Ryan Lerch píše v St 03. 05. 2017 v 10:38 +1000:
On Wed, May 3, 2017 at 12:47 AM, Jiri Eischmann <eischmann@redhat.com
wrote: Hi, last week I asked on my Czech blog what people are missing on the Linux desktop, mainly Fedora Workstation. It was picked by all major Czech Linux sites and received literally hundreds of responses. I went through them and created a summary for you. Some of it are well- known issues/features, some points were new to me. If something is not clear, just let me know and I'll be happy to explain it:
INSTALLER It was mentioned several times as something that put off users when trying Fedora. In pretty much all cases it was partitioning that was the problem (too complicated, different to what they're used to). Some of the experiences were a couple of years old, so it might have improved, but apparently we still have reserves here. One of the more concrete points:
- Missing ability to choose where to place the bootloader (it's
there, but very well hidden and cumbersome to set up).
UPDATES Quite a few people complained about having to restart to install updates. I know objective reasons for this, but it's important to understand that it's perceived as annoying by users and we should strive for minimizing the number of packages that need to be updated offline.
UPGRADES One of the most frequent request was an LTS version. When I asked why, the answer was typically that upgrades still bring incompatibilities, regressions, lost settings. The most frequently mentioned offender was NM, other mentioned problems were mostly hardware related (regressions in graphics, dockin station support, sound).
SHELL
- the Activities hot corner is triggered too easily. We used to
have the "pressure" feature on X11 which prevented accidental triggering, but it seems to be gone on Wayland. It's a UX problem for many users.
- Ability to turn off effects on less powerful computers.
- Some extensions make the Shell crash.
- Switching between keyboard layouts loses focus (e.g. when you
press Super+Space while e.g. typing in a search field you need to click to the search field again to continue typing)
- When you use one of the tiling gestures you then can't change the
size of the tiled window.
- There is no presentation mode which would disable notifications,
screensaver inhibitor etc.
- Multitouch gestures more widely used and unified across the
desktop (GTK vs Qt).
GDM
- You can not turn NumLock on by default.
- You have to restart to switch from GNOME Classic to GNOME
(perhaps a bug in F25?).
WAYLAND Not really big surprises here:
- Missing remote desktop (one of the most frequent comments at
all).
- Missing color picker support.
- Missing screen sharing.
- Missing something like xdotool (shotcuts for window
manipulations, e.g. to show/hide a window of certain app)
SETTINGS
- Many people complained about splitting settings into g-c-c and g-
t-t, tried to explain the reason, but nevertheless it's one of the most common complaints.
LOCALIZATION Users don't get a fully localized system after installing Fedora. Many languages don't have all l10n packages on the installation ISO and users have to run 'sudo dnf install langpacks-*' manually to install missing packages, but most users don't have a clue about this and just think that the missing localization is not in Fedora at all. Mainly LibreOffice suffers from this not being localized at all. This is a long known problem and we should really fix it and install the missing packages automatically either during installation or in the initial experience. There have been a couple of other complaints about locatization, everything language specific. But localization seems to be very important to users and they're very sensitive to untranslated pieces of UI, especially if it's what's perceived as part of the system, it makes the system look amateurish.
PDF Many complaints about PDF support, mostly:
- Evince doesn't support non-ascii characters in PDF forms, this is
a major problem for many people.
- Some PDF forms refuse to work with anything but Acrobat Reader
although they may work just fine with Evince, faking a reader's identity might be a solution here.
- Incomplete support for PDF 1.7.
DIALOGS
- "file save dialog" doesn't have "Recent" any more and if you save
a couple of files in the same location, you have to go through the full path every time instead of clicking Recent and pick the destination folder directly.
APPLICATIONS
- gnome-software has problems to fetch content (e.g. screenshots)
behind a proxy.
- A new chat app (unlikely to happen due to the nature of current
IM services).
- More modern and better looking presentation templates and graphs
in LibreOffice.
- Ability to install Android apps.
- Difficult Thunderbird<->Evolution migration.
- OneDrive integration in Nautilus/GOA.
- Firefox should have tabs integrated into the title bar just like
on Window.
- Cannot connect to GOA accounts after log out and log in to the
account (it's a known systemd bug, but a pretty annoying one and we have had it for several releases already). GPU as expected a very hot area, most frequent complaints:
- Nvidia driver is hard to install and it breaks with kernel
updates.
- Support for switchable graphics cards (not sure the complainers
have tried F25 and newer).
- Support for video output through different cards.
HARDWARE People ask for supported laptop models where stuff like suspend, hot keys, wifi, bluetooth would be quaranteed to work on Fedora.
- Canon printers need to be set up after every kernel update.
- Better battery life.
- Missing a "Pan/Scroll" feature in Wacom tablet support.
- Fedora support for ARM laptops (Chromebooks).
- Bad support for screen between 120 and 192 DPI which is a vast
majority of monitors with better DPI in the market. Users can partly fix it by manual tweaks (larger fonts etc.), but they can't be done per screen.
SOUND
- Can't control volume of a connected bluetooth speaker (general
problem or device specific?).
- PulseAudio doesn't remember settings for multichannel setups
after restart.
GRUB
- a tool on a live ISO the user can boot and fix their broken
bootloader.
BUG HANDLING A couple of users complained that bug reports in RHBZ get ignored which discourages them to report problems.
Jiri
Is it worth trying to track some of these in the Fedora Workstation pagure queue?
I know some of these are upstream fixes, but we might be able to track them primarily in the pagure queue, and maybe discuss some temporary workarounds to ship while they are being fixed upstream.
I'll leave this up to the workstation working group. So far I've been opening bugs upstream, but things like the missing localization files are purely problems of Workstation, so it'd make sense at least for those.
Jiri