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...
On Sat, Feb 01, 2014 at 12:42:12PM -0500, Alex GS wrote:
it should be a TRUE workstation-class product.
You mean RISC CPUs and a proprietary Unix? ;-)
Fedora Workstation = Core + Mate (Gnome 2 + Compton and/or Mutter)
That's just not feasible. Even though our MATE maintainers invest a great amount of effort to keep it going, there just aren't enough of them to maintain a collection of software as big as Gnome 2 as Fedora's primary desktop.
Now looking at upstream MATE's git there are two people working on it in a regular manner (hope I didn't miss someone) and MATE relies on a whole bunch of stuff that is dead upstream …
They have to play catch-up for a while before they can even start to innovate. Not exactly a good match for Fedora, right?
Lars
You completely missed the whole point of my post.
You wrote: That's just not feasible. Even though our MATE maintainers invest a great amount of effort to keep it going, there just aren't enough of them to maintain a collection of software as big as Gnome 2 as Fedora's primary desktop.
It will involve equal development resources and effort to adapt Gnome 3 Shell to the Workstation use-case and the traditional workstation metaphor. Workstation's have a totally different set of requirements and expectations than Desktops. You can't play around with the UI/UX at all with a Workstation, it has a conservative nature.
You wrote:
innovate. Not exactly a good match for Fedora, right?
They have to play catch-up for a while before they can even start to
Most workstation users today either use Mac OS, Windows 7 or if they're on Linux they're still using Gnome 2 in older versions of RHEL. The point is that if you intend on having a meaningful user-base moving to anything but Gnome 2 and the traditional desktop metaphor is not possible with this product.
Try telling Windows workstation users to abandon Windows 7 and jump to Windows 8 and you'll see what I mean.
One of the major goals of the Workstation PRD was:
Work towards standardizing and unifying the Linux desktop space
link: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Workstation/Workstation_PRD
Gnome 2 has several "modern" different forks; Unity, Cinnamon and Gnome Shell. These have all resulted in a Linux desktop space that's fragmented and in serious decline. If you intend on unifying the desktop space you have to start at square one, back to Gnome 2. Mate is currently moving to GTK 3 and when that happens which is soon, you'll be able to start bringing current Gnome programs and make then integrate better.
In the next major release of MATE it is going to support GTK3 while still
being compatible with GTK2 as well. The development is mainly done by Semmu under Google Summer of Code 2013, with the help of the main MATE developers. You can follow the development at Semmu's GSoC blog.
link: http://wiki.mate-desktop.org/status:gtk
On Sat, Feb 1, 2014 at 2:51 PM, Lars Seipel lars.seipel@gmail.com wrote:
On Sat, Feb 01, 2014 at 12:42:12PM -0500, Alex GS wrote:
it should be a TRUE workstation-class product.
You mean RISC CPUs and a proprietary Unix? ;-)
Fedora Workstation = Core + Mate (Gnome 2 + Compton and/or Mutter)
That's just not feasible. Even though our MATE maintainers invest a great amount of effort to keep it going, there just aren't enough of them to maintain a collection of software as big as Gnome 2 as Fedora's primary desktop.
Now looking at upstream MATE's git there are two people working on it in a regular manner (hope I didn't miss someone) and MATE relies on a whole bunch of stuff that is dead upstream ...
They have to play catch-up for a while before they can even start to innovate. Not exactly a good match for Fedora, right?
Lars
Your assumption is that we use Intel's definition of a "workstation" when we define the "workstation" product is simply wrong.
Also, I think we need a modern desktop that supports hi-dpi screens, touch interface (both are going to be fairly common in laptops very soon), with modern components (systemd's logind session management, wayland instead of Xorg).
Can Mate do hi-dpi? Or wayland? Does it support multi-seat configurations out of the box? Does it have a proper support for touch-based devices? An on-screen-keyboard? Integrated cloud services? Integrated web apps? The answer to all these questions is absolutely no.
Not to mention GNOME actually has far more people working on it and testing it - even outside fedora.
Mate is about holding back and refusing to adapt to changes. Fedora is about moving forward as quickly as possible. Mate is incompatible with that by definition, and since the "workstation" product will be the main product of Fedora, it makes no sense to put a desktop like Mate in it by default.
On Sat, 2014-02-01 at 23:08 +0200, Elad Alfassa wrote:
Your assumption is that we use Intel's definition of a "workstation" when we define the "workstation" product is simply wrong.
