Hi, so 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/ http://peterlevi.com/variety/ http://foldercolor.tuxfamily.org choqok for GNOME (microblogging client)
** URL - https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2015/04/20/fedora-workstation-more-than-the-s...
On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 8:34 PM, Christian Schaller cschalle@redhat.com wrote:
Hi, so 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.
[...]
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.
Its getting worse RF does not have a repo for F22 which means once it is released even RF won't be an easy option for a while.
HiDPI issues A few comments on various challenges people have with HiDPI screens, especially when dealing with non-GTK3 apps-
Well I had patches to fix this (requires wayland though; but still works for legacy apps) see https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=728902 Should try to find time to fnish them at some point.
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
Anything more specific than that?
Better Android integration A few people asked for more/better Android device integration features
What does that mean?
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/ http://peterlevi.com/variety/ http://foldercolor.tuxfamily.org choqok for GNOME (microblogging client)
Well if there are no legal issues (assuming all of those are FOSS) we could just package them.
----- Original Message -----
From: "drago01" drago01@gmail.com To: "Discussions about development for the Fedora desktop" desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org Sent: Thursday, May 7, 2015 2:41:41 PM Subject: Re: Why people are not switching to Fedora
On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 8:34 PM, Christian Schaller cschalle@redhat.com wrote:
Hi, so 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.
[...]
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.
Its getting worse RF does not have a repo for F22 which means once it is released even RF won't be an easy option for a while.
HiDPI issues A few comments on various challenges people have with HiDPI screens, especially when dealing with non-GTK3 apps-
Well I had patches to fix this (requires wayland though; but still works for legacy apps) see https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=728902 Should try to find time to fnish them at some point.
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
Anything more specific than that?
One commenter mentioned that his Samba config was difficult due to SELinux. Don't remember any other concrete items mentioned, but I did actually myself hit a SELinux related issue yesterday (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=555785)
Better Android integration A few people asked for more/better Android device integration features
What does that mean?
I think the comments was in the context of easier data sharing between their phone and the desktop.
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/ http://peterlevi.com/variety/ http://foldercolor.tuxfamily.org choqok for GNOME (microblogging client)
Well if there are no legal issues (assuming all of those are FOSS) we could just package them.
Yeah, think they are all free.
-- desktop mailing list desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
On Thu, 7 May 2015 20:41:41 +0200, drago01 wrote:
3rd Party Software
Its getting worse RF does not have a repo for F22 which means once it is released even RF won't be an easy option for a while.
Since Apr 29th, there has been some activity in their free repo: something which seems like an unofficial and incomplete mass-rebuild for F22 done on some buildsys other than the official one and continued on May 2nd. Not all packages are available.
On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 9:41 PM, drago01 drago01@gmail.com wrote:
Its getting worse RF does not have a repo for F22 which means once it is released even RF won't be an easy option for a while.
I should also point out that this specific third party repo is not a solution. It's not easy for people to install, it requires prior knowledge. If a user needs to google search how to make their music play and follow instructions on some forum, that's a very bad first impression. If you google how to play mp3 in fedora, the first result is an askfedora thread, whose first answer talks about gstreamer1 porting... that's not useful for users. At all. So not only it's a google search, it's a google search that would land you on pages with confusing technical terms. Yes, Workstation is for developers, but you can't expect every web developer to get familiar with the architecture of our multimedia stack just to play their music.
And even if they do find that repo, they have no way to install it securely and safely. While rpmfusion packages are signed, the key is downloaded in the initial setup (when you download the -release RPM) over plain text, and the page you download it from is a wiki people can just edit - and also served over plain text so someone could modify the instructions and the links...
Another point is that this repo does not seem to be fast enough with security updates, as it is operated by volunteers and doesn't seem to have a security response team - so it sometimes takes weeks for critical security fixes to be shipped to users.
I don't know how to solve these issues. I know there's a complicated legal background for all of this, but what I do know is: 1) People should be able to play music and videos 2) People shouldn't need to sacrifice their safety to play music and videos 3) People shouldn't need to have special knowledge about how their OS works to perform these basic tasks.
And this example is about codecs... drivers are even a bigger mess. How is a user supposed to download a wifi driver when their wifi is not working? Keep in mind that many newer laptops don't have an ehternet port at all. If you have a broadcom wireless chip and no ethernet port, you'll need a second device, or a second OS, to find out how to get the driver and how to install it. And if you have a different OS that already works, and Fedora requires you to either replace your wifi chip or figure out the magic command lines to install a driver, why would you make the switch?
Basically, the more time a person needs to spend on learning how to make your OS work the less they'd want to make the switch.
Elad Alfassa wrote:
On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 9:41 PM, drago01 drago01@gmail.com wrote:
Its getting worse RF does not have a repo for F22 which means once it is released even RF won't be an easy option for a while.
I should also point out that this specific third party repo is not a solution.
Given the legal (patents) landscape, this is currently as good as it gets unfortunately.
Unless you have specific (viable) suggestions, this line of conversation is likely not constructive.
-- Rex
On May 7, 2015 2:27 PM, "Elad Alfassa" elad@fedoraproject.org wrote:
On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 9:41 PM, drago01 drago01@gmail.com wrote:
Its getting worse RF does not have a repo for F22 which means once it is released even RF won't be an easy option for a while.
I should also point out that this specific third party repo is not a solution. It's not easy for people to install, it requires prior knowledge. If a user needs to google search how to make their music play and follow instructions on some forum, that's a very bad first impression. If you google how to play mp3 in fedora, the first result is an askfedora thread, whose first answer talks about gstreamer1 porting... that's not useful for users. At all.
...
--
-Elad.
I know this isn't your point, but did you propose or vote up a better answer? #1 ranking in a Google search is a pretty good start, it's community contributed content, and you're part of the community. If you come up with something friendlier, share a link, I'll do my part and vote it up.
--Pete
HI
On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 10:11 PM, Pete Travis wrote:
I know this isn't your point, but did you propose or vote up a better answer? #1 ranking in a Google search is a pretty good start, it's community contributed content, and you're part of the community. If you come up with something friendlier, share a link, I'll do my part and vote it up.
FYI, I have already done this several hours ago. I would recommend that more people participate and help make the content better as well
Rahul
On 8 May 2015 at 01:57, Elad Alfassa elad@fedoraproject.org wrote:
On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 9:41 PM, drago01 drago01@gmail.com wrote:
Its getting worse RF does not have a repo for F22 which means once it is released even RF won't be an easy option for a while.
I don't know how to solve these issues. I know there's a complicated legal background for all of this, but what I do know is:
- People should be able to play music and videos
- People shouldn't need to sacrifice their safety to play music and videos
- People shouldn't need to have special knowledge about how their OS
works to perform these basic tasks.
Well said !! I did F21 release party and users were asking same thing before switching to Fedora. Other distros looks like handling this better way.
Regards, Pravin Satpute
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hi I agree with this but at the same time I disagree. I completely agree that installing codecs should be easier. On the other hand, I'm sympothetic to fedora's awkward position. If they made installing these codecs easier or installed them by default, even though the software to play them is open source, they could find themselves on the bad end of an riaa or mpaa lawsuit. Redhat might win, but it would be spending money they could be spending improving linux on stupid and pointless court battles. It's why I've converted all my media to open codecs, ogg or opus, even stuff that I originally got in patent encumbered mp3 formats and others. Is this an option for everyone? Absolutely not, since I know enough about how linux works to know how, but not everyone will. It's a complicated and thorny issue that I have no answers to. I'll also point out that some distributions, notably ubuntu, used to offer a solution by advertising an "officially" sanctioned method, which involved shelling out money for a blob from fluendo to play the mp3 codec, which, while avoiding a lawsuit, completely defeats the purpose of open source software. This is not an option for fedora, and I hope they never consider this. I'd honestly rather the lawsuit than that solution. Thanks Kendell clark Sent from Fedora GNU/Linux
pravin.d.s@gmail.com wrote:
On 8 May 2015 at 01:57, Elad Alfassa elad@fedoraproject.org wrote:
On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 9:41 PM, drago01 drago01@gmail.com wrote:
Its getting worse RF does not have a repo for F22 which means once it is released even RF won't be an easy option for a while.
I don't know how to solve these issues. I know there's a complicated legal background for all of this, but what I do know is: 1) People should be able to play music and videos 2) People shouldn't need to sacrifice their safety to play music and videos 3) People shouldn't need to have special knowledge about how their OS works to perform these basic tasks.
Well said !! I did F21 release party and users were asking same thing before switching to Fedora. Other distros looks like handling this better way.
Regards, Pravin Satpute
On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 9:37 AM, kendell clark coffeekingms@gmail.com wrote:
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hi I agree with this but at the same time I disagree. I completely agree that installing codecs should be easier. On the other hand, I'm sympothetic to fedora's awkward position. If they made installing these codecs easier or installed them by default, even though the software to play them is open source, they could find themselves on the bad end of an riaa or mpaa lawsuit.
Nope. Neither of those entities own codec patents. And no its not "impossible" to ship those codes in a legal way. If fedora/red hat would buy patent licenses they can legally distribute those codes *but* those licenses would not apply to remixes so anyone else basing his/her distro on fedora would have to either remove them or get a patent license. MP3 will expire soon anyway. So we'd only need AAC/H264 to be able to handle most videos out there.
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hi What sort of message do you suppose that would send to the open source community if redhat paid up? That would have all kinds of consequences, and I'm not averse to installing rpm fusion repo packages in order to get them. If windows/mac users are staying away from linux based on having to install special repositories for codecs, especially since it's very simple to find out that's what needs doing, then they obviously don't want to use linux that badly anyway. They have to go through quite a bit more than that to get codecs for non patent encumbered formats in windows. I know windows supports mp3 natively, and mp4, but only some containers. Windows provides zero support when it comes to installing codecs. Just an error dialog. Not that linux is perfect in this area but it's trying, and that has to count for something. I know I'm being stubborn, but to be completely honest, catering to the "average" user starts to get rather old and unappealing after a while, and beyond a certain point ... Thanks Kendell clark Sent from Fedora GNU/Linux
drago01 wrote:
On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 9:37 AM, kendell clark coffeekingms@gmail.com wrote:
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA512
hi I agree with this but at the same time I disagree. I completely agree that installing codecs should be easier. On the other hand, I'm sympothetic to fedora's awkward position. If they made installing these codecs easier or installed them by default, even though the software to play them is open source, they could find themselves on the bad end of an riaa or mpaa lawsuit.
Nope. Neither of those entities own codec patents. And no its not "impossible" to ship those codes in a legal way. If fedora/red hat would buy patent licenses they can legally distribute those codes *but* those licenses would not apply to remixes so anyone else basing his/her distro on fedora would have to either remove them or get a patent license. MP3 will expire soon anyway. So we'd only need AAC/H264 to be able to handle most videos out there.
Third party software is a big point in my opinion. I'll speak from my angle which seems to be a different PoV that was already talked about.
Linux Gaming is getting a huge rise in popularity. Valve has adopted a stable Debian fork for SteamOS and Ubuntu is their recommended distribution for Steam gaming. Closed Source drivers are also easier to maintain and install in Ubuntu than Fedora for example. It's all a question of: Ease of use (for first timers) and liberty to select from closed source and open source software.
Fedora has a hard stance on Closed source software, installing Steam for example, is a pain. When I switched from Windows for my work in my thesis, I opted for Fedora due being the forefront solid distribution for GNOME 3.0 (Which I quite love for being different and trying to move the paradigm forward) but I feel punished everytime I want to do something that applies to a real use case scenario of a normal end user. (There was no Workstation terminology used before, one can say that Fedora is workstation oriented and not multipurpose, but still)
I think Fedora should grab the boat on Linux Gaming as soon as they can. GoG is launching GoG Galaxy which is a Store Manager similar like Steam but with no DRM. AMD is working hard on open sourcing their drivers. Vulkan has to be implemented in the future and Fedora should be one of the first to implement the new drivers with the new API. NVidia is still NVidia, but they are the kings in 3D Graphics in Linux. Using them should be easier in Fedora.
Those are my two cents for now, sorry if I got off-topic or offtrack.
On Fri, 8 May 2015 at 09:05 kendell clark coffeekingms@gmail.com wrote:
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hi What sort of message do you suppose that would send to the open source community if redhat paid up? That would have all kinds of consequences, and I'm not averse to installing rpm fusion repo packages in order to get them. If windows/mac users are staying away from linux based on having to install special repositories for codecs, especially since it's very simple to find out that's what needs doing, then they obviously don't want to use linux that badly anyway. They have to go through quite a bit more than that to get codecs for non patent encumbered formats in windows. I know windows supports mp3 natively, and mp4, but only some containers. Windows provides zero support when it comes to installing codecs. Just an error dialog. Not that linux is perfect in this area but it's trying, and that has to count for something. I know I'm being stubborn, but to be completely honest, catering to the "average" user starts to get rather old and unappealing after a while, and beyond a certain point ... Thanks Kendell clark Sent from Fedora GNU/Linux
drago01 wrote:
On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 9:37 AM, kendell clark coffeekingms@gmail.com wrote:
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hi I agree with this but at the same time I disagree. I completely agree that installing codecs should be easier. On the other hand, I'm sympothetic to fedora's awkward position. If they made installing these codecs easier or installed them by default, even though the software to play them is open source, they could find themselves on the bad end of an riaa or mpaa lawsuit.
Nope. Neither of those entities own codec patents. And no its not "impossible" to ship those codes in a legal way. If fedora/red hat would buy patent licenses they can legally distribute those codes *but* those licenses would not apply to remixes so anyone else basing his/her distro on fedora would have to either remove them or get a patent license. MP3 will expire soon anyway. So we'd only need AAC/H264 to be able to handle most videos out there.
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desktop mailing list desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
hi I agree with this but at the same time I disagree. I completely agree that installing codecs should be easier. On the other hand, I'm sympothetic to fedora's awkward position. If they made installing these codecs easier or installed them by default, even though the software to play them is open source, they could find themselves on the bad end of an riaa or mpaa lawsuit.
Nope. Neither of those entities own codec patents. And no its not "impossible" to ship those codes in a legal way. If fedora/red hat would buy patent licenses they can legally distribute those codes *but* those licenses would not apply to remixes so anyone else basing his/her distro on fedora would have to either remove them or get a patent license. MP3 will expire soon anyway. So we'd only need AAC/H264 to be able to handle most videos out there.
And H.265, plus probably some of the Dobly ones for surround sound.... it's ongoing.
On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 7:05 PM, Peter Robinson pbrobinson@gmail.com wrote:
hi I agree with this but at the same time I disagree. I completely agree that installing codecs should be easier. On the other hand, I'm sympothetic to fedora's awkward position. If they made installing these codecs easier or installed them by default, even though the software to play them is open source, they could find themselves on the bad end of an riaa or mpaa lawsuit.
Nope. Neither of those entities own codec patents. And no its not "impossible" to ship those codes in a legal way. If fedora/red hat would buy patent licenses they can legally distribute those codes *but* those licenses would not apply to remixes so anyone else basing his/her distro on fedora would have to either remove them or get a patent license. MP3 will expire soon anyway. So we'd only need AAC/H264 to be able to handle most videos out there.
And H.265, plus probably some of the Dobly ones for surround sound.... it's ongoing.
I wrote "most" not "all" ;)
Hey all, I joined the -desktop mailing list literally because of this thread and the associated blog post. I'm going to be responding from a user's point of view.
Release Cadence:
Personally I think 6 months is about the appropriate time. If Fedora moved to an 8-month release and didn't simultaneously make a 'Tumbleweed'-style branch then personally I'd just move to Arch full-time.
Whether or not Fedora DOES switch to an 8 month, or even 12 month release, I would personally love to see a Tumbleweed-style branch. Something more stable than Rawhide but more to date than $RELEASE
3rd Party Software:
I don't like that getting mp3's, flash, etc, installed is such a pain in the ass. I understand that its patent encumbered but -something- needs to be done. Especially if RPMFusion is going through issues right now. We all support FOSS and we all love FOSS, but lets be honest here: if RPM-Fusion, or a replacement, didn't exist then Fedora's share of the linux market would be a fraction of what it is.
Optimus Support:
I can't speak on this one since I don't have an Optimus enabled laptop.
Upgrades:
This was actually an idea I brought up to Richard Hughes a few years ago, though it never went anywhere. See: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1036486
HiDPU Issues:
No HiDPI, can't comment.
Multimonitor Support:
I use KDE for the most part, kscreen is working fine here, so maybe gnome specific? Or odd configuration?
Selinux Is A Pain:
I used to be in the enforcing=0 crowd by default. But I can happily say that over the last 3 or so releases I haven't had to disable selinux at all. And now when an alert does come up I actually read it and pay attention.
