state of gnome-photos (+1: 5, 0: 0, -1: 0) (stickster, 14:52:01) * Non-working sushi (stickster, 14:52:14) * mclasen has patch (stickster, 14:53:20) * ACTION: mclasen land patch and get a release out (or engage minion) ;-) (stickster, 14:53:37) * LINK: https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/36/b1/6c/36b16cc68bbbca07f1c… (stickster, 14:54:34) * All other business (open floor) (stickster, 14:54:50) Meeting ended at 14:57:10 UTC. Action Items ------------ * stickster put whenisgood on list after this meeting, and finalize decision by no later than next WG meeting * mclasen make a proposed "real blocker" list for Wayland default, triaging the WaylandRelated tracker, and send to list * stickster make sure WaylandRelated tracker is referenced in Common Bugs page for F25 * mclasen land patch and get a release out (or engage minion) ;-) Action Items, by person ----------------------- * mclasen * mclasen make a proposed "real blocker" list for Wayland default, triaging the WaylandRelated tracker, and send to list * mclasen land patch and get a release out (or engage minion) ;-) * stickster * stickster put whenisgood on list after this meeting, and finalize decision by no later than next WG meeting * stickster make sure WaylandRelated tracker is referenced in Common Bugs page for F25 * **UNASSIGNED** * (none) People Present (lines said) --------------------------- * stickster (86) * mclasen (32) * kalev (18) * zodbot (10) * rdieter (5) * otaylor (4) * ryanlerch (1) * mcatanzaro (0) Generated by `MeetBot`_ 0.1.4 .. _`MeetBot`: http://wiki.debian.org/MeetBot -- Paul W. Frields http://paul.frields.org/ gpg fingerprint: 3DA6 A0AC 6D58 FEC4 0233 5906 ACDB C937 BD11 3717 http://redhat.com/ - - - - http://pfrields.fedorapeople.org/ The open source story continues to grow: http://opensource.com

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Agenda for tomorrow's (Wed 2016-Aug-31) meeting
by Paul W. Frields 30 Aug '16

30 Aug '16

Sorry for being so tardy getting this out. Suggestions welcome. Meeting is at 1400 UTC, 10:00am US/EDT. * WG meeting time * Wayland by default * What specific bugs need fixed to make this a "go"? * Shotwell -> gnome-photos change * Non-working sushi -- Paul

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File previews (sushi) is broken on Wayland
by Elad Alfassa 25 Aug '16

25 Aug '16

Hi all, I just wanted to bring this bug to your attention: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1295031 The tl;dr is that file previews in nautilius (aka sushi) will not work on Wayland, and thus will be broken by default in F25. We have two options going forward, we can either do one of those, or both: 1) We can patch sushi in Fedora to use the X11 backend (and thus XWayland), as suggested in one of the upstream bugs. I'm not sure if this will work since I don't have time to test this at the moment, but it might "fix" the problem, at least in the short term. 2) We can remove sushi from our default installation. Shipping something that will just crash when used with our defaults (ie. Wayland) doesn't make much sense and it's probably violating our final release criteria that says default applications must work as expected. I hope I'll have time to test if "solution" #1 works soon and report the result. Anyway, I think the WG should decide what will happen to this package. -- -Elad.

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Wayland-by-default: it is for Alpha, unless you change something
by Adam Williamson 24 Aug '16

24 Aug '16

Hey folks! We were just chewing over the Wayland-by-default Change and Fedora 25 status in the QA meeting. That led me to realize maybe this needs emphasizing: Alpha go/no-go (after the initial slip) is Thursday. We will be trying to cut the Alpha RC today or tomorrow. Right now, *Wayland will be the default* in any Alpha compose, because that's the state of things in the 'stable' repo right now. If you *don't* want Wayland to be default in Alpha you need to take action right away. Wednesday is too late - unless we find blocking issues in the RC compose and have to slip again, which you shouldn't rely on. If you want Wayland not to be default in Alpha, you need to file a bug and propose it as either a blocker or a freeze exception issue immediately, and submit an update that changes the default and mark it as fixing the bug. Please ask me or any other person involved in the blocker process if you need help on doing that. If no blocker/FE bug is filed, Wayland will be the default in Alpha.

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