+1. You're playing word games, whereas it's pretty clear from the entire thrust of the Workstation effort on all levels that the definition of "workstation" you cite is not the one anyone involved (the WG, FESCo etc) is using.
We could have another argument about whether Workstation is the right word to use, but that doesn't seem like the most productive use of anyone's time...
On Sat, 2014-02-01 at 14:33 -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
On Sat, 2014-02-01 at 23:08 +0200, Elad Alfassa wrote:
Your assumption is that we use Intel's definition of a "workstation" when we define the "workstation" product is simply wrong.
+1. You're playing word games
er, just to be clear, I mean *Alex* was playing word games, not Elad.
On Sat, 2014-02-01 at 23:08 +0200, Elad Alfassa wrote:
and since the "workstation" product will be the main product of Fedora,
Has this been decided / stated anywhere? I didn't believe any relationship of precedence between the three main .next Products had been established.
On Sun, Feb 2, 2014 at 12:35 AM, Adam Williamson awilliam@redhat.comwrote:
On Sat, 2014-02-01 at 23:08 +0200, Elad Alfassa wrote:
and since the "workstation" product will be the main product of Fedora,
Has this been decided / stated anywhere? I didn't believe any relationship of precedence between the three main .next Products had been established. --
I don't think it has been stated anywhere. It was purely my personal opinion and I should have clarified that better. That said, I still don't think having Mate as default in any of our 3 new major products fits the Fedora value of "First". Fedora is about the latest and gratest, not about living in the past.
On 1 February, 2014 2:49:19 PM PST, Elad Alfassa elad@fedoraproject.org wrote:
On Sun, Feb 2, 2014 at 12:35 AM, Adam Williamson awilliam@redhat.comwrote:
On Sat, 2014-02-01 at 23:08 +0200, Elad Alfassa wrote:
and since the "workstation" product will be the main product of Fedora,
Has this been decided / stated anywhere? I didn't believe any relationship of precedence between the three main .next Products had been established. --
I don't think it has been stated anywhere. It was purely my personal opinion and I should have clarified that better. That said, I still don't think having Mate as default in any of our 3 new major products fits the Fedora value of "First". Fedora is about the latest and gratest, not about living in the past.
-- -Elad Alfassa.
-- desktop mailing list desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
I agree with you about mate, just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing an important decision about .next. I guess I'm inclined to the opinion that the three products are all pretty important to us.
My impression so far was the 3 products was to be presented equally, which I also thought was a big reason for trying very hard to avoid product creep. Making a website offering 3 products nicely is doable, at some +x level above that it becomes a cluttered mess.
Christian
----- Original Message -----
From: "Adam Williamson" awilliam@redhat.com To: "Discussions about development for the Fedora desktop" desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org Sent: Saturday, February 1, 2014 11:35:19 PM Subject: Re: Underlying DE for the Workstation product, Desktop -vs- Workstation
On Sat, 2014-02-01 at 23:08 +0200, Elad Alfassa wrote:
and since the "workstation" product will be the main product of Fedora,
Has this been decided / stated anywhere? I didn't believe any relationship of precedence between the three main .next Products had been established. -- Adam Williamson Fedora QA Community Monkey IRC: adamw | Twitter: AdamW_Fedora | XMPP: adamw AT happyassassin . net http://www.happyassassin.net
-- desktop mailing list desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
On Sat, 2014-02-01 at 23:08 +0200, Elad Alfassa wrote:
Mate is about holding back and refusing to adapt to changes. Fedora is about moving forward as quickly as possible. Mate is incompatible with that by definition, and since the "workstation" product will be the main product of Fedora, it makes no sense to put a desktop like Mate in it by default.
Personally, I think the only serious alternative to GNOME is KDE. Choosing a minor desktop to be the default would be a great way to become a minor distro.
Anyway, a modest proposal: I suggest installing GNOME Classic by default. GNOME Classic is a set of GNOME Shell extensions that are officially supported by GNOME. I don't suggest using it as the default session like RHEL is doing, but as an alternative that users could choose in gdm without having to install it themselves.
If you haven't tried GNOME Classic, you can give it a shot in Fedora 19 or 20 by installing the package gnome-classic-session. The experience is roughly halfway between GNOME 3 and MATE. It feels modern, looks a lot better than MATE, and of course has all the same features as standard GNOME, but users who prefer a traditional GNOME 2 desktop should hopefully feel right at home.
If we are considering Gnome Classic, why not consider Cinnamon? For me it's a much for elegant and beautiful interface and still allows traditional workflow patterns and practices. I use it as my default desktop because I kept wasting time tying to re-learn how to interact with my computer when using Gnome.
I am one of the more traditional users whom prefer a normal task bar for managing my time between many different applications at once. Cinnamon is quite mature now and has been pretty stable for me. Its honestly the only reason my coworkers and I have any Gnome software on our machines.
Earlier someone mentioned Fedora loosing users to Ubuntu because of possible fragmentation of the experience (the many different spins). Its my opinion that we are losing users to Ubuntu because Ubuntu ships a truly beautiful and efficient workspace. This comes down to using very elegant fonts (users have to fond non-free fonts to make it appealing appealing in Fedora), and shipping with an interface that is quite easy to use.
Again, I am expressing personal opinion which comes from experience which may not be directly contributing to the discussion. But being an Ambassador and fan of what Fedora stands for my heart truly wants to see it succeed so I voice my concerns as an avid user of Linux in general in hopes it may help. These are the pains that I feel when using the product and these same pains are voiced within my circle of contacts equally. We may not be the target audience (we are RHEL sysadmins mostly) where Workstation WG has stated they want to focus on developers. On Feb 1, 2014 6:55 PM, "Michael Catanzaro" mcatanzaro@gnome.org wrote:
On Sat, 2014-02-01 at 23:08 +0200, Elad Alfassa wrote:
Mate is about holding back and refusing to adapt to changes. Fedora is about moving forward as quickly as possible. Mate is incompatible with that by definition, and since the "workstation" product will be the main product of Fedora, it makes no sense to put a desktop like Mate in it by default.
Personally, I think the only serious alternative to GNOME is KDE. Choosing a minor desktop to be the default would be a great way to become a minor distro.
Anyway, a modest proposal: I suggest installing GNOME Classic by default. GNOME Classic is a set of GNOME Shell extensions that are officially supported by GNOME. I don't suggest using it as the default session like RHEL is doing, but as an alternative that users could choose in gdm without having to install it themselves.
If you haven't tried GNOME Classic, you can give it a shot in Fedora 19 or 20 by installing the package gnome-classic-session. The experience is roughly halfway between GNOME 3 and MATE. It feels modern, looks a lot better than MATE, and of course has all the same features as standard GNOME, but users who prefer a traditional GNOME 2 desktop should hopefully feel right at home.
-- desktop mailing list desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
On Sat, Feb 1, 2014 at 1:08 PM, Elad Alfassa elad@fedoraproject.org wrote:
Your assumption is that we use Intel's definition of a "workstation" when we define the "workstation" product is simply wrong.
Also, I think we need a modern desktop that supports hi-dpi screens, touch interface (both are going to be fairly common in laptops very soon), with modern components (systemd's logind session management, wayland instead of Xorg).
Can Mate do hi-dpi? Or wayland? Does it support multi-seat configurations out of the box? Does it have a proper support for touch-based devices? An on-screen-keyboard? Integrated cloud services? Integrated web apps? The answer to all these questions is absolutely no.
Not to mention GNOME actually has far more people working on it and testing it - even outside fedora.
Mate is about holding back and refusing to adapt to changes. Fedora is about moving forward as quickly as possible. Mate is incompatible with that by definition, and since the "workstation" product will be the main product of Fedora, it makes no sense to put a desktop like Mate in it by default.
Please don't spread inaccurate information about MATE and educate yourself.
http://wiki.mate-desktop.org/roadmap
Dan
On Feb 1, 2014 3:57 PM, "Alex GS" alxgrtnstrngl@gmail.com wrote:
You completely missed the whole point of my post.
You wrote: That's just not feasible. Even though our MATE maintainers invest a great amount of effort to keep it going, there just aren't enough of them to maintain a collection of software as big as Gnome 2 as Fedora's primary desktop.
It will involve equal development resources and effort to adapt Gnome 3
Shell to the Workstation use-case and the traditional workstation metaphor. Workstation's have a totally different set of requirements and expectations than Desktops. You can't play around with the UI/UX at all with a Workstation, it has a conservative nature.
I think you are very wrong in your estimates of the work required. Adapting G3 to a more sophisticated workflow would be far easier than bringing G2 up to the technical expectations that G3 has brought. Let G2 rest.
You wrote: innovate. Not exactly a good match for Fedora, right?
They have to play catch-up for a while before they can even start to
Most workstation users today either use Mac OS, Windows 7 or if they're
on Linux they're still using Gnome 2 in older versions of RHEL. The point is that if you intend on having a meaningful user-base moving to anything but Gnome 2 and the traditional desktop metaphor is not possible with this product.
Try telling Windows workstation users to abandon Windows 7 and jump to
Windows 8 and you'll see what I mean.
One of the major goals of the Workstation PRD was:
I think you've got good point buried in here. :)
The intended audience for G3 is exactly the opposite of the user that Fedora Workstation is targeting. I want to stress that I certainly don't mean the workstation user is going to, or needs to, constantly adjust the theme, wallpaper, fonts, animations, whatever but there are things they are going to want: like group tab switching/window grouping (the virtual desktop has been maintained when the metaphor should be jettisoned for what we are really concerned about: tasks), some way to quickly and consistently monitor intermittent but running tasks, etc. But G3 has too many good ideas, and is too close to being excellent for specialized workflows (like, say, animators at large studios) to drop entirely.
Look at rhel 7: it's using G3 classic mode by default. We don't need to do as rhel since we aren't rhel but I think it is a good idea, given who this is targeting, to see what's behind the changes from default G3. Personally I don't believe that the problem was it being "different". In the end I'd say that G3 wasn't radical enough with the ux changes, and by being more conservative they ended up with a ui that doesn't quite fit in any space.
Work towards standardizing and unifying the Linux desktop space
link: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Workstation/Workstation_PRD
Gnome 2 has several "modern" different forks; Unity, Cinnamon and Gnome
Shell. These have all resulted in a Linux desktop space that's fragmented and in serious decline. If you intend on unifying the desktop space you have to start at square one, back to Gnome 2. Mate is currently moving to GTK 3 and when that happens which is soon, you'll be able to start bringing current Gnome programs and make then integrate better.
I think we'd need to see numbers to be certain but I imagine that the main reason Gnome lost so many users is because of Ubuntu switching their default. Considering the API instability and the fact that Gtk is apparently no longer intended for writing "big apps", the Gnome stack isn't going to be a target for widespread third party development. Instead we should focus on providing THE BEST ootb experience of any desktop and let third party developers target webapi, or use any of the bundling ideas (I liked Lennart's a bit more since it was designed for the Linux DE and with security in mind, but anything that "works" is fine, obviously).
In the next major release of MATE it is going to support GTK3 while
still being compatible with GTK2 as well. The development is mainly done by Semmu under Google Summer of Code 2013, with the help of the main MATE developers. You can follow the development at Semmu's GSoC blog.
link: http://wiki.mate-desktop.org/status:gtk
On Sat, Feb 1, 2014 at 2:51 PM, Lars Seipel lars.seipel@gmail.com wrote:
On Sat, Feb 01, 2014 at 12:42:12PM -0500, Alex GS wrote:
it should be a TRUE workstation-class product.
You mean RISC CPUs and a proprietary Unix? ;-)
Fedora Workstation = Core + Mate (Gnome 2 + Compton and/or Mutter)
That's just not feasible. Even though our MATE maintainers invest a great amount of effort to keep it going, there just aren't enough of them to maintain a collection of software as big as Gnome 2 as Fedora's primary desktop.
Now looking at upstream MATE's git there are two people working on it in a regular manner (hope I didn't miss someone) and MATE relies on a whole bunch of stuff that is dead upstream ...
They have to play catch-up for a while before they can even start to innovate. Not exactly a good match for Fedora, right?
Lars
-- desktop mailing list desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
Adopting anything other than a Gnome 3 based system for Fedora Workstation just doesn't make a lot of sense to me.
That said I think you have a point that, intentionally or not, Gnome 3 has an interface that seems to be touch inspired and consumption-focused, which is at is with the workstation target of software devs, cs students, sysadmins, and the like.
(As an aside, I have been using G3 as my daily desktop for around 4 years--well before the official release. There's a lot to like in G3, otherwise I wouldn't use it, but it still feels like the best of a not-great set of choices.)
Ultimately, it seems like we have a conflict between the goals of Fedora Workstation and those of Gnome. I know there's been discussion about altering, downstream, some of the design choices of Gnome to better suit Fedora's users but nothing came of that. However that was before this big effort to revitalize Fedora (which I am completely behind, for whatever that's worth:) ). What I would like to see is Fedora's designers look at any perceived problems in G3's DESIGN and propose some solutions.
Pardon any typos or unclear writing; I'm typing this on a phone :)
Best/Liam
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