Better Android Integration:
KDE Connect works perfectly fine for me under KDE, minus the fact i wish it had a bluetooth backend (coming). I know Gnome has something in the works.
Built In Backup Solution:
Something built in would be nice...
Side notes, things that fall under 'a thousand paper cuts' and the likes:
1) system-config-* utilities need some work... some of them are broken, some of them are useless, some only work partially. Samba comes to the mind especially, i tried using it a couple months ago and it looked like it hadn't been updated at all since Fedora 10 or 11.
2) More improvements in things just as stand-alone utilities / work with the KDE guys more:
I totally understand that Gnome is Fedora's focus, that's fine, but the KDE spin is a pretty popular spin and has a lot of followers within it. Maybe Fedora / Red Hat could spare a few developers to the KDE side of things? Personally...I hate gnome shell. I try it every release and I never like it more than I did before. BUT... It does have some good ideas. System Settings and First Run being two of them. Gnome has a lot of individually good utilities, hell my go-to disk management is still Gnome Disks, but I feel like they are pretty locked-in to the gnome desktop.
A couple specific things come to mind... Gnome has an Active Directory integration module under Login... KDE doesn't. Gnome's got Rygel, KDE's got nothing. The list goes on.
3) Add /usr/games to $PATH. I discovered this when installing some games via GOG.com. Ubuntu has /usr/games in user $PATH by default and GOG assumes thats there for their distro-independent installer scripts. Reality is game developers are targeting Ubuntu and Fedora needs to be matching Ubuntu's configuration where possible in order to not needless raise the barrier-to-entry.
4) Thermald not packaged by default. I'm working on getting thermald package and into mainline after Intel apparently stopped caring about getting it in. Thermald is a very nice addition for any mobile systems and its sad to see it not being used by distros.
5) Zram / zswap by default. Apple made a big deal about using RAM as compressed swap for Yosemite or Mountain Lion. I'd be interested to see some benchmarks for any performance / power efficiency gains.
6) Power efficiency... if Powertop has a tunable for it then I think Fedora / Red Hat needs to lead the way in getting them enabled by default in kernel / in udev. The difference between "all tunables enabled" and "none enabled" on my laptop is about 5watts-- that's several hours of battery life on my system.
7) Anaconda... I don't mean to start a flame war, and I don't want to sound ungrateful (because new anaconda is better than the old) but I really hate anaconda... Ubuntu ubiquity works because its in your face: Here's step 1, here's step 2, here's step 3. Done. Go. From an intuitive stand point the Hub-and-spoke model seems really... non-intuitive.
8) Stop breaking packagekit / apper! I dunno if it was Fedora, the KDE Team, Apper upstream or packagekit upstream but when Fedora first came out Apper worked fine. Then I updated... Apper never prompted me for available updates ever again and any attempts TO install packages manually would lead to "an unhandled error occured." Tried clearing the packagekit cache and everything. Don't know what happened, but stuff like that CAN NOT happen. EVER. Standard user who is just dipping their feet into Linux? They are going to have any idea where to go for help, what to look for, or even that something's wrong. Even if packagekit had some horrible privilege execution bug that had to get fixed IF that fix would break a packagekit-frontend in the process and it could not be automatically fixed, then that initial fix should not be put out. Sure, you're fixing one security hole, but how many more will remain open and unpatched because the user doesn't know there's available updates?
On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 1:29 PM, drago01 drago01@gmail.com wrote:
On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 7:05 PM, Peter Robinson pbrobinson@gmail.com wrote:
hi I agree with this but at the same time I disagree. I completely agree that installing codecs should be easier. On the other hand, I'm sympothetic to fedora's awkward position. If they made installing these codecs easier or installed them by default, even though the software to play them is open source, they could find themselves on the bad end of an riaa or mpaa lawsuit.
Nope. Neither of those entities own codec patents. And no its not "impossible" to ship those codes in a legal way. If fedora/red hat would buy patent licenses they can legally distribute those codes *but* those licenses would not apply to remixes so anyone else basing his/her distro on fedora would have to either remove them or get a patent license. MP3 will expire soon anyway. So we'd only need AAC/H264 to be able to handle most videos out there.
And H.265, plus probably some of the Dobly ones for surround sound.... it's ongoing.
I wrote "most" not "all" ;)
desktop mailing list desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
On 08/05/15 06:14 PM, Eric Griffith wrote:
Built In Backup Solution:
*ahem* deja-dup should be default. It looks a bug if it is removed on Fedora 22.
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On 08/05/15 06:14 PM, Eric Griffith wrote:
Built In Backup Solution:
Something built in would be nice...
*ahem* deja-dup. If it is not included by default in Fedora 22, then it is a bug.
- system-config-* utilities need some work... some of them are
broken, some of them are useless, some only work partially. Samba comes to the mind especially, i tried using it a couple months ago and it looked like it hadn't been updated at all since Fedora 10 or 11.
Some of them are obsoletes replaced by alternative. system-config-selinux is renamed policycoreutils. system-config-services is very much a frontend for systemd. Granted the UX needs overhaul.
- More improvements in things just as stand-alone utilities / work
with the KDE guys more:
[...]
A couple specific things come to mind... Gnome has an Active Directory integration module under Login... KDE doesn't. Gnome's got Rygel, KDE's got nothing. The list goes on.
Then it is up to KDE team at that point.
- Add /usr/games to $PATH. I discovered this when installing some
games via GOG.com. Ubuntu has /usr/games in user $PATH by default and GOG assumes thats there for their distro-independent installer scripts. Reality is game developers are targeting Ubuntu and Fedora needs to be matching Ubuntu's configuration where possible in order to not needless raise the barrier-to-entry.
- Anaconda... I don't mean to start a flame war, and I don't want to
sound ungrateful (because new anaconda is better than the old) but I really hate anaconda... Ubuntu ubiquity works because its in your face: Here's step 1, here's step 2, here's step 3. Done. Go. From an intuitive stand point the Hub-and-spoke model seems really... non-intuitive.
I have to disagree. I found the hub-and-spoke more intuitive and logical than a series of steps. Basic setup from clock, keyboard and network are done automatically when using a live media. One element that got Ubiquity beat is the advanced partition setup due to the range from basic to enterprise needs. Once the partition receive further visual element, it will be much easier to understand. Currently Anaconda is receiving visual touch, not sure when the result will come (possibly in Fedora 23).
- -- Luya Tshimbalanga Graphic & Web Designer E: luya@fedoraproject.org W: http://www.coolest-storm.net
On Sun, 2015-05-10 at 01:12 -0700, Luya Tshimbalanga wrote:
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On 08/05/15 06:14 PM, Eric Griffith wrote:
Built In Backup Solution:
Something built in would be nice...
*ahem* deja-dup. If it is not included by default in Fedora 22, then it is a bug.
Why would you think this a bug? It was removed to save space on the live CD a couple years ago. Nowadays we have a much better reason not to include it: it's unmaintained.
I definitely want a backup tool installed and active (nagging!) by default, but not Deja Dup. All of our software has bugs, but for Deja Dup nobody is even looking at them, let alone fixing them. That isn't acceptable for a backup tool, where failure means data loss. We should reconsider if that situation changes upstream.
Since no better tool exists, that means we should have none for the time being.
- system-config-* utilities need some work... some of them are
broken, some of them are useless, some only work partially. Samba comes to the mind especially, i tried using it a couple months ago and it looked like it hadn't been updated at all since Fedora 10 or 11.
Some of them are obsoletes replaced by alternative. system-config-selinux is renamed policycoreutils. system-config -services is very much a frontend for systemd. Granted the UX needs overhaul.
We don't ship any system-config-* utilities anymore, and we will not add any ever again (system configuration belongs in gnome-control -center), so this isn't relevant to Workstation at all. This sounds like a complaint for the KDE SIG.
- Add /usr/games to $PATH. I discovered this when installing some
games via GOG.com. Ubuntu has /usr/games in user $PATH by default and GOG assumes thats there for their distro-independent installer scripts. Reality is game developers are targeting Ubuntu and Fedora needs to be matching Ubuntu's configuration where possible in order to not needless raise the barrier-to-entry.
Erm, their "distro-independent installer scripts" are not very good: since only Debian/Ubuntu use /usr/games, that's going to break on almost every distro, not just Fedora. I didn't realize we even have /usr/games, and it's definitely wrong for upstream to put stuff there.
Adding it to $PATH seems like a reasonable request that can't possibly harm anything. On the other hand, it might be better to simply remove /usr/games.
- Anaconda...
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/desktop/2015-May/012065.html
Cheers,
Michael
drago01 píše v Pá 08. 05. 2015 v 09:50 +0200:
And no its not "impossible" to ship those codes in a legal way. If fedora/red hat would buy patent licenses they can legally
AFAIK we tried before, Spot mentioned it somewhere. The problem is that the license is per user/installation, so the license arrangements required us to have a reliable way to count installations which we don't have and moreover it's not really in accordance with our values. So yes, theoretically it's not impossible, practically it is.
Jiri
On Thu, 7 May 2015 23:27:31 +0300, Elad Alfassa wrote:
Another point is that this repo does not seem to be fast enough with security updates, as it is operated by volunteers and doesn't seem to have a security response team - so it sometimes takes weeks for critical security fixes to be shipped to users.
Wait a minute! You don't really want to open that can of worms. Do you know any examples about _critical_ vulnerabilities in rpmfusion.org packages?
Fedora may have a security team, but there are 304 open CVE tickets about "moderate vulnerabilities" dating back as far as into the year 2012, and 38 open tickets about "important vulnerabilities" dating back into early 2013. Example:
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/958305 Reported: 2013-04-30 2015-04-23: Can an update be pushed for this package?
Two years have passed without any activity in that ticket. Not even any details about whether there have been new upstream releases meanwhile or whether the issue has been forwarded upstream.
On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 12:27 PM, Michael Schwendt mschwendt@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, 7 May 2015 23:27:31 +0300, Elad Alfassa wrote:
Another point is that this repo does not seem to be fast enough with security updates, as it is operated by volunteers and doesn't seem to have a security response team - so it sometimes takes weeks for critical security fixes to be shipped to users.
Wait a minute! You don't really want to open that can of worms. Do you know any examples about _critical_ vulnerabilities in rpmfusion.org packages?
CVE-2014-9629 in VLC, for example. I could probably find more if I'd look at more packages.
Fedora may have a security team, but there are 304 open CVE tickets about "moderate vulnerabilities" dating back as far as into the year 2012, and 38 open tickets about "important vulnerabilities" dating back into early 2013. Example:
Ouch. Okay, in that case you can ignore my point about security response in rpmfusion.
But regardless of the security response point, I still think installing rpmfusion harms user safety. There's no way to verify the key you just trusted is the actual signing key used by rpmfusion, an adversary could easily replace the "Enable RPMFusion on your system" page with something more sinister.
On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 12:03 PM, Elad Alfassa elad@fedoraproject.org wrote:
On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 12:27 PM, Michael Schwendt mschwendt@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, 7 May 2015 23:27:31 +0300, Elad Alfassa wrote:
Another point is that this repo does not seem to be fast enough with security updates, as it is operated by volunteers and doesn't seem to have a security response team - so it sometimes takes weeks for critical security fixes to be shipped to users.
Wait a minute! You don't really want to open that can of worms. Do you know any examples about _critical_ vulnerabilities in rpmfusion.org packages?
CVE-2014-9629 in VLC, for example. I could probably find more if I'd look at more packages.
Fedora may have a security team, but there are 304 open CVE tickets about "moderate vulnerabilities" dating back as far as into the year 2012, and 38 open tickets about "important vulnerabilities" dating back into early 2013. Example:
Ouch. Okay, in that case you can ignore my point about security response in rpmfusion.
But regardless of the security response point, I still think installing rpmfusion harms user safety. There's no way to verify the key you just trusted is the actual signing key used by rpmfusion, an adversary could easily replace the "Enable RPMFusion on your system" page with something more sinister.
Well that can fixed though (i.e. serve the file over SSL; sure there it would be still possible to attack the server and replace the package there but at least one can not easily hijack the domain / http request and replace it).
On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 1:24 PM, drago01 drago01@gmail.com wrote:
Well that can fixed though (i.e. serve the file over SSL; sure there it would be still possible to attack the server and replace the package there but at least one can not easily hijack the domain / http request and replace it). -- desktop mailing list desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
Sure, I am not saying this is un-fixable.
However, and adversary could still create fake rpmfusion lookalike, promote it very high up the search results, link to it in forum answers, etc etc... these forums might not be served with HTTPS, too. Since there is no official Fedora instructions on how to get rpmfusion, it means putting users in risk.
The best solution would have been if Fedora would have the rpmfusion-release package in the repos, signed by the Fedora key (or a URL to get it + a checksum of the resulting file), and gnome-software would be able to fetch it... so people won't need to trust arbitrary forum posts.
That approach, of course, is against Fedora's policies, so it's not going to happen.
It seems we're going on tangents here, so if I go back to the main point: The current Fedora policy prevents us from giving people the best possible out of the box experience. Many people will not want to switch to Fedora because of that. So either the policy should be changed to making these things easier and safer, or we decide we just give up on that point and focus on the other issues that prevent people from switching.
On May 8, 2015 4:39 AM, "Elad Alfassa" elad@fedoraproject.org wrote:
On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 1:24 PM, drago01 drago01@gmail.com wrote:
Well that can fixed though (i.e. serve the file over SSL; sure there it would be still possible to attack the server and replace the package there but at least one can not easily hijack the domain / http request and replace it). -- desktop mailing list desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
Sure, I am not saying this is un-fixable.
However, and adversary could still create fake rpmfusion lookalike, promote it very high up the search results, link to it in forum answers, etc etc... these forums might not be served with HTTPS, too. Since there is no official Fedora instructions on how to get rpmfusion, it means putting users in risk.
The best solution would have been if Fedora would have the rpmfusion-release package in the repos, signed by the Fedora key (or a URL to get it + a checksum of the resulting file), and gnome-software would be able to fetch it... so people won't need to trust arbitrary forum posts.
That approach, of course, is against Fedora's policies, so it's not going to happen.
It seems we're going on tangents here, so if I go back to the main point: The current Fedora policy prevents us from giving people the best possible out of the box experience. Many people will not want to switch to Fedora because of that. So either the policy should be changed to making these things easier and safer, or we decide we just give up on that point and focus on the other issues that prevent people from switching. --
-Elad.
RPMfusion is struggling with infrastructure issues right now. There's a rather small subset of the Fedora community maintaining what I think we're all agreed are essential packages. At some point, those of us who really care about the functionality that RPMfusion provides should help them. This doesn't have to be entirely solved as an Official Fedora Workstation problem - working within that third party community benefits users too. A policy that allows their release package doesn't improve their release - it just makes a very simple process slightly simpler. A policy that allows Fedora to directly ship encumbered products is a non-starter.
(note that I'm including myself in that statement, and realize that a lot of folks reading could be RPMfusion maintainers and I don't know it)
--Pete
On Fri, 2015-05-08 at 13:39 +0300, Elad Alfassa wrote:
It seems we're going on tangents here, so if I go back to the main point: The current Fedora policy prevents us from giving people the best possible out of the box experience. Many people will not want to switch to Fedora because of that. So either the policy should be changed to making these things easier and safer, or we decide we just give up on that point and focus on the other issues that prevent people from switching.
Alternate solutions - - help $third_party_repo improve - educate people on why they need to use $third_party_repo - educate people on why our policies are what they are
Hi,
On Thu, 2015-05-07 at 23:27 +0300, Elad Alfassa wrote:
I should also point out that this specific third party repo is not a solution. It's not easy for people to install, it requires prior knowledge. If a user needs to google search how to make their music play and follow instructions on some forum, that's a very bad first impression. If you google how to play mp3 in fedora, the first result is an askfedora thread, whose first answer talks about gstreamer1 porting... that's not useful for users. At all. So not only it's a google search, it's a google search that would land you on pages with confusing technical terms. Yes, Workstation is for developers, but you can't expect every web developer to get familiar with the architecture of our multimedia stack just to play their music.
I've never understood this argument tbh. Instead of us educating people on *WHY* the codecs aren't provided by Fedora, I see people repeatedly speaking about how not having them in Fedora is a huge deal breaker.
While one reason is patents as someone already mentioned, the other is also the philosophy of FOSS - I hope it isn't just about using a free of charge system..
I do understand that having multimedia support is important user wise, and I'm more than happy to spend time trying to educate people - I'm not in favour of any changes that encourage people to install software that is not FOSS.
And even if they do find that repo, they have no way to install it securely and safely. While rpmfusion packages are signed, the key is downloaded in the initial setup (when you download the -release RPM) over plain text, and the page you download it from is a wiki people can just edit - and also served over plain text so someone could modify the instructions and the links...
Another point is that this repo does not seem to be fast enough with security updates, as it is operated by volunteers and doesn't seem to have a security response team - so it sometimes takes weeks for critical security fixes to be shipped to users.
So, let us help the third party repository become better? Wouldn't that be a good way to go to help our users?
I don't know how to solve these issues. I know there's a complicated legal background for all of this, but what I do know is:
- People should be able to play music and videos
- People shouldn't need to sacrifice their safety to play music and
videos 3) People shouldn't need to have special knowledge about how their OS works to perform these basic tasks.
4) People should know what FOSS is about. 5) People should know what intellectual property rights are.
I want to reiterate - it's not just the legal liabilities that such software bring to RH, it's also about the philosophy that FOSS is based on.
And this example is about codecs... drivers are even a bigger mess. How is a user supposed to download a wifi driver when their wifi is not working? Keep in mind that many newer laptops don't have an ehternet port at all. If you have a broadcom wireless chip and no ethernet port, you'll need a second device, or a second OS, to find out how to get the driver and how to install it. And if you have a different OS that already works, and Fedora requires you to either replace your wifi chip or figure out the magic command lines to install a driver, why would you make the switch?
Again, it completely comes down to lack of awareness - people that have bitten by the broadcom issue (even though broadcom support in the kernel has become much much better recently) know better than to buy broadcom in the future.
Basically, the more time a person needs to spend on learning how to make your OS work the less they'd want to make the switch.
It isn't "making your OS work", it's "installing additional components" - again, if they knew why it had to be done, I'm sure they wouldn't mind doing it once every 13 months (and less if they use fedup which has worked like a charm on my three machines this week :D)
I'm completely on board with any movement that aims to educate people on these issues - I'm not on board with any movement about changing our foundations/policies regarding.
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hi I couldn't agree with this post more. It's the age old battle against user convenience versus user awareness. You've got a certain segment of the population that thinks computers are this amazing magical box. You press the power button, windows, because everyone uses windows, right? Comes on and it all just works. Then you've got the rest, who generally like to figure out how things work. For us, I count myself one of these, a problem isn't a problem, it's an opportunity to figure out what's gone wrong so I can fix it. My patience isn't limitless, and I do have my frustration points, but fedora is what it is. If you want a distro taht puts all that nonfree goodness in there by default, pick another distro. Harsh, but true. I for one, and I suspect many others, aren't going to go out of the way to put mp3, aac, etc codecs in fedora, just to satisfy the "just works" group of users. I'm not even sure fedora could, but I've already mentioned this. What I think they should do, and this can be brought up in one of the wg meetings maybe, is to have a samples folder of "free" codecs, ogg music files, maybe a few videos, some open document files, maybe assorted other files, to show that you don't have to have proprietary file formats to listen to music. Mp3 is just bits, with a particular header at the beginning that identifies it as an mp3. The music is just raw audio data. You can take that music out, transplant it into another container and you wouldn't know the difference. And you don't have to know the internals of gstreamer to get mp3 codecs working. It's like this. The good codecs are not patent encumbered. The bad and ugly ones might be, depending on a whole bunch of legal stuff that's way over my head. You want those to play mp3, aac, etc. You go on rpmfusion and get them. Simple. If a user cannot do that, stick to windows or ubuntu or something. Thanks Kendell clark
Ankur Sinha wrote:
Hi,
On Thu, 2015-05-07 at 23:27 +0300, Elad Alfassa wrote:
I should also point out that this specific third party repo is not a solution. It's not easy for people to install, it requires prior knowledge. If a user needs to google search how to make their music play and follow instructions on some forum, that's a very bad first impression. If you google how to play mp3 in fedora, the first result is an askfedora thread, whose first answer talks about gstreamer1 porting... that's not useful for users. At all. So not only it's a google search, it's a google search that would land you on pages with confusing technical terms. Yes, Workstation is for developers, but you can't expect every web developer to get familiar with the architecture of our multimedia stack just to play their music.
I've never understood this argument tbh. Instead of us educating people on *WHY* the codecs aren't provided by Fedora, I see people repeatedly speaking about how not having them in Fedora is a huge deal breaker.
While one reason is patents as someone already mentioned, the other is also the philosophy of FOSS - I hope it isn't just about using a free of charge system..
I do understand that having multimedia support is important user wise, and I'm more than happy to spend time trying to educate people - I'm not in favour of any changes that encourage people to install software that is not FOSS.
And even if they do find that repo, they have no way to install it securely and safely. While rpmfusion packages are signed, the key is downloaded in the initial setup (when you download the -release RPM) over plain text, and the page you download it from is a wiki people can just edit - and also served over plain text so someone could modify the instructions and the links...
Another point is that this repo does not seem to be fast enough with security updates, as it is operated by volunteers and doesn't seem to have a security response team - so it sometimes takes weeks for critical security fixes to be shipped to users.
So, let us help the third party repository become better? Wouldn't that be a good way to go to help our users?
I don't know how to solve these issues. I know there's a complicated legal background for all of this, but what I do know is: 1) People should be able to play music and videos 2) People shouldn't need to sacrifice their safety to play music and videos 3) People shouldn't need to have special knowledge about how their OS works to perform these basic tasks.
- People should know what FOSS is about. 5) People should know
what intellectual property rights are.
I want to reiterate - it's not just the legal liabilities that such software bring to RH, it's also about the philosophy that FOSS is based on.
And this example is about codecs... drivers are even a bigger mess. How is a user supposed to download a wifi driver when their wifi is not working? Keep in mind that many newer laptops don't have an ehternet port at all. If you have a broadcom wireless chip and no ethernet port, you'll need a second device, or a second OS, to find out how to get the driver and how to install it. And if you have a different OS that already works, and Fedora requires you to either replace your wifi chip or figure out the magic command lines to install a driver, why would you make the switch?
Again, it completely comes down to lack of awareness - people that have bitten by the broadcom issue (even though broadcom support in the kernel has become much much better recently) know better than to buy broadcom in the future.
Basically, the more time a person needs to spend on learning how to make your OS work the less they'd want to make the switch.
It isn't "making your OS work", it's "installing additional components" - again, if they knew why it had to be done, I'm sure they wouldn't mind doing it once every 13 months (and less if they use fedup which has worked like a charm on my three machines this week :D)
I'm completely on board with any movement that aims to educate people on these issues - I'm not on board with any movement about changing our foundations/policies regarding.
Hi,
kendell clark writes:
It's the age old battle against user convenience versus user awareness.
(...)
If you want a distro taht puts all that nonfree goodness in there by default, pick another distro. Harsh, but true.
Except, Fedora has important advantages that you can't ignore.
Sure, FLOSS / user awareness are args, but "just choose another distro" is a shortcut that damages some users, I don't want to choose a product whose contributors tell me "just choose something else".
Regards Pierre-Yves
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hi Sorry, I should've been clearer. I wasn't aiming that argument at you, but the "average" windows/mac user who just wants to turn their computer on, doesn't know or care how it works, as long as all their closed source, locked down content plays. That doesn't sound like you, and you seem perfectly capable of using a 3rd party repo to get your files to play if you need to. Again, this seems unlikely to change. If redhat were to pay up and get a "patent" license for mp3, they might as well "license" iTunes, pay apple for patent rights, "license" a nonfree netflix app, steam, where does it end? My point is, if we were to have mp3 codecs in fedora, then someone else would come along and insist that we have another codec for their favorite file format. Then someone else would ... it's a slippery slope. Thanks Kendell clark Sent from Fedora GNU/Linux
Pierre-Yves Luyten wrote:
Hi,
kendell clark writes:
It's the age old battle against user convenience versus user awareness.
(...)
If you want a distro taht puts all that nonfree goodness in there by default, pick another distro. Harsh, but true.
Except, Fedora has important advantages that you can't ignore.
Sure, FLOSS / user awareness are args, but "just choose another distro" is a shortcut that damages some users, I don't want to choose a product whose contributors tell me "just choose something else".
Regards Pierre-Yves
On Mon, May 11, 2015 at 12:16 AM, Ankur Sinha sanjay.ankur@gmail.com wrote:
I do understand that having multimedia support is important user wise, and I'm more than happy to spend time trying to educate people - I'm not in favour of any changes that encourage people to install software that is not FOSS.
I don't think anyone is talking about non-free software. For instance vlc is completely Free Software, although i can't be included to our repos due to the current policy around codecs.
To be clear. I'm not saying we should include vlc to our repos, just clarifying that we are not talking about non-free software.
- People should know what FOSS is about.
- People should know what intellectual property rights are.
So the first point is covered as mentioned above. I agree about educating people about intellectual property but someone could argue that this can be done in an "automated" way inside Gnome Software. See for instance Hughes' post on how a user can make an educated decision about installing non-free software (in this case Chrome). Same thing can happen for non-free codecs. Gnome Software could deliver RPMFusion metadata.
You can't protect users freedom by removing freedom of choice.
On Mon, May 11, 2015 at 12:16 AM, Ankur Sinha sanjay.ankur@gmail.com wrote:
I've never understood this argument tbh. Instead of us educating people on *WHY* the codecs aren't provided by Fedora, I see people repeatedly speaking about how not having them in Fedora is a huge deal breaker.
It's not the job of an OS to educate people. Operation systems exists to allow and enable people to do what they want and need in a safe, secure and efficient manner.
People are, usually, busy. If they install Fedora on a work computer, they won't want to waste half the workday figuring out why things are not working, and fixing them. For some people, software is a hobby, so they have the patience and time to mess around with it in their free time, to tweak it, to figure out why it's not working.
Most people are not like that. Most people don't care that much about software, and never will, and that's fine. They want an OS that "just works" and let them use their computer the way they need to use it, without too much fiddling around and fixing issues.
While one reason is patents as someone already mentioned, the other is also the philosophy of FOSS - I hope it isn't just about using a free of charge system..
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Workstation/Workstation_PRD Fedora Workstation aims to create the best-in-class operation system for developers. That's what it is about.
Developers probably already know what open source is - we are no longer the underdog. Open Source solutions are used everywhere. If you're a developer, chances are you already know what open source is. If these developers we are speaking about were idealistic about open source, they'd probably be using Linux already and therefore not relevant for this discussion... after all, we are asking "why people aren't switching from Mac or Windows" and not "Why aren't people switching from Ubuntu".
And the answer to why people are not switching away from Mac or Windows is simple: Mac OS X and Windows both have one thing in common. They work. They don't require too much fiddling (especially in the case of OS X). WiFi works, music works, video works... and even if Windows or Mac required you to fiddle a bit when you started, you are already entrenched. Everything works. Installing, learning, and fixing a new thing would eat away at your precious time, in which you could be doing something actually productive, or having fun.
I do understand that having multimedia support is important user wise, and I'm more than happy to spend time trying to educate people - I'm not in favour of any changes that encourage people to install software that is not FOSS.
gstreamer1-plugins-bad-freeworld is LGPLv2+. This falls under the definition of FOSS. Please don't confuse software patents and closed-source software. They are two very different things.
So, let us help the third party repository become better? Wouldn't that be a good way to go to help our users?
Yes, that would be very helpful and it is certainly a way to go. However, previously when I offered my assistance I got no response from anyone who could actually point me at where to get started there... and as such this repository still does not have appdata afaik.
Again, it completely comes down to lack of awareness - people that have bitten by the broadcom issue (even though broadcom support in the kernel has become much much better recently) know better than to buy broadcom in the future.
So you give people a choice here: "either throw away your brand new laptop and buy a different one, or don't use Fedora". That's not a good thing to do. It's safe to assume our target users already have computers, and that a very large percentage of them have broadcom wifi chips. If you're a developer with a laptop supplied to you by your company, you might not have a choice of the type of laptop at all.
Wireless chips are not usually listed in the specs. This means knowing what you buy requires a lot of research and prior knowledge of which chips are "good"... Sometimes the information is not available at all. Sometimes there are multiple editions of the same laptop with different wifi chips. Sometimes non-broadcom is not an option (if you buy a Mac, for example). If someone tries Fedora, and sees that wifi doesn't work, they won't blame their hardware (they probably don't even know what "broadcom" is), after all, it worked fine on Windows (or on OS X). They'll blame Fedora.
Fedora Workstation's main goal is to create a well-integrated OS for developers. If we keep pretending we can just ignore issues because they are "hard" or "complicated" then we are not doing a very good job.
The thing is, we do have things we can do to make the situation better, instead of saying "no, it's our philosophy" or "this is not a real issue". We could enable our users to safely get codecs, for example. Means of doing that have been discussed in this very list in the past. So yes, purchasing a patent license for all Fedora users is out of the question... but there are other ways.
For example, including 3rd party repository definitions is still an option - if I recall correctly the only reason it was veto'd is philosophical, not legal.
Or we could offer the users to purchase the Fluendo codec pack in an integrated and secure way. This is possible, and yes, most users probably won't pay, but at least it's something, and something is better than nothing.
We could also have an official-ish page with less vague instructions on how to safely get 3rd party repo to work, with a clear disclaimer that this is community generated content in such a way that would make legal happy.
As for wifi, we could implement a pre-install check screen on the live CD, that will warn you before you install if your hardware has known issues. If your only network adapter is not supported, you'd want to know about it *before* you overwrite your main OS. This kind of utility could even provide a shortlink (so you can write it down) for instructions on how to use your other OS to get the right drivers or firmware files and how to install them.
And as a community, we could try and pressure Broadcom (and similar) to make better (ie. opensource, in the mainline kernel) drivers for our OS. That sounds much more productive then blaming users for buying the wrong thing.
These solutions are not perfect. They are also not very easy, but they are steps we can take. And I'm sure that if you think outside the box for a bit you can find more solutions.
We have a real potential here, let's not make it go to waste.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA512
hi I've about had it with posts like this. On the one hand, you say "people are busy and don't have time to fiddle with computers." And on the other hand, you praise the values of foss. Which is it. Windows has issues of it's own that make it a real pain to work with. And no, it does not "just work" Hardware is usually sorted, that's true. As long as you use only OEM installs. Install from a retail dvd and that starts to get iffy. Audio codecs, not true either. Windows supports mp3 natively, as well as mp4, wma and dvd codecs. Other than that, you're left on your own to go find the codecs to play the formats, windows is of no help. Osx, no idea. Too expensive, and I don't like the apple atmosphere. If you're one of those people who just want their computer to just work, use windows, and stop bashing fedora for being what it is. Your post is the one reason I don't go out of my way to help new users if they start demanding. Once you fix one thing, then they'll expect you to fix something else because they're incapable of doing it for themselves. I don't need the stress I've got enough things to do, thanks
Elad Alfassa wrote:
On Mon, May 11, 2015 at 12:16 AM, Ankur Sinha sanjay.ankur@gmail.com wrote:
I've never understood this argument tbh. Instead of us educating people on *WHY* the codecs aren't provided by Fedora, I see people repeatedly speaking about how not having them in Fedora is a huge deal breaker.
It's not the job of an OS to educate people. Operation systems exists to allow and enable people to do what they want and need in a safe, secure and efficient manner.
People are, usually, busy. If they install Fedora on a work computer, they won't want to waste half the workday figuring out why things are not working, and fixing them. For some people, software is a hobby, so they have the patience and time to mess around with it in their free time, to tweak it, to figure out why it's not working.
Most people are not like that. Most people don't care that much about software, and never will, and that's fine. They want an OS that "just works" and let them use their computer the way they need to use it, without too much fiddling around and fixing issues.
While one reason is patents as someone already mentioned, the other is also the philosophy of FOSS - I hope it isn't just about using a free of charge system..
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Workstation/Workstation_PRD Fedora Workstation aims to create the best-in-class operation system for developers. That's what it is about.
Developers probably already know what open source is - we are no longer the underdog. Open Source solutions are used everywhere. If you're a developer, chances are you already know what open source is. If these developers we are speaking about were idealistic about open source, they'd probably be using Linux already and therefore not relevant for this discussion... after all, we are asking "why people aren't switching from Mac or Windows" and not "Why aren't people switching from Ubuntu".
And the answer to why people are not switching away from Mac or Windows is simple: Mac OS X and Windows both have one thing in common. They work. They don't require too much fiddling (especially in the case of OS X). WiFi works, music works, video works... and even if Windows or Mac required you to fiddle a bit when you started, you are already entrenched. Everything works. Installing, learning, and fixing a new thing would eat away at your precious time, in which you could be doing something actually productive, or having fun.
I do understand that having multimedia support is important user wise, and I'm more than happy to spend time trying to educate people - I'm not in favour of any changes that encourage people to install software that is not FOSS.
gstreamer1-plugins-bad-freeworld is LGPLv2+. This falls under the definition of FOSS. Please don't confuse software patents and closed-source software. They are two very different things.
So, let us help the third party repository become better? Wouldn't that be a good way to go to help our users?
Yes, that would be very helpful and it is certainly a way to go. However, previously when I offered my assistance I got no response from anyone who could actually point me at where to get started there... and as such this repository still does not have appdata afaik.
Again, it completely comes down to lack of awareness - people that have bitten by the broadcom issue (even though broadcom support in the kernel has become much much better recently) know better than to buy broadcom in the future.
So you give people a choice here: "either throw away your brand new laptop and buy a different one, or don't use Fedora". That's not a good thing to do. It's safe to assume our target users already have computers, and that a very large percentage of them have broadcom wifi chips. If you're a developer with a laptop supplied to you by your company, you might not have a choice of the type of laptop at all.
Wireless chips are not usually listed in the specs. This means knowing what you buy requires a lot of research and prior knowledge of which chips are "good"... Sometimes the information is not available at all. Sometimes there are multiple editions of the same laptop with different wifi chips. Sometimes non-broadcom is not an option (if you buy a Mac, for example). If someone tries Fedora, and sees that wifi doesn't work, they won't blame their hardware (they probably don't even know what "broadcom" is), after all, it worked fine on Windows (or on OS X). They'll blame Fedora.
Fedora Workstation's main goal is to create a well-integrated OS for developers. If we keep pretending we can just ignore issues because they are "hard" or "complicated" then we are not doing a very good job.
The thing is, we do have things we can do to make the situation better, instead of saying "no, it's our philosophy" or "this is not a real issue". We could enable our users to safely get codecs, for example. Means of doing that have been discussed in this very list in the past. So yes, purchasing a patent license for all Fedora users is out of the question... but there are other ways.
For example, including 3rd party repository definitions is still an option - if I recall correctly the only reason it was veto'd is philosophical, not legal.
Or we could offer the users to purchase the Fluendo codec pack in an integrated and secure way. This is possible, and yes, most users probably won't pay, but at least it's something, and something is better than nothing.
We could also have an official-ish page with less vague instructions on how to safely get 3rd party repo to work, with a clear disclaimer that this is community generated content in such a way that would make legal happy.
As for wifi, we could implement a pre-install check screen on the live CD, that will warn you before you install if your hardware has known issues. If your only network adapter is not supported, you'd want to know about it *before* you overwrite your main OS. This kind of utility could even provide a shortlink (so you can write it down) for instructions on how to use your other OS to get the right drivers or firmware files and how to install them.
And as a community, we could try and pressure Broadcom (and similar) to make better (ie. opensource, in the mainline kernel) drivers for our OS. That sounds much more productive then blaming users for buying the wrong thing.
These solutions are not perfect. They are also not very easy, but they are steps we can take. And I'm sure that if you think outside the box for a bit you can find more solutions.
We have a real potential here, let's not make it go to waste.
On Tue, 2015-05-12 at 00:14 +0300, Elad Alfassa wrote:
On Mon, May 11, 2015 at 12:16 AM, Ankur Sinha <sanjay.ankur@gmail.com
wrote: I've never understood this argument tbh. Instead of us educating people on *WHY* the codecs aren't provided by Fedora, I see people repeatedly speaking about how not having them in Fedora is a huge
deal
breaker.
It's not the job of an OS to educate people.
But it is the job of a community, and the last time I checked, we were more than just an OS. If the goal was just to create an operating system that "just works" as you keep putting it, and providing it free of charge, we'd just be Korora, not Fedora. The objective is to create a system that "just works" while keeping it FOSS - please don't skip out that very important clause.
Operation systems exists to allow and enable people to do what they want and need in a safe, secure and efficient manner.
People are, usually, busy. If they install Fedora on a work computer, they won't want to waste half the workday figuring out why things are not working, and fixing them. For some people, software is a hobby, so they have the patience and time to mess around with it in their free time, to tweak it, to figure out why it's not working.
Most people are not like that. Most people don't care that much about software, and never will, and that's fine. They want an OS that "just works" and let them use their computer the way they need to use it, without too much fiddling around and fixing issues.
While one reason is patents as someone already mentioned, the
other is
also the philosophy of FOSS - I hope it isn't just about using a
free
of charge system..
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Workstation/Workstation_PRD Fedora Workstation aims to create the best-in-class operation system for developers. That's what it is about.
Developers probably already know what open source is - we are no longer the underdog. Open Source solutions are used everywhere. If you're a developer, chances are you already know what open source is. If these developers we are speaking about were idealistic about open source, they'd probably be using Linux already and therefore not relevant for this discussion... after all, we are asking "why people aren't switching from Mac or Windows" and not "Why aren't people switching from Ubuntu".
And the answer to why people are not switching away from Mac or Windows is simple: Mac OS X and Windows both have one thing in common. They work. They don't require too much fiddling (especially in the case of OS X). WiFi works, music works, video works... and even if Windows or Mac required you to fiddle a bit when you started, you are already entrenched. Everything works. Installing, learning, and fixing a new thing would eat away at your precious time, in which you could be doing something actually productive, or having fun.
All these things "work" because the patents and things that are required to get them to work have been correctly paid for by the vendor..
I do understand that having multimedia support is important user
wise,
and I'm more than happy to spend time trying to educate people -
I'm
not in favour of any changes that encourage people to install
software
that is not FOSS.
gstreamer1-plugins-bad-freeworld is LGPLv2+. This falls under the definition of FOSS. Please don't confuse software patents and closed-source software. They are two very different things.
For the purposes of this discussion, they're similar - we choose not to provide either:
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Forbidden_items?rd=ForbiddenItems#MP3_Su pport
"However, Fedora cannot and does not include MP3 decoders/encoders in order to serve the goal of providing and supporting only free and open source software that is not restricted by software patents by default."
So, let us help the third party repository become better? Wouldn't that be a good way to go to help our users?
Yes, that would be very helpful and it is certainly a way to go. However, previously when I offered my assistance I got no response from anyone who could actually point me at where to get started there... and as such this repository still does not have appdata afaik.
People are aware that an infra migration is in process there - they do not have the same number of volunteers Fedora has - it takes time. They've recently begun publishing the F22 tree and the migration process will continue. A mail was recently sent to their developer mailing list with open tasks and a message that said "please help where you can." Unlike Fedora, where RH does pay people to handle critical tasks and projects, RPMFusion is completely volunteer based - their hardware, the infra people, everything - the only way we can help them improve is to encourage more people to volunteer.
Again, it completely comes down to lack of awareness - people that have bitten by the broadcom issue (even though broadcom support in
the
kernel has become much much better recently) know better than to
buy
broadcom in the future.
So you give people a choice here: "either throw away your brand new laptop and buy a different one, or don't use Fedora". That's not a good thing to do. It's safe to assume our target users already have computers, and that a very large percentage of them have broadcom wifi chips. If you're a developer with a laptop supplied to you by your company, you might not have a choice of the type of laptop at all.
Well, it's like saying I'm travelling to the states and haven't the right plug point - what should I do? Should I run around asking the states to change their electrical system or should I try to figure out what converter I need to get my system working?
Wireless chips are not usually listed in the specs. This means knowing what you buy requires a lot of research and prior knowledge of which chips are "good"... Sometimes the information is not available at all. Sometimes there are multiple editions of the same laptop with different wifi chips. Sometimes non-broadcom is not an option (if you buy a Mac, for example). If someone tries Fedora, and sees that wifi doesn't work, they won't blame their hardware (they probably don't even know what "broadcom" is), after all, it worked fine on Windows (or on OS X). They'll blame Fedora.
And we come back to awareness.
Fedora Workstation's main goal is to create a well-integrated OS for developers. If we keep pretending we can just ignore issues because they are "hard" or "complicated" then we are not doing a very good job.
"a well integrated *FOSS* based OS", no?
The thing is, we do have things we can do to make the situation better, instead of saying "no, it's our philosophy" or "this is not a real issue".
I haven't read anyone write "this is not a real issue", and I certainly haven't said that. I have said "it is our philosophy" and I will stick to it.
We could enable our users to safely get codecs, for example. Means of doing that have been discussed in this very list in the past. So yes, purchasing a patent license for all Fedora users is out of the question... but there are other ways.
For example, including 3rd party repository definitions is still an option - if I recall correctly the only reason it was veto'd is philosophical, not legal.
Yes, certainly - which is why the alternate suggestion of helping the third party repository improve came up. Why has that been discounted?
Or we could offer the users to purchase the Fluendo codec pack in an integrated and secure way. This is possible, and yes, most users probably won't pay, but at least it's something, and something is better than nothing.
I'm totally on board with this - in fact, I was looking at Fluendo myself earlier today. If people aren't willing to pay for a service someone else is providing, they won't get the service..
We could also have an official-ish page with less vague instructions on how to safely get 3rd party repo to work, with a clear disclaimer that this is community generated content in such a way that would make legal happy.
Like this? https://ask.fedoraproject.org/en/question/9111/sticky-what-plugins-do- i-need-to-install-to-watch-movies-and-listen-to-music/
As for wifi, we could implement a pre-install check screen on the live CD, that will warn you before you install if your hardware has known issues. If your only network adapter is not supported, you'd want to know about it *before* you overwrite your main OS. This kind of utility could even provide a shortlink (so you can write it down) for instructions on how to use your other OS to get the right drivers or firmware files and how to install them.
Sounds like a great idea - RFE to anaconda?
And as a community, we could try and pressure Broadcom (and similar) to make better (ie. opensource, in the mainline kernel) drivers for our OS. That sounds much more productive then blaming users for buying the wrong thing.
I wasn't blaming the users - I wasn't blaming any one - I was saying that they have hardware that isn't well supported, like an old phone that cannot run the latest android - it isn't the manufacturer's fault that the person bought the phone - the manufacturer made it to run a certain version (for whatever reason) - not $whatever, and it isn't android's fault that it won't run on the hardware - it wasn't designed to.
These solutions are not perfect. They are also not very easy, but they are steps we can take. And I'm sure that if you think outside the box for a bit you can find more solutions.
We have a real potential here, let's not make it go to waste.
Again, I don't see anyone that dismissed the issue. Personally, all I've said is that alternatives to "ignore our philosophy!" need to be explored - and you've yourself gone ahead stated quite a few that are worth looking into while maintaining our philosophy.
Here's another idea: - a community contributed list of laptops/workstations in the market that are open source friendly - maybe even a link on fp.o that says "what system should I buy if I want to run Fedora?"
I *think* smolt did something on the lines, but it was retired for good reasons: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Smolt_retirement
If we can get a noticeable amount of users to stay away from non FOSS vendors, the vendors *may* feel a bit of pressure?
Quite a few actionable ideas here! :D
On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 1:37 AM, Ankur Sinha sanjay.ankur@gmail.com wrote:
It's not the job of an OS to educate people.
But it is the job of a community, and the last time I checked, we were more than just an OS. If the goal was just to create an operating system that "just works" as you keep putting it, and providing it free of charge, we'd just be Korora, not Fedora. The objective is to create a system that "just works" while keeping it FOSS - please don't skip out that very important clause.
We are still FOSS. I'm not suggesting to just ship these things by default. I'm suggesting making it easier for users to make informed decisions on this subject, while making sure they remain safe and not compromise their computers in the process.
"However, Fedora cannot and does not include MP3 decoders/encoders in order to serve the goal of providing and supporting only free and open source software that is not restricted by software patents by default."
"by default" is a key phrase here. As well as "include". My suggestion is not to include these things by default, that's not viable both legally and philosophically.
So you give people a choice here: "either throw away your brand new laptop and buy a different one, or don't use Fedora". That's not a good thing to do. It's safe to assume our target users already have computers, and that a very large percentage of them have broadcom wifi chips. If you're a developer with a laptop supplied to you by your company, you might not have a choice of the type of laptop at all.
Well, it's like saying I'm travelling to the states and haven't the right plug point - what should I do? Should I run around asking the states to change their electrical system or should I try to figure out what converter I need to get my system working?
That's not the same at all, sorry. Getting a plug converter is very easy, you walk into a store, you pay money, you get a product - end of story. It's different with drivers. Installing them is not easy and requires following complicated instructions... and firmware files are even more of a mess.
Wireless chips are not usually listed in the specs. This means knowing what you buy requires a lot of research and prior knowledge of which chips are "good"... Sometimes the information is not available at all. Sometimes there are multiple editions of the same laptop with different wifi chips. Sometimes non-broadcom is not an option (if you buy a Mac, for example). If someone tries Fedora, and sees that wifi doesn't work, they won't blame their hardware (they probably don't even know what "broadcom" is), after all, it worked fine on Windows (or on OS X). They'll blame Fedora.
And we come back to awareness.
I'm sure you could explain this to people face to face in conferences, but this doesn't scale. We can't have a dialog saying "Sorry your wifi is not working, this is not our fault, blame that hardware vendor you've never heard of".
And again, you could invest your time in convincing people a certain vendor is bad and that they need to do extensive research before buying a laptop, but this doesn't scale and doesn't work for various reasons that I've explained in my previous message. I'll sum them up: 1) People already have laptops. They are not going to throw them away just because of Fedora. 2) Some people have no choice of a laptop, they are provided to them by their IT department and there's only one or two models. 3) The information regarding wifi chips is not listed on formal vendor specs, it requires extensive research. Sometimes, the information available online is inaccurate due to model fragmentation, or not available at all. 4) You can't convey this information to each and every person in your target audience, so people will keep blaming Fedora.
For example, including 3rd party repository definitions is still an option - if I recall correctly the only reason it was veto'd is philosophical, not legal.
Yes, certainly - which is why the alternate suggestion of helping the third party repository improve came up. Why has that been discounted?
Again, just having the 3rd party repo out there, even if installing it is more secure, is not sufficient. People still need a way to find it. I still think that if people need to go to google to search this, we are not doing a very good job. Especially since if they try to play an MP3 file, gnome-software will show up, tell them they couldn't find anything, and send them to a very confusing page in the Fedora wiki with not much real useful information.
Or we could offer the users to purchase the Fluendo codec pack in an integrated and secure way. This is possible, and yes, most users probably won't pay, but at least it's something, and something is better than nothing.
I'm totally on board with this - in fact, I was looking at Fluendo myself earlier today. If people aren't willing to pay for a service someone else is providing, they won't get the service..
I wonder how complicated it would be (both from a policy perspective and a technical perspective) to get it integrated in gnome-software in such a way that users could purchase and install these codec packs with minimum manual steps. I also wonder if those codecs are getting security updates, and how.
We could also have an official-ish page with less vague instructions on how to safely get 3rd party repo to work, with a clear disclaimer that this is community generated content in such a way that would make legal happy.
Like this? https://ask.fedoraproject.org/en/question/9111/sticky-what-plugins-do- i-need-to-install-to-watch-movies-and-listen-to-music/
Something similar. Would be nice if the wiki page Software throws you at when there's a codec missing could link to a relevant tag in ask fedora. However, this post dives into terminal commands, which I'm not sure is such a good idea - it would be nice if this installation could be graphical. I had an idea last year that Software could offer you to install the codecs immidately after you install the repo configuration. I think it's still possible to implement, just need to have a proper way to do this. Maybe we can make this a reality...
As for wifi, we could implement a pre-install check screen on the live CD, that will warn you before you install if your hardware has known issues. If your only network adapter is not supported, you'd want to know about it *before* you overwrite your main OS. This kind of utility could even provide a shortlink (so you can write it down) for instructions on how to use your other OS to get the right drivers or firmware files and how to install them.
Sounds like a great idea - RFE to anaconda?
Not sure if anaconda is the right component for this, maybe the welcome dialog you get when you start the live session should perform this checks, or maybe something else entirely. This also needs design, and we need to understand if we even have a reliable way to detect problematic hardware.
Here's another idea:
- a community contributed list of laptops/workstations in the market
that are open source friendly - maybe even a link on fp.o that says "what system should I buy if I want to run Fedora?"
I don't think this scales... there are so many different laptops out there, and new ones come out faster than you could check them all. We'd end up with a list of mostly obsolete laptops.
If we can get a noticeable amount of users to stay away from non FOSS vendors, the vendors *may* feel a bit of pressure?
We are way too small right now to make a noticeable difference. The only pressure we can have is by emailing the vendor (would be a good idea to tell every user you hear that suffers from this issue to send a mail to the problematic hardware vendor, maybe enough of these might move something, but I'm not too optimistic about this)
On Tue, 2015-05-12 at 02:14 +0300, Elad Alfassa wrote:
Something similar. Would be nice if the wiki page Software throws you at when there's a codec missing could link to a relevant tag in ask fedora. However, this post dives into terminal commands, which I'm not sure is such a good idea - it would be nice if this installation could be graphical. I had an idea last year that Software could offer you to install the codecs immidately after you install the repo configuration. I think it's still possible to implement, just need to have a proper way to do this. Maybe we can make this a reality...
I'm working on improving that post right now - I've just updated it with information on Fluendo. I'll see if I can find a nice way of providing a clickable link in the answer.
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA512
hi I mean no offense, but does the fluendo codec do anything that the usual gstreamer bad/ugly codecs cannot do, besides being closed source and being legal according to whoever holds the patent rights? Thanks Kendell clark
Ankur Sinha wrote:
On Tue, 2015-05-12 at 02:14 +0300, Elad Alfassa wrote:
Something similar. Would be nice if the wiki page Software throws you at when there's a codec missing could link to a relevant tag in ask fedora. However, this post dives into terminal commands, which I'm not sure is such a good idea - it would be nice if this installation could be graphical. I had an idea last year that Software could offer you to install the codecs immidately after you install the repo configuration. I think it's still possible to implement, just need to have a proper way to do this. Maybe we can make this a reality...
I'm working on improving that post right now - I've just updated it with information on Fluendo. I'll see if I can find a nice way of providing a clickable link in the answer.
On 05/11/2015 05:14 PM, Elad Alfassa wrote:
On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 1:37 AM, Ankur Sinha sanjay.ankur@gmail.com wrote:
It's not the job of an OS to educate people.
But it is the job of a community, and the last time I checked, we were more than just an OS. If the goal was just to create an operating system that "just works" as you keep putting it, and providing it free of charge, we'd just be Korora, not Fedora. The objective is to create a system that "just works" while keeping it FOSS - please don't skip out that very important clause.
We are still FOSS. I'm not suggesting to just ship these things by default. I'm suggesting making it easier for users to make informed decisions on this subject, while making sure they remain safe and not compromise their computers in the process.
"However, Fedora cannot and does not include MP3 decoders/encoders in order to serve the goal of providing and supporting only free and open source software that is not restricted by software patents by default."
"by default" is a key phrase here. As well as "include". My suggestion is not to include these things by default, that's not viable both legally and philosophically.
belSo you give people a choice here: "either throw away your brand new laptop and buy a different one, or don't use Fedora". That's not a good thing to do. It's safe to assume our target users already have computers, and that a very large percentage of them have broadcom wifi chips. If you're a developer with a laptop supplied to you by your company, you might not have a choice of the type of laptop at all.
Well, it's like saying I'm travelling to the states and haven't the right plug point - what should I do? Should I run around asking the states to change their electrical system or should I try to figure out what converter I need to get my system working?
That's not the same at all, sorry. Getting a plug converter is very easy, you walk into a store, you pay money, you get a product - end of story. It's different with drivers. Installing them is not easy and requires following complicated instructions... and firmware files are even more of a mess.
Wireless chips are not usually listed in the specs. This means knowing what you buy requires a lot of research and prior knowledge of which chips are "good"... Sometimes the information is not available at all. Sometimes there are multiple editions of the same laptop with different wifi chips. Sometimes non-broadcom is not an option (if you buy a Mac, for example). If someone tries Fedora, and sees that wifi doesn't work, they won't blame their hardware (they probably don't even know what "broadcom" is), after all, it worked fine on Windows (or on OS X). They'll blame Fedora.
And we come back to awareness.
I'm sure you could explain this to people face to face in conferences, but this doesn't scale. We can't have a dialog saying "Sorry your wifi is not working, this is not our fault, blame that hardware vendor you've never heard of".
And again, you could invest your time in convincing people a certain vendor is bad and that they need to do extensive research before buying a laptop, but this doesn't scale and doesn't work for various reasons that I've explained in my previous message. I'll sum them up:
- People already have laptops. They are not going to throw them away
just because of Fedora. 2) Some people have no choice of a laptop, they are provided to them by their IT department and there's only one or two models. 3) The information regarding wifi chips is not listed on formal vendor specs, it requires extensive research. Sometimes, the information available online is inaccurate due to model fragmentation, or not available at all. 4) You can't convey this information to each and every person in your target audience, so people will keep blaming Fedora.
For example, including 3rd party repository definitions is still an option - if I recall correctly the only reason it was veto'd is philosophical, not legal.
Yes, certainly - which is why the alternate suggestion of helping the third party repository improve came up. Why has that been discounted?
Again, just having the 3rd party repo out there, even if installing it is more secure, is not sufficient. People still need a way to find it. I still think that if people need to go to google to search this, we are not doing a very good job. Especially since if they try to play an MP3 file, gnome-software will show up, tell them they couldn't find anything, and send them to a very confusing page in the Fedora wiki with not much real useful information.
Or we could offer the users to purchase the Fluendo codec pack in an integrated and secure way. This is possible, and yes, most users probably won't pay, but at least it's something, and something is better than nothing.
I'm totally on board with this - in fact, I was looking at Fluendo myself earlier today. If people aren't willing to pay for a service someone else is providing, they won't get the service..
I wonder how complicated it would be (both from a policy perspective and a technical perspective) to get it integrated in gnome-software in such a way that users could purchase and install these codec packs with minimum manual steps. I also wonder if those codecs are getting security updates, and how.
We could also have an official-ish page with less vague instructions on how to safely get 3rd party repo to work, with a clear disclaimer that this is community generated content in such a way that would make legal happy.
Like this? https://ask.fedoraproject.org/en/question/9111/sticky-what-plugins-do- i-need-to-install-to-watch-movies-and-listen-to-music/
Something similar. Would be nice if the wiki page Software throws you at when there's a codec missing could link to a relevant tag in ask fedora. However, this post dives into terminal commands, which I'm not sure is such a good idea - it would be nice if this installation could be graphical. I had an idea last year that Software could offer you to install the codecs immidately after you install the repo configuration. I think it's still possible to implement, just need to have a proper way to do this. Maybe we can make this a reality...
As for wifi, we could implement a pre-install check screen on the live CD, that will warn you before you install if your hardware has known issues. If your only network adapter is not supported, you'd want to know about it *before* you overwrite your main OS. This kind of utility could even provide a shortlink (so you can write it down) for instructions on how to use your other OS to get the right drivers or firmware files and how to install them.
Sounds like a great idea - RFE to anaconda?
Not sure if anaconda is the right component for this, maybe the welcome dialog you get when you start the live session should perform this checks, or maybe something else entirely. This also needs design, and we need to understand if we even have a reliable way to detect problematic hardware.
Here's another idea:
- a community contributed list of laptops/workstations in the market
that are open source friendly - maybe even a link on fp.o that says "what system should I buy if I want to run Fedora?"
I don't think this scales... there are so many different laptops out there, and new ones come out faster than you could check them all. We'd end up with a list of mostly obsolete laptops.
If we can get a noticeable amount of users to stay away from non FOSS vendors, the vendors *may* feel a bit of pressure?
We are way too small right now to make a noticeable difference. The only pressure we can have is by emailing the vendor (would be a good idea to tell every user you hear that suffers from this issue to send a mail to the problematic hardware vendor, maybe enough of these might move something, but I'm not too optimistic about this)
GNOME Software is awesome. I started a fresh F22 installation on my laptop and thought I had installed.. $package. Whatever it was. I typed out the application name, a matching thing popped up, I pressed enter, and found out "Oh, this isn't installed, I need to press this one button first". Then I was *done*. It was really easy; no messing around with a terminal, no visiting sketchy blogs, no third party sites visited. I have a sense that this is exactly the kind of experience you'd like when a user wants to use flash, or Virtualbox, or listen to MP3s - everything they want to do Just Works on Fedora.
There's a problem with this. The user that's completely dissuaded by four lines of cut and paste instructions to make all that happen is going to gleefully appreciate that "Fedora Just Works with my flash videos, mp3s, and videos! I didn't have to do anything". We can sit down and discuss the technical, by the books compliance with stated policy by not shipping the bits, or metadata that provides the bits - hey, it's just a URL to the metadata, it doesn't load anything until the user initiates something. It's a tired discussion, and one that IMO continually misses the point. First, I hope nobody actually thinks that obfuscating this is different - to the end user - compared to actually shipping it. Why do people with nvidia cards appreciate Ubuntu? It offers them the nvidia driver. Not installs for them, detects and *offers* it. The user is making the choice there. We don't do that; the user has to open a browser, type "Fedora Nvidia", click several times, then perhaps cut and paste a line into a terminal. I have a lawnmower with more complicated instructions - and I can disassemble it and replace broken bits with spec parts if I need to.
More importantly, there's a compromise of the project's values. Not company policy, not bureaucratic red tape, not a few difficult community members that need to be convinced that the easy way is better. Core. Values. The compromise isn't decreased by making the user click "OK" or offering them a brief "this comes from a third party" to ignore. The licensing and patent issues that come under discussion are symptoms of a disease that, by consensus shown via participation, we all want to cure. The Fedora Project's highest goal is *not* to produce a competitive, easy to use operating system.
When someone asks me what makes Fedora different, especially a prospective contributor, I don't talk about how easy it is in GNOME to switch to an already-running application, or how nice it is that the gedit UI matches the UI of the system settings application. These are all good things, and they're all upstream and available in other distros too. I point them at Fedora's values, the project's commitment to furthering the Open Source Way, transparency, advocacy, staying close to open upstreams - all of the *philosophy* that results in a somewhat difficult transition from more tolerant platforms. The Fedora Project's Mission Statement, Foundations, and Objectives are required reading for contributors.
I'm shocked that these principles are continually treated as negotiable obstacles. Maybe some end up contributing to the project without thinking about these issues, or because their dayjob requires it, but many, myself included, chose a distribution to play in because of the community and it's principles. Kendell's situation is a great example; he's passionate about the ideology behind the project, and beginning to contribute because the project's values align with his own. He's written about the formats used for audiobooks made for the blind - DRM crippled, vendor lock-in at every level, really as inaccessible as an accessibility effort can be. You can understand his frustration when, after finding a project that's *committed* to advocating permissively licensed solutions to these problems, he finds that the developers responsible for the project's flagship product advocating abandoning those values for convenience and marketshare gain.
There are a lot of us out there contributing our free time in support of these values. I encourage everyone to do the same - if you strongly feel that patent and license restricted bits should be effortlessly available to end users, spend some free time improving a project like RPMFusion or Kokora. If you want to create a world where free culture is welcoming and widespread, collaboration is commonplace, and people control their content and devices, well, it isn't going to be that easy.
--Pete
I agree with most of what you wrote, but:
On Tue, 2015-05-12 at 00:14 +0300, Elad Alfassa wrote:
Fedora Workstation aims to create the best-in-class operation system for developers. That's what it is about.
I see: "We want to create a stable, integrated, polished and user friendly system that can appeal to a wide general audience." That's priority #1 as far as I'm concerned.
Next I see: "The Fedora Workstation working group will have a special focus on providing a platform for development of various types of applications." We all agree this is an important goal as well, but we need to be careful not to phrase it as our exclusive goal. A few weeks ago we had a quote from a user who didn't bother to try Workstation because it was "for developers;" we have to do better to avoid creating that impression.
I think we're mostly all on the same page about this at this point (what's good for general users is good for developers too); we just need to be careful about out messaging.
after all, we are asking "why people aren't switching from Mac or Windows" and not "Why aren't people switching from Ubuntu".
Frankly, I'm asking the later question. We can't really compete with Mac or Windows because we can't run Mac or Windows apps. We can compete just fine with Ubuntu. I don't see why we shouldn't aim to make Fedora Workstation the #1 GNU/Linux distribution.
gstreamer1-plugins-bad-freeworld is LGPLv2+. This falls under the definition of FOSS. Please don't confuse software patents and closed-source software. They are two very different things.
Note: all of GStreamer is LGPLv2+
For example, including 3rd party repository definitions is still an option - if I recall correctly the only reason it was veto'd is philosophical, not legal.
We can do this for nonfree software with Council approval (which I do not expect we will ever get), but we cannot include any repositories that contain codecs that infringe US patents.
My thoughts:
The two important codecs are MP3 and H264: everything else is secondary. MP3 expires prior to F23, so we can just include the upstream GStreamer codec with no problem. On IRC today Christian mentioned he is working with Cisco to use their FOSS H264 codec. I suspect (correct me if I'm wrong) that users will have to agree to a restrictive EULA prohibiting commercial use to use a licensed Cisco binary, but that's probably the only option we have for the forseeable future. It's FOSS, so we're not compromising on FOSS principles. It is a defeat for media freedom, but we already lost this battle a long time ago.
On Mon, May 11, 2015 at 5:38 PM, Michael Catanzaro mcatanzaro@gnome.org wrote:
On Tue, 2015-05-12 at 00:14 +0300, Elad Alfassa wrote:
after all, we are asking "why people aren't switching from Mac or Windows" and not "Why aren't people switching from Ubuntu".
Frankly, I'm asking the later question. We can't really compete with Mac or Windows because we can't run Mac or Windows apps. We can compete just fine with Ubuntu. I don't see why we shouldn't aim to make Fedora Workstation the #1 GNU/Linux distribution.
We can't compete with Mac or Windows because we don't have a sales force with quotas and we don't have a partnership to ship integrated hardware/software solutions with Fedora. I can't walk into a store and buy a Fedora laptop - I can't even order one from Amazon. Hell, I can't even walk into a store and buy a *RHEL* laptop or order one online!
So we want to compete with Ubuntu? Great! Somebody needs to pick up the phone and close a win-win partnership with a hardware vendor to make a Fedora or RHEL or CentOS equivalent to the Dell XPS13. ;-)
http://www.dell.com/learn/us/en/555/campaigns/xps-linux-laptop
On Tue, 2015-05-12 at 00:14 +0300, Elad Alfassa wrote:
Yes, that would be very helpful and it is certainly a way to go. However, previously when I offered my assistance I got no response from anyone who could actually point me at where to get started there... and as such this repository still does not have appdata afaik.
I've mailed the devel list of the repo suggesting we manually provide appdata until their infra switch is done. I've offered to maintain the appdata package too - it isn't much work at all, actually. Hopefully we'll have some sort of appdata before F22 releases.
On Tue, May 12, 2015 at 12:14:32AM +0300, Elad Alfassa wrote:
It's not the job of an OS to educate people.
I agree, but let's do keep in mind that the job of *Fedora* is to lead the advancement of free and open source software, and educating people can reasonably be a component of that. Building an OS is one of the activities we undertake in order to accomplish that mission, but we're *not* doing it for its own sake.
Developers probably already know what open source is - we are no longer the underdog. Open Source solutions are used everywhere. If you're a developer, chances are you already know what open source is.
That's definitely one of the reasons developers were chosen as a target for Workstation. We're not starting from zero. But we _do_ want those users to get increasingly caught up in using free and open source software everywhere as a first choice, not just when it happens to be an easy one. If we can do that by making things easier, awesome — and we should! — but that's not the only angle available to us.
On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 11:34 AM, Christian Schaller cschalle@redhat.com wrote:
Hi, so 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.
If the actual question was, "Why aren't you migrating to Fedora Workstation?", I wonder what their current environment was. I migrated to Fedora a few years ago from openSUSE for two reasons:
1. They switched from a six-month cycle to an eight-month cycle and still had problems meeting deadlines, and 2. The Planet CCRMA computer music tools are built on Fedora.
So now I'm perfectly happy with Fedora Workstation. I'd like a rolling release but I'm not going back to openSUSE just to get Tumbleweed, or, for that matter, NVidia or ATI drivers or Flash or codecs. But if someone were to ask me, "Why aren't you migrating to openSUSE (or Ubuntu or Arch or Debian or Mint or Mageia or Gentoo)?" I'd simply say, "Because they have no *compelling* advantage and I'd have to spend a couple of weeks getting up to speed on the way *they* do things."
They're all fine distros, they all have wonderful communities, they all do a good job of tracking upstream, I can compile unpackaged software on them, I can remix them as long as I don't infringe on trademarks, etc. But they aren't "better" than Fedora and Fedora's not really "better" than they are.
So if you want to take users away from Ubuntu, you need a *compelling* advantage. Fedora Workstation has to make users badass at something meaningful in a way that Ubuntu doesn't.
I didn't think the request for comments would leave us with the blueprint for creating the ultimate Linux distribution, and to some degree taking users from other distributions is a secondary concern. But I did feel the request could help us identify some pain points that if addressed could make us a more likely choice not just for users of other distributions, but also for Mac and Windows users.
Of course as we move forward we should make sure to try to poll wider to learn more, for instance I think someone on the blog suggested we reach out to certain reddit forums.
Christian
----- Original Message -----
From: "M. Edward (Ed) Borasky" znmeb@znmeb.net To: "Discussions about development for the Fedora desktop" desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org Sent: Thursday, May 7, 2015 3:04:45 PM Subject: Re: Why people are not switching to Fedora
On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 11:34 AM, Christian Schaller cschalle@redhat.com wrote:
Hi, so 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.
If the actual question was, "Why aren't you migrating to Fedora Workstation?", I wonder what their current environment was. I migrated to Fedora a few years ago from openSUSE for two reasons:
- They switched from a six-month cycle to an eight-month cycle and
still had problems meeting deadlines, and 2. The Planet CCRMA computer music tools are built on Fedora.
So now I'm perfectly happy with Fedora Workstation. I'd like a rolling release but I'm not going back to openSUSE just to get Tumbleweed, or, for that matter, NVidia or ATI drivers or Flash or codecs. But if someone were to ask me, "Why aren't you migrating to openSUSE (or Ubuntu or Arch or Debian or Mint or Mageia or Gentoo)?" I'd simply say, "Because they have no *compelling* advantage and I'd have to spend a couple of weeks getting up to speed on the way *they* do things."
They're all fine distros, they all have wonderful communities, they all do a good job of tracking upstream, I can compile unpackaged software on them, I can remix them as long as I don't infringe on trademarks, etc. But they aren't "better" than Fedora and Fedora's not really "better" than they are.
So if you want to take users away from Ubuntu, you need a *compelling* advantage. Fedora Workstation has to make users badass at something meaningful in a way that Ubuntu doesn't. -- desktop mailing list desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
On Thu, May 07, 2015 at 03:26:56PM -0400, Christian Schaller wrote:
for instance I think someone on the blog suggested we reach out to certain reddit forums.
I'm going to be doing an AMA on r/linux later this month, speaking of which.
On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 12:26 PM, Christian Schaller cschalle@redhat.com wrote:
I didn't think the request for comments would leave us with the blueprint for creating the ultimate Linux distribution, and to some degree taking users from other distributions is a secondary concern. But I did feel the request could help us identify some pain points that if addressed could make us a more likely choice not just for users of other distributions, but also for Mac and Windows users.
I've never used a Mac so I can't help you there, but I can give you a long list of pain points for Windows. Honestly, the only reason I'd install Windows on a new machine would be if I had to use the full desktop version of Office. Nothing else works as well - not Google Docs, not Libre/Open Office, not even Office 365 or Office on a Mac or an iPad. If you need *Office*, you need it exactly and nothing else will do.
On my laptop (64-bit Intel i5 with 8 GB of RAM, Windows 8.1 / Fedora 22) when it's booted in Windows it takes *minutes* for it to come up and be ready for work. In Fedora, it's less than a minute. The disk thrashing on Windows (probably NTFS being super-careful not to lose any data) is painful in the extreme.
Then there's the mixed-metaphor desktop / tablet / mouse / touchscreen fiasco. And the "apps" for news, sports, weather, etc. that distract me from my work. And then there's the cumbersome installers for open-source pacakges like R, RStudio, PostgreSQL, MSysGit and OSGeo4W. I used to distribute a Windows-installer-based equivalent of my Fedora remix. It takes *hours* to install and requires the user to accept the defaults in *dozens* of screens. I've replaced that mess with an install of Boot2Docker and a "docker pull". ;-)
Hi all!
I think one of the main issues with users migrating is the "ease-of-use" factor that some of the larger 'competitors' offer, such as Ubuntu or Mint. Realistically, these distributions are curtailed to meet the needs of the average desktop user, as well as the non-cli-guru. Things such as the Software Center are appealing for most who are attempting to get into the linux realm, as learning cli can be overwhelming at times for some. I'm not saying this is the end-all be-all answer, nor do I have a suggestion are far as how to tackle this issue, but I do feel it would help with the 'enticement' factor towards those who are looking for a distribution to learn on, as well as grow with.
On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 9:28 PM, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky znmeb@znmeb.net wrote:
On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 12:26 PM, Christian Schaller cschalle@redhat.com wrote:
I didn't think the request for comments would leave us with the
blueprint for
creating the ultimate Linux distribution, and to some degree taking
users from
other distributions is a secondary concern. But I did feel the request
could help
us identify some pain points that if addressed could make us a more
likely choice
not just for users of other distributions, but also for Mac and Windows
users.
I've never used a Mac so I can't help you there, but I can give you a long list of pain points for Windows. Honestly, the only reason I'd install Windows on a new machine would be if I had to use the full desktop version of Office. Nothing else works as well - not Google Docs, not Libre/Open Office, not even Office 365 or Office on a Mac or an iPad. If you need *Office*, you need it exactly and nothing else will do.
On my laptop (64-bit Intel i5 with 8 GB of RAM, Windows 8.1 / Fedora 22) when it's booted in Windows it takes *minutes* for it to come up and be ready for work. In Fedora, it's less than a minute. The disk thrashing on Windows (probably NTFS being super-careful not to lose any data) is painful in the extreme.
Then there's the mixed-metaphor desktop / tablet / mouse / touchscreen fiasco. And the "apps" for news, sports, weather, etc. that distract me from my work. And then there's the cumbersome installers for open-source pacakges like R, RStudio, PostgreSQL, MSysGit and OSGeo4W. I used to distribute a Windows-installer-based equivalent of my Fedora remix. It takes *hours* to install and requires the user to accept the defaults in *dozens* of screens. I've replaced that mess with an install of Boot2Docker and a "docker pull". ;-) -- desktop mailing list desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
Christian,
Can I add one more item that list? It's not so much why people aren't switching from another Linux distro to Fedora but a more general theme involving MacBooks. In my experience with a recent migration to Office 365 from Google Apps at my workplace I can tell you that is the weak spot for Workstation. Most often the choice to use a MacBook is one out of necessity to access Microsoft collaboration tools. Like I said previously, and this is the third time I mention this:
Current pain points with Office 365 integration are:
1. Users should be able to do a one-step setup of Office 365 using GNOME
Online Accounts and not have to configure Evolution and Pidgin/Empathy separately, this is too complicated for most users.
- Empathy currently doesn't support enough features from Lync (now Skype
for Business) - the Microsoft enterprise communication tool - and that's a show stopper. You can't do video calls, you can't initiate meetings and you can't do screen-sharing or file-transfers.
According to my understanding an encryption library is missing in Pidgin/Empathy that would allow the Windows/Mac clients to video/audio talk to Linux clients over a mandated encrypted connection. Currently the brand new Skype for Business Windows client can have Audio calls with Linux clients and do file transfers but it's very unreliable.
- OneDrive isn't supported by documents and there's no way to sync
documents or access documents directly from Nautilus. Seamless OneDrive support plus LibreOffice would be an awesome combination.
- Evolution is missing some crucial Office features such as finding
available meeting rooms and setting up Lync meetings. Also calendar sharing is a bit broken. People have shared calendars with me and I still couldn't access them.
- OneNote [2] is the note-taking app in Office. Currently no known Linux
app can edit these documents. It would be great to have an equivalent GNOME app that could import things like OneNote documents and then sync them to OneDrive.
Ideally Fedora Workstation should support Microsoft servicies and Office 365 out of the box enabling IT departments to add it to their "approved desktop OS" lists and start rolling them out to their various teams in large numbers. Another issue is how Workstation integrates with Active Directory. It would be amazing if I could log into Workstation using my AD credentials and then have my machine register itself with the AD server. This would be a game changer.
This would make it way too easy for IT to justify using it's existing Windows machines and deploying them users as Fedora Workstations instead of Mac OS X. There is also major synergy for enterprises that are already using CentOS or RHEL on their servers. This would be a win-win for everyone, including the IT departments.
If given the opportunity I would love to join a WG meeting and talk about these issues as someone who uses Fedora Workstation at work in a Microsoft environment.
Thank you for your patience and hard work.
Best,
AlexGS
On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 3:04 PM, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky znmeb@znmeb.net wrote:
On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 11:34 AM, Christian Schaller cschalle@redhat.com wrote:
Hi, so 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.
If the actual question was, "Why aren't you migrating to Fedora Workstation?", I wonder what their current environment was. I migrated to Fedora a few years ago from openSUSE for two reasons:
- They switched from a six-month cycle to an eight-month cycle and
still had problems meeting deadlines, and 2. The Planet CCRMA computer music tools are built on Fedora.
So now I'm perfectly happy with Fedora Workstation. I'd like a rolling release but I'm not going back to openSUSE just to get Tumbleweed, or, for that matter, NVidia or ATI drivers or Flash or codecs. But if someone were to ask me, "Why aren't you migrating to openSUSE (or Ubuntu or Arch or Debian or Mint or Mageia or Gentoo)?" I'd simply say, "Because they have no *compelling* advantage and I'd have to spend a couple of weeks getting up to speed on the way *they* do things."
They're all fine distros, they all have wonderful communities, they all do a good job of tracking upstream, I can compile unpackaged software on them, I can remix them as long as I don't infringe on trademarks, etc. But they aren't "better" than Fedora and Fedora's not really "better" than they are.
So if you want to take users away from Ubuntu, you need a *compelling* advantage. Fedora Workstation has to make users badass at something meaningful in a way that Ubuntu doesn't. -- desktop mailing list desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
Hi Alex, Thanks for this. Yeah, I am sure that better Windows/MS interoperability is important for a lot of people and it is something we should look into. I know there was a special AD/Windows interoperability effort that happened around the run up to RHEL7, so we can hopefully build on that. Also Rishi do have some windows work on his todo list for GOA, and while the aim for that was specifically to make remoting individual windows applications over RDP easier, I am sure a lot of the work would be generally useful for better AD support for instance.
Christian
----- Original Message -----
From: "Alex G.S." alxgrtnstrngl@gmail.com To: "Discussions about development for the Fedora desktop" desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org Sent: Thursday, May 7, 2015 3:31:35 PM Subject: Re: Why people are not switching to Fedora
Christian,
Can I add one more item that list? It's not so much why people aren't switching from another Linux distro to Fedora but a more general theme involving MacBooks. In my experience with a recent migration to Office 365 from Google Apps at my workplace I can tell you that is the weak spot for Workstation. Most often the choice to use a MacBook is one out of necessity to access Microsoft collaboration tools. Like I said previously, and this is the third time I mention this:
Current pain points with Office 365 integration are:
- Users should be able to do a one-step setup of Office 365 using GNOME
Online Accounts and not have to configure Evolution and Pidgin/Empathy separately, this is too complicated for most users.
- Empathy currently doesn't support enough features from Lync (now Skype for
Business) - the Microsoft enterprise communication tool - and that's a show stopper. You can't do video calls, you can't initiate meetings and you can't do screen-sharing or file-transfers.
According to my understanding an encryption library is missing in Pidgin/Empathy that would allow the Windows/Mac clients to video/audio talk to Linux clients over a mandated encrypted connection. Currently the brand new Skype for Business Windows client can have Audio calls with Linux clients and do file transfers but it's very unreliable.
- OneDrive isn't supported by documents and there's no way to sync documents
or access documents directly from Nautilus. Seamless OneDrive support plus LibreOffice would be an awesome combination.
- Evolution is missing some crucial Office features such as finding
available meeting rooms and setting up Lync meetings. Also calendar sharing is a bit broken. People have shared calendars with me and I still couldn't access them.
- OneNote [2] is the note-taking app in Office. Currently no known Linux app
can edit these documents. It would be great to have an equivalent GNOME app that could import things like OneNote documents and then sync them to OneDrive.
Ideally Fedora Workstation should support Microsoft servicies and Office 365 out of the box enabling IT departments to add it to their "approved desktop OS" lists and start rolling them out to their various teams in large numbers. Another issue is how Workstation integrates with Active Directory. It would be amazing if I could log into Workstation using my AD credentials and then have my machine register itself with the AD server. This would be a game changer.
This would make it way too easy for IT to justify using it's existing Windows machines and deploying them users as Fedora Workstations instead of Mac OS X. There is also major synergy for enterprises that are already using CentOS or RHEL on their servers. This would be a win-win for everyone, including the IT departments.
If given the opportunity I would love to join a WG meeting and talk about these issues as someone who uses Fedora Workstation at work in a Microsoft environment.
Thank you for your patience and hard work.
Best,
AlexGS
On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 3:04 PM, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky < znmeb@znmeb.net > wrote:
On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 11:34 AM, Christian Schaller < cschalle@redhat.com > wrote:
Hi, so 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.
If the actual question was, "Why aren't you migrating to Fedora Workstation?", I wonder what their current environment was. I migrated to Fedora a few years ago from openSUSE for two reasons:
- They switched from a six-month cycle to an eight-month cycle and
still had problems meeting deadlines, and 2. The Planet CCRMA computer music tools are built on Fedora.
So now I'm perfectly happy with Fedora Workstation. I'd like a rolling release but I'm not going back to openSUSE just to get Tumbleweed, or, for that matter, NVidia or ATI drivers or Flash or codecs. But if someone were to ask me, "Why aren't you migrating to openSUSE (or Ubuntu or Arch or Debian or Mint or Mageia or Gentoo)?" I'd simply say, "Because they have no *compelling* advantage and I'd have to spend a couple of weeks getting up to speed on the way *they* do things."
They're all fine distros, they all have wonderful communities, they all do a good job of tracking upstream, I can compile unpackaged software on them, I can remix them as long as I don't infringe on trademarks, etc. But they aren't "better" than Fedora and Fedora's not really "better" than they are.
So if you want to take users away from Ubuntu, you need a *compelling* advantage. Fedora Workstation has to make users badass at something meaningful in a way that Ubuntu doesn't. -- desktop mailing list desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
-- desktop mailing list desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
On May 7, 2015 1:32 PM, "Alex G.S." alxgrtnstrngl@gmail.com wrote:
Christian,
...
...Another issue is how Workstation integrates with Active Directory. It
would be amazing if I could log into Workstation using my AD credentials and then have my machine register itself with the AD server. This would be a game changer.
Best,
AlexGS
It doesn't work like that; you need to tell the machine about the domain/realm and *then* it knows how to validate your credentials. That said, I last used gnome-settings to add an ad account, and it joined the domain along the way, and set up much of the stuff you'd be looking for. It was surprisingly, shockingly easy and painless.
But! You aren't going to get things like group policy on a Fedora box. Windows admins want to admin Windows; there will always be features 'missing' because they will always want it to be Windows...
--Pete
----- Original Message -----
From: "Pete Travis" lists@petetravis.com To: "Discussions about development for the Fedora desktop" desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org Sent: Thursday, May 7, 2015 3:48:00 PM Subject: Re: Why people are not switching to Fedora
On May 7, 2015 1:32 PM, "Alex G.S." < alxgrtnstrngl@gmail.com > wrote:
Christian,
...
...Another issue is how Workstation integrates with Active Directory. It would be amazing if I could log into Workstation using my AD credentials and then have my machine register itself with the AD server. This would be a game changer.
Best,
AlexGS
It doesn't work like that; you need to tell the machine about the domain/realm and *then* it knows how to validate your credentials. That said, I last used gnome-settings to add an ad account, and it joined the domain along the way, and set up much of the stuff you'd be looking for. It was surprisingly, shockingly easy and painless.
Right, you can thank realmd, adcli and SSSD for that :)
That being said, theoretically it could be possible for us to write a tool that looked for logins of the type "DOMAIN\username" and attempted to autotedetect the domain controllers for that domain from AD and *then* attempt to call realmd automatically with the provided username and password. But that's an awful lot of work for a dubiously-useful feature.
(This would work because AD's default is to allow any user account to join up to five machines without admin permission, although many deployments disable this feature and require an admin account for this purpose).
But! You aren't going to get things like group policy on a Fedora box. Windows admins want to admin Windows; there will always be features 'missing' because they will always want it to be Windows...
As the person developing and maintaining GPO support in SSSD on Fedora, I'd like to contradict that statement vehemently :)
At the moment, our support for group policy is limited to access-control authorization, but it's pluggable and should be expandable to support other group policy capabilities going forward.
+1. Suggest a focused follow-on blog post requesting feedback on what their perspective is which would result in Fedora Workstation being 'compelling'. M. Edward (Ed) Borasky znmeb@znmeb.net; on Thursday, May 7, 2015 3:04 PM, said:
So if you want to take users away from Ubuntu, you need a *compelling* advantage. Fedora Workstation has to make users badass at something meaningful in a way that Ubuntu doesn't.
On Thu, 7 May 2015 14:34:20 -0400 (EDT), Christian Schaller wrote:
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.
What I wonder here is have they found another dist that is successful with a rolling release?
Many users who do "distribution hopping" use their installations only a bit and effectively use nothing for a long time. Their are lots of users with multi-booting setups and where the Linux installation is booted only sporadically.
SELinux is a pain A few comments about SELinux still getting in the way at times
And enforcing=0 still works.
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.
Upgrades Many people also pointed out that we had no UI for upgrading Fedora.
Also a few concrete requests in terms of applications for Fedora: http://www.mixxx.org http://www.vocalproject.net https://gnumdk.github.io/lollypop/ http://peterlevi.com/variety/ http://foldercolor.tuxfamily.org choqok for GNOME (microblogging client)
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.
I think the division "system + apps", probably with "(RPM-)ostree + xdg-app" would heavily and wonderfully fix ALL the above items.
Instant, reliable and stable rolling release. Tiny, secure and reversible updates and upgrades. Power of app (free and non-free) distribution to upstream (releasing packagers to do other cool stuff in Fedora itself). And fixed state/API to permit easy and effective 3rd party distribution of non-free drivers and codecs.
So, maybe trying a official "Fedora Workstation ostree spin" starting from Fedora 23 would be a wise thing to do?
The reasons for this could be testing, experimentation, experience, feedback, marketing, sending a "We are going to the future. Come with us." message to the linux world, etc...
I would TOTALLY try it, btw.
(also, if I am not wrong, Ubuntu will try a similar thing - with Snappy replacing DEBs, I think - in 15.10/16.04).
Built in backup solution A few people requested we create some kind of integrated backup solution
AFAIK Ubuntu just integrate the deja-dup UI in a item called "Backup" in GNOME-control-center (and pre-install it, of course). I think is a great solution.
----- Original Message -----
Built in backup solution A few people requested we create some kind of integrated backup solution
AFAIK Ubuntu just integrate the deja-dup UI in a item called "Backup" in GNOME-control-center (and pre-install it, of course). I think is a great solution.
deja-dup is better than nothing, but it's still not that great, mainly because duplicity isn't that great. I said as much when discussing the same topic on the GNOME lists.
I use deja-dup, and it's currently refusing to backup anything because "it's already in use", and uses 6GB of local data to save 92 GB of data remotely.
We need something better.
On Mon, 2015-05-11 at 06:13 -0400, Bastien Nocera wrote:
I use deja-dup, and it's currently refusing to backup anything because "it's already in use",
So what's happening is it actually starts a backup, then attempts to start a second one, but can't because one is already going in the background. But it provides no indication that it is actually properly backing things up, just an indication that it failed.
This happens almost always when I plug in my external hard drive, but occasionally it will actually properly display backup progress.
Do you have a bug reference for that?
----- Original Message -----
On Mon, 2015-05-11 at 06:13 -0400, Bastien Nocera wrote:
I use deja-dup, and it's currently refusing to backup anything because "it's already in use",
So what's happening is it actually starts a backup, then attempts to start a second one, but can't because one is already going in the background. But it provides no indication that it is actually properly backing things up, just an indication that it failed.
This happens almost always when I plug in my external hard drive, but occasionally it will actually properly display backup progress. -- desktop mailing list desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 9:34 PM, Christian Schaller cschalle@redhat.com wrote:
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.
I don't think we have the resources to please both those who want a usable rolling release *and* those who want an LTS release. I think people who want rolling releases are those who come from other Linux distributions... I don't think anyone coming from Windows or Mac would want their OS to change under their feet on regular updates.
HiDPI issues A few comments on various challenges people have with HiDPI screens, especially when dealing with non-GTK3 apps-
I don't think this is specific enough to be actionable.
Multimonitor support A few comments that our multimonitor support could be better
Again, not specific enough.
SELinux is a pain A few comments about SELinux still getting in the way at times
I'm using Fedora with SELinux on enforcing mode on two machines and I have no issue... however I do think the SELinux Troubleshooter deserves a UI refresh and some UX work. SELinux used to be much worse, years ago, but from what I see it is getting better.
Better Android integration A few people asked for more/better Android device integration features
We have Nuntius, which is neat. What other features do you think we need to have better mobile device integration?
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
This is just another example to show the Linux distribution module doesn't scale. No matter how many apps we package, there are going to be more. Application bundles is going to be a great improvement on this front.
On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 12:48 PM, Elad Alfassa elad@fedoraproject.org wrote:
On Thu, May 7, 2015 at 9:34 PM, Christian Schaller cschalle@redhat.com wrote:
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.
I don't think we have the resources to please both those who want a usable rolling release *and* those who want an LTS release. I think people who want rolling releases are those who come from other Linux distributions... I don't think anyone coming from Windows or Mac would want their OS to change under their feet on regular updates.
HiDPI issues A few comments on various challenges people have with HiDPI screens, especially when dealing with non-GTK3 apps-
I don't think this is specific enough to be actionable.
It is ... its pretty obvious if you use most non gtk3 app on hidpi. The fonts gets scaled up but not the UI elements ... you end up with small click targets (icons, toolbars, etc.) ... if you use a pure java app (i.e swing UI) its even worse not even the fonts gets scaled up. As to how to fix it see my first reply.
On Fri, May 08, 2015 at 01:48:56PM +0300, Elad Alfassa wrote:
I don't think we have the resources to please both those who want a usable rolling release *and* those who want an LTS release.
Making release-to-release upgrades more transparent seems like it'd help with both of these things, at least on a desktop. For an LTS server, one basically hopes to never apply updates ever. For a desktop, as long as the updates are hassle-free, as long as I don't have to spend a day on it (or significantly adjust my daily habits), LTS, rolling release, and twice-annual version bumps should basically be interchangeable.
I just fedup'd my travel laptop, after doing it successfully on my desktop system, and while the first time went basically smoothly, on the second, the dash-to-dock extension isn't behaving right, and for some bizare reason the unicode symbol 🌐 comes out gigantic — like, multiple lines large.
The extensions problem is, I know, hard to deal with, since it's third-party code. And I'll file a bug for the unicode thing — I dunno what's up with that.
Christian Schaller píše v Čt 07. 05. 2015 v 14:34 -0400: 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.
I had a talk on Fedora Workstation in front of 100 people who were mostly our target audience (developers, students,...) and I also asked them what annoys them on Linux desktop the most. Support for multiple graphics cards was the most frequent answer. No distribution has really solved this problem.
And for Fedora I would also add nVidia drivers. Not having multimedia support by default is a disadvantage, but it's really a matter of running one command and installing a couple of packages. But if you don't have good graphics card drivers or they break with every new release of kernel it's a dealbreaker because it can't be reliably solved by a couple of commands.
So instead of complaining about issues that can't be solved because they are not technical issues (patent-protected codecs), let's focus on problems that are technical because there is still a lot of room for improvement.
Jiri
On Mon, May 11, 2015 at 9:08 AM, Jiri Eischmann eischmann@redhat.com wrote:
Christian Schaller píše v Čt 07. 05. 2015 v 14:34 -0400: 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.
I had a talk on Fedora Workstation in front of 100 people who were mostly our target audience (developers, students,...) and I also asked them what annoys them on Linux desktop the most. Support for multiple graphics cards was the most frequent answer. No distribution has really solved this problem.
And for Fedora I would also add nVidia drivers. Not having multimedia support by default is a disadvantage, but it's really a matter of running one command and installing a couple of packages. But if you don't have good graphics card drivers or they break with every new release of kernel it's a dealbreaker because it can't be reliably solved by a couple of commands.
So instead of complaining about issues that can't be solved because they are not technical issues (patent-protected codecs), let's focus on problems that are technical because there is still a lot of room for improvement.
I'm not sure if you meant to include the nVidia driver as one of the "technical issues", but it seems to be implied. While that might be the greatest driver in the world, there really isn't much we can do about it breaking from a technical perspective. It's proprietary, so we can't fix it to build against the latest kernel we're going to ship and we rely on nVidia to play catch up.
josh
Josh Boyer píše v Po 11. 05. 2015 v 09:32 -0400:
On Mon, May 11, 2015 at 9:08 AM, Jiri Eischmann <eischmann@redhat.com
wrote: Christian Schaller píše v Čt 07. 05. 2015 v 14:34 -0400: 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.
I had a talk on Fedora Workstation in front of 100 people who were mostly our target audience (developers, students,...) and I also asked them what annoys them on Linux desktop the most. Support for multiple graphics cards was the most frequent answer. No distribution has really solved this problem.
And for Fedora I would also add nVidia drivers. Not having multimedia support by default is a disadvantage, but it's really a matter of running one command and installing a couple of packages. But if you don't have good graphics card drivers or they break with every new release of kernel it's a dealbreaker because it can't be reliably solved by a couple of commands.
So instead of complaining about issues that can't be solved because they are not technical issues (patent-protected codecs), let's focus on problems that are technical because there is still a lot of room for improvement.
I'm not sure if you meant to include the nVidia driver as one of the "technical issues", but it seems to be implied. While that might be the greatest driver in the world, there really isn't much we can do about it breaking from a technical perspective. It's proprietary, so we can't fix it to build against the latest kernel we're going to ship and we rely on nVidia to play catch up.
Well, unlike free implementations of popular codecs, free implementation of nVidia drivers can be and is legally re -distributable by us, so although it's hard to make it happen with our limited resources and nVidia doesn't cooperate at all, it has a solution legally, so it still IMHO falls under technical issues.
But to the point: I know the reasons why Fedora doesn't work with nVidia drivers. I was just stating the biggest issue I hear from users they have with Fedora. By far more crucial than missing multimedia support. Not only because multimedia codecs are solvable by a few commands once for all, but also because Windows users who are still the biggest group out there don't really expect an OS with a complete multimedia support, they're used to going out and getting VLC or some magic-multimedia-codecs-pack.exe.
I introduced Fedora to 600 IT students (mostly Windows users) last year from whom a larger number installed it. I don't remember having a single complain about missing codecs, but we spent a lot of time with dozens of them because of problems with graphics drivers (mostly nVidia, some AMD, no problems with Intel) and in some cases with all our experience we just had to give up and tell them to install Fedora in a virtual machine in Windows to work on their school projects.
Jiri
On Mon, May 11, 2015 at 10:31 AM, Jiri Eischmann eischmann@redhat.com wrote:
Josh Boyer píše v Po 11. 05. 2015 v 09:32 -0400:
On Mon, May 11, 2015 at 9:08 AM, Jiri Eischmann <eischmann@redhat.com
wrote: Christian Schaller píše v Čt 07. 05. 2015 v 14:34 -0400: 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.
I had a talk on Fedora Workstation in front of 100 people who were mostly our target audience (developers, students,...) and I also asked them what annoys them on Linux desktop the most. Support for multiple graphics cards was the most frequent answer. No distribution has really solved this problem.
And for Fedora I would also add nVidia drivers. Not having multimedia support by default is a disadvantage, but it's really a matter of running one command and installing a couple of packages. But if you don't have good graphics card drivers or they break with every new release of kernel it's a dealbreaker because it can't be reliably solved by a couple of commands.
So instead of complaining about issues that can't be solved because they are not technical issues (patent-protected codecs), let's focus on problems that are technical because there is still a lot of room for improvement.
I'm not sure if you meant to include the nVidia driver as one of the "technical issues", but it seems to be implied. While that might be the greatest driver in the world, there really isn't much we can do about it breaking from a technical perspective. It's proprietary, so we can't fix it to build against the latest kernel we're going to ship and we rely on nVidia to play catch up.
Well, unlike free implementations of popular codecs, free implementation of nVidia drivers can be and is legally re -distributable by us, so although it's hard to make it happen with our limited resources and nVidia doesn't cooperate at all, it has a solution legally, so it still IMHO falls under technical issues.
Yes, but...
But to the point: I know the reasons why Fedora doesn't work with nVidia drivers. I was just stating the biggest issue I hear from users they have with Fedora. By far more crucial than missing multimedia support. Not only because multimedia codecs are solvable by a few commands once for all, but also because Windows users who are still the biggest group out there don't really expect an OS with a complete multimedia support, they're used to going out and getting VLC or some magic-multimedia-codecs-pack.exe.
I introduced Fedora to 600 IT students (mostly Windows users) last year from whom a larger number installed it. I don't remember having a single complain about missing codecs, but we spent a lot of time with dozens of them because of problems with graphics drivers (mostly nVidia, some AMD, no problems with Intel) and in some cases with all our experience we just had to give up and tell them to install Fedora in a virtual machine in Windows to work on their school projects.
I'm aware of all this too. What isn't new is that there is no actual suggestion for improvement, mostly because it's a situation that doesn't have any area for improvement outside of "make the FOSS driver better". So I'm agreeing with you that it's a problem, but we knew that already.
Believe me, I know it is terrible to have to tell people there is no solution for a problem. However, unless someone comes up with an idea that doesn't undermine Fedora's values or cause an inordinate amount of work for maintainers, I'm afraid we're kind of stuck with it.
josh
On Mon, 2015-05-11 at 09:32 -0400, Josh Boyer wrote:
I'm not sure if you meant to include the nVidia driver as one of the "technical issues", but it seems to be implied. While that might be the greatest driver in the world, there really isn't much we can do about it breaking from a technical perspective. It's proprietary, so we can't fix it to build against the latest kernel we're going to ship and we rely on nVidia to play catch up.
I think we need to discuss locking the kernel to a single major version for the lifetime of each Fedora Workstation release. Otherwise, we're probably going to have to give up on nVidia users.
----- Original Message -----
On Mon, 2015-05-11 at 09:32 -0400, Josh Boyer wrote:
I'm not sure if you meant to include the nVidia driver as one of the "technical issues", but it seems to be implied. While that might be the greatest driver in the world, there really isn't much we can do about it breaking from a technical perspective. It's proprietary, so we can't fix it to build against the latest kernel we're going to ship and we rely on nVidia to play catch up.
I think we need to discuss locking the kernel to a single major version for the lifetime of each Fedora Workstation release.
Locking kernel down to one single version is not a solution either. It's the way how HW support is distributed in Linux and this way you left people with very recent HW without support but on the other hand, you avoid regressions for older HW... Maybe flip coin problem?
But I'll let Josh to handle this :).
Jaroslav
Otherwise, we're probably going to have to give up on nVidia users.
desktop mailing list desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
On Mon, May 11, 2015 at 10:48 AM, Michael Catanzaro mcatanzaro@gnome.org wrote:
On Mon, 2015-05-11 at 09:32 -0400, Josh Boyer wrote:
I'm not sure if you meant to include the nVidia driver as one of the "technical issues", but it seems to be implied. While that might be the greatest driver in the world, there really isn't much we can do about it breaking from a technical perspective. It's proprietary, so we can't fix it to build against the latest kernel we're going to ship and we rely on nVidia to play catch up.
I think we need to discuss locking the kernel to a single major version for the lifetime of each Fedora Workstation release. Otherwise, we're probably going to have to give up on nVidia users.
There are a lot of lessons we've learned over the years working with a team of 3 people across up to 4 (i.e. Branched state) releases. One of them is that freezing on a kernel version per release doesn't work well.
But I think you've overstated the problem and and over-"simplified" with the suggested solution. The problem isn't that nVidia never updates their driver. They do. And if we stuck with one kernel version just because of them, we'd be sacrificing a number of other users.
The problem is the lag time between when Fedora rebases and when nVidia and the 3rd party repos update to match the new kernel version. The most popular 3rd party repo already has a good understanding of how and when Fedora rebases, but they need the newer kernel in place in Fedora to build against once an updated driver is available. Outside of building it within Fedora, I'm not sure there's much to be done. This is somewhat mitigated by the fact that Fedora keeps 3 kernels installed, so nVidia users still have working options. They will get the update eventually.
josh
On Mon, 2015-05-11 at 11:14 -0400, Josh Boyer wrote:
On Mon, May 11, 2015 at 10:48 AM, Michael Catanzaro mcatanzaro@gnome.org wrote:
On Mon, 2015-05-11 at 09:32 -0400, Josh Boyer wrote:
I'm not sure if you meant to include the nVidia driver as one of the "technical issues", but it seems to be implied. While that might be the greatest driver in the world, there really isn't much we can do about it breaking from a technical perspective. It's proprietary, so we can't fix it to build against the latest kernel we're going to ship and we rely on nVidia to play catch up.
I think we need to discuss locking the kernel to a single major version for the lifetime of each Fedora Workstation release. Otherwise, we're probably going to have to give up on nVidia users.
There are a lot of lessons we've learned over the years working with a team of 3 people across up to 4 (i.e. Branched state) releases. One of them is that freezing on a kernel version per release doesn't work well.
But I think you've overstated the problem and and over-"simplified" with the suggested solution. The problem isn't that nVidia never updates their driver. They do. And if we stuck with one kernel version just because of them, we'd be sacrificing a number of other users.
The problem is the lag time between when Fedora rebases and when nVidia and the 3rd party repos update to match the new kernel version. The most popular 3rd party repo already has a good understanding of how and when Fedora rebases, but they need the newer kernel in place in Fedora to build against once an updated driver is available. Outside of building it within Fedora, I'm not sure there's much to be done. This is somewhat mitigated by the fact that Fedora keeps 3 kernels installed, so nVidia users still have working options. They will get the update eventually.
One option here might be to attempt to coordinate with RPMFusion on releases. Perhaps we enforce a minimum time for the kernel in Bodhi (excepting security updates, perhaps) to give RPMFusion time to produce a matching kmod.
On Mon, May 11, 2015 at 4:48 PM, Michael Catanzaro mcatanzaro@gnome.org wrote:
On Mon, 2015-05-11 at 09:32 -0400, Josh Boyer wrote:
I'm not sure if you meant to include the nVidia driver as one of the "technical issues", but it seems to be implied. While that might be the greatest driver in the world, there really isn't much we can do about it breaking from a technical perspective. It's proprietary, so we can't fix it to build against the latest kernel we're going to ship and we rely on nVidia to play catch up.
I think we need to discuss locking the kernel to a single major version for the lifetime of each Fedora Workstation release. Otherwise, we're probably going to have to give up on nVidia users.
Can you recall the last time where we shipped a kernel before nvidia supported it? We don't really wait for them but they don't take that long to catch up ...
You are suggesting a solution for a problem that doesn't really exists much in practice.
----- Original Message -----
From: "drago01" drago01@gmail.com To: "Discussions about development for the Fedora desktop" desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org Sent: Monday, May 11, 2015 3:23:01 PM Subject: Re: Why people are not switching to Fedora
On Mon, May 11, 2015 at 4:48 PM, Michael Catanzaro mcatanzaro@gnome.org wrote:
On Mon, 2015-05-11 at 09:32 -0400, Josh Boyer wrote:
I'm not sure if you meant to include the nVidia driver as one of the "technical issues", but it seems to be implied. While that might be the greatest driver in the world, there really isn't much we can do about it breaking from a technical perspective. It's proprietary, so we can't fix it to build against the latest kernel we're going to ship and we rely on nVidia to play catch up.
I think we need to discuss locking the kernel to a single major version for the lifetime of each Fedora Workstation release. Otherwise, we're probably going to have to give up on nVidia users.
Can you recall the last time where we shipped a kernel before nvidia supported it? We don't really wait for them but they don't take that long to catch up ...
You are suggesting a solution for a problem that doesn't really exists much in practice. --
I am wondering if we are maybe making this issue harder to solve than it is. I haven't used the NVidia binary drivers in a few years, but back when I did it wasn't that much of a pain. I used one of the 3rd party rpms with the driver in it and while it was usually a little bit of time between a new Fedora kernel and the NVidia driver getting rebuilt, it was never a real issue. I just kept booting with the old kernel until the driver got updated.
So to me the only thing that would be needed to make this a bit smoother is maybe some way for Grub or similar to be aware of your situation and unless there are major security issues maybe suggest you keep booting with the old kernel for a bit? (maybe easier said than done?). But the assumption that as soon as a new Fedora kernel is out you HAVE to start using it seems to be creating problems for ourselves that doesn't need to be the case?
Christian
On Mon, 2015-05-11 at 15:34 -0400, Christian Schaller wrote:
So to me the only thing that would be needed to make this a bit smoother is maybe some way for Grub or similar to be aware of your situation and unless there are major security issues maybe suggest you keep booting with the old kernel for a bit? (maybe easier said than done?).
Or just do so automatically, if grub could become that smart.
But the assumption that as soon as a new Fedora kernel is out you HAVE to start using it seems to be creating problems for ourselves that doesn't need to be the case?
Well users shouldn't have to understand what a kernel is, much less be forced to choose between them during boot. We should pare the GRUB boot menu down to the basics: there should be one entry for "Fedora" and that's it, one for "Windows," one for each other OS, and no boot menu at all if only Fedora is present. Offering to boot multiple kernels throws confusing technical details right in the user's face.
Michael
On Mon, May 11, 2015 at 7:55 PM, Michael Catanzaro mcatanzaro@gnome.org wrote:
On Mon, 2015-05-11 at 15:34 -0400, Christian Schaller wrote:
So to me the only thing that would be needed to make this a bit smoother is maybe some way for Grub or similar to be aware of your situation and unless there are major security issues maybe suggest you keep booting with the old kernel for a bit? (maybe easier said than done?).
Or just do so automatically, if grub could become that smart.
But the assumption that as soon as a new Fedora kernel is out you HAVE to start using it seems to be creating problems for ourselves that doesn't need to be the case?
Well users shouldn't have to understand what a kernel is, much less be forced to choose between them during boot. We should pare the GRUB boot menu down to the basics: there should be one entry for "Fedora" and that's it, one for "Windows," one for each other OS, and no boot menu at all if only Fedora is present. Offering to boot multiple kernels throws confusing technical details right in the user's face.
How does Arch handle it? I've got an Arch laptop next to me and when I boot it up it offers "Arch Linux" which boots whatever the latest kernel installed is for Arch, and then "Advanced Options For Arch Linux" where it lists out the various kernels.
Michael
desktop mailing list desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
On Mon, May 11, 2015 at 03:34:20PM -0400, Christian Schaller wrote:
I haven't used the NVidia binary drivers in a few years, but back when I did it wasn't that much of a pain. I used one of the 3rd party rpms with the driver in it and while it was usually a little bit of time between a new Fedora kernel and the NVidia driver getting rebuilt, it was never a real issue. I just kept booting with the old kernel until the driver got updated.
So to me the only thing that would be needed to make this a bit smoother is maybe some way for Grub or similar to be aware of your situation and unless there are major security issues maybe suggest you keep booting with the old kernel for a bit?
That's not necessary, I think. The packaged nvidia blobs from the major 3rd party repo also come in a variant (called akmod) that doesn't require you to wait for rebuilds of the module to appear in the repo. Instead, it builds the kmod rpm on the fly when booting a new kernel (or was it on install?). As the kernel-specific part (shipped as source code) is just a thin wrapper, the time it takes to build it is hardly noticable. Obviously, it requires GCC but that shouldn't be an issue considering the current lax to non-existing size constraints of our graphical spins.
Ubuntu is using that approach as well (or at least they used to, no idea what they're doing today). It tends to be much more robust in face of kernel updates, as in most cases a simple rebuild is all that's needed.
The repo's nvidia howto recommends the akmod variant. Many results of a random google query probably don't.
On Mon, 2015-05-11 at 21:23 +0200, drago01 wrote:
Can you recall the last time where we shipped a kernel before nvidia supported it? We don't really wait for them but they don't take that long to catch up ...
You are suggesting a solution for a problem that doesn't really exists much in practice.
I don't have an nvidia graphics card. I knew better than to buy from them. :D I was basing my suggestion on complaints in Christian's blog [1], but searching for "nvidia" I see only two complaints, and neither related to our kernel updates. So maybe it's not as big an issue after all.
"Installing proprietary Nvidia drivers (ugh, I know) was painful. Google searches return multiple guides for various Fedora versions and it was hard to tell if something from F18 or F19 was still applicable on F21."
[1] https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2015/04/20/fedora-workstation-more -than-the-sum-of-its-parts/
----- Original Message -----
Christian Schaller píše v Čt 07. 05. 2015 v 14:34 -0400: 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.
I had a talk on Fedora Workstation in front of 100 people who were mostly our target audience (developers, students,...) and I also asked them what annoys them on Linux desktop the most. Support for multiple graphics cards was the most frequent answer. No distribution has really solved this problem.
We already support multiple graphics cards...
What we don't support is matching an output to a graphics card on laptops with multiple graphics cards, leading to either lowered performance, or lowered battery life.
I'm planning on working on this when we're further into the Wayland transition, as I feel that any work on X11 would be soon wasted, and I don't want to set my Optimus horses before the Wayland cart is ready.
And for Fedora I would also add nVidia drivers. Not having multimedia support by default is a disadvantage, but it's really a matter of running one command and installing a couple of packages. But if you don't have good graphics card drivers or they break with every new release of kernel it's a dealbreaker because it can't be reliably solved by a couple of commands.
So instead of complaining about issues that can't be solved because they are not technical issues (patent-protected codecs), let's focus on problems that are technical because there is still a lot of room for improvement.
I don't think that's a good way to look at things. I don't think that having hardware support 6 months before Ubuntu is going to make people want to move from Ubuntu when things already work "well enough" (it's not as if the graphics card didn't work at all), when getting the distribution set up is still going to be a pain.
It's an important problem to look into, not something to sweep under the rug.
I'm planning on working on this when we're further into the Wayland transition, as I feel that any work on X11 would be soon wasted, and I don't want to set my Optimus horses before the Wayland cart is ready.
Having the FOSS and proprietary drivers be mutually exclusive creates a scenario where a user get's the worst of two experiences.
The proprietary and FOSS drivers should be able to be installed at the same time and loaded when needed depending on the use-case. Ideally the user should default to the FOSS driver and run a GNOME Wayland session. When they play a game from Steam the proprietary drivers should be dynamically loaded as an isolated X11 session similar to what XWayland does today. The user should also be able to run apps with the proprietary driver if they wish but the overall desktop should be managed by the FOSS drivers.
Then the FOSS driver developers in the Nouveau, AMD and Intel projects could focus entirely on Wayland and standard desktop apps like Chromium and Firefox. That would accelerate the development of a usable FOSS driven Wayland desktop and most users could then make the migration.
On Mon, May 11, 2015 at 9:47 AM, Bastien Nocera bnocera@redhat.com wrote:
----- Original Message -----
Christian Schaller píše v Čt 07. 05. 2015 v 14:34 -0400: 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.
I had a talk on Fedora Workstation in front of 100 people who were mostly our target audience (developers, students,...) and I also asked them what annoys them on Linux desktop the most. Support for multiple graphics cards was the most frequent answer. No distribution has really solved this problem.
We already support multiple graphics cards...
What we don't support is matching an output to a graphics card on laptops with multiple graphics cards, leading to either lowered performance, or lowered battery life.
I'm planning on working on this when we're further into the Wayland transition, as I feel that any work on X11 would be soon wasted, and I don't want to set my Optimus horses before the Wayland cart is ready.
And for Fedora I would also add nVidia drivers. Not having multimedia support by default is a disadvantage, but it's really a matter of running one command and installing a couple of packages. But if you don't have good graphics card drivers or they break with every new release of kernel it's a dealbreaker because it can't be reliably solved by a couple of commands.
So instead of complaining about issues that can't be solved because they are not technical issues (patent-protected codecs), let's focus on problems that are technical because there is still a lot of room for improvement.
I don't think that's a good way to look at things. I don't think that having hardware support 6 months before Ubuntu is going to make people want to move from Ubuntu when things already work "well enough" (it's not as if the graphics card didn't work at all), when getting the distribution set up is still going to be a pain.
It's an important problem to look into, not something to sweep under the rug. -- desktop mailing list desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
On Mon, May 11, 2015 at 10:07 AM, Alex G.S. alxgrtnstrngl@gmail.com wrote:
I'm planning on working on this when we're further into the Wayland transition, as I feel that any work on X11 would be soon wasted, and I don't want to set my Optimus horses before the Wayland cart is ready.
Having the FOSS and proprietary drivers be mutually exclusive creates a scenario where a user get's the worst of two experiences.
The proprietary and FOSS drivers should be able to be installed at the same time and loaded when needed depending on the use-case. Ideally the user should default to the FOSS driver and run a GNOME Wayland session. When they play a game from Steam the proprietary drivers should be dynamically loaded as an isolated X11 session similar to what XWayland does today. The user should also be able to run apps with the proprietary driver if they wish but the overall desktop should be managed by the FOSS drivers.
This is technically impossible to do, because the kernel only allows one driver to drive a piece of hardware. Even if we rearchitected the kernel to allow multiple drivers in a co-operative manner, it still wouldn't be possible unless the proprietary drivers were modified to do this hand-off. The only way to achieve what you are suggesting is to unload a FOSS driver and load a proprietary driver when you started e.g. Steam. Then do the opposite when you exit the game. That is basically a tear-down of everything and you might as well reboot.
The idea is nice, but it isn't feasible at all. We have a better chance of just making the FOSS drivers as performant as the proprietary drivers. At least that is somewhat realistic.
josh
The idea is nice, but it isn't feasible at all. We have a better chance of just making the FOSS drivers as performant as the proprietary drivers. At least that is somewhat realistic.
In the new AMD scenario (unified kernel module for both FOSS and proprietary drivers) where you have the proprietary blob in user-space would this be a feasible thing to achieve if they're using the same kernel module? I think then it's a matter Nvidia being the real problem here and they need to be pushed to do the same with the Nouveau project and have a single kernel module and move the Nvidia blob into user-space. It's extremely frustrating that Nvidia is basically the only thing keeping X11 around.
On Mon, May 11, 2015 at 10:13 AM, Josh Boyer jwboyer@fedoraproject.org wrote:
On Mon, May 11, 2015 at 10:07 AM, Alex G.S. alxgrtnstrngl@gmail.com wrote:
I'm planning on working on this when we're further into the Wayland transition, as I feel that any work on X11 would be soon wasted, and I don't want to set my Optimus horses before the Wayland cart is ready.
Having the FOSS and proprietary drivers be mutually exclusive creates a scenario where a user get's the worst of two experiences.
The proprietary and FOSS drivers should be able to be installed at the
same
time and loaded when needed depending on the use-case. Ideally the user should default to the FOSS driver and run a GNOME Wayland session. When they play a game from Steam the proprietary drivers should be dynamically loaded as an isolated X11 session similar to what XWayland does today.
The
user should also be able to run apps with the proprietary driver if they wish but the overall desktop should be managed by the FOSS drivers.
This is technically impossible to do, because the kernel only allows one driver to drive a piece of hardware. Even if we rearchitected the kernel to allow multiple drivers in a co-operative manner, it still wouldn't be possible unless the proprietary drivers were modified to do this hand-off. The only way to achieve what you are suggesting is to unload a FOSS driver and load a proprietary driver when you started e.g. Steam. Then do the opposite when you exit the game. That is basically a tear-down of everything and you might as well reboot.
The idea is nice, but it isn't feasible at all. We have a better chance of just making the FOSS drivers as performant as the proprietary drivers. At least that is somewhat realistic.
josh
desktop mailing list desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA512
hi I'll add my two cents in here. I'm not a developer, and can't add any solutions, but I can at least make some suggestions. Do we want a distro that highlights what free software can do, and the best free software projects, or are we just another ubuntu? If our goal is to make the user experience as "thought free" as possible, then by all means, install chrome, skype, steam, nvidia and catalyst, and all that good stuff. If our goal is to stand out and be a free software project in as far as this is possible, binary firmware being the exception, then we need to do all we can to push these stubborn hardware companies to stop clinging to their IP, open up their code, and play along with the rest of the world. If indeed the nvidia driver is fantastic, then that company needs to open up it's specs and provide documentation so the foss developers can catch up. I can already here you practical people screaming at me " who cares as long as it just works?" I do. And I'm not alone either. I see posts here saying that "I don't want to include nonfree software, I just want to make the user experience more convenient." Well, to most users, unless they can click on an icon labeled install, and the system just work, whether it's open source or not is of no consequence. Fedora stands on it's principals, and it's one of the few distros to do so. The issues you highlight aren't issues fedora, or linux developers can help. If they could, there would already be an open source nvidia driver that's as good or better than the proprietary one. What we really need is cooperation from the hardware companies, not "we'll give you a driver, but it's closed source" or "we'll give you details if you sign an NDA, because our IP is sacred" It makes me so angry to have linux held back by companies like this. Ok, I've ranted enough lol. I'll shut up no w Thanks Kendell Sent from Fedora GNU/Linux
Alex G.S. wrote:
The idea is nice, but it isn't feasible at all. We have a better chance of just making the FOSS drivers as performant as the proprietary drivers. At least that is somewhat realistic.
In the new AMD scenario (unified kernel module for both FOSS and proprietary drivers) where you have the proprietary blob in user-space would this be a feasible thing to achieve if they're using the same kernel module? I think then it's a matter Nvidia being the real problem here and they need to be pushed to do the same with the Nouveau project and have a single kernel module and move the Nvidia blob into user-space. It's extremely frustrating that Nvidia is basically the only thing keeping X11 around.
On Mon, May 11, 2015 at 10:13 AM, Josh Boyer jwboyer@fedoraproject.org wrote:
On Mon, May 11, 2015 at 10:07 AM, Alex G.S. alxgrtnstrngl@gmail.com wrote:
I'm planning on working on this when we're further into the Wayland transition, as I feel that any work on X11 would be soon wasted, and I don't want to set my Optimus horses before the Wayland cart is ready.
Having the FOSS and proprietary drivers be mutually exclusive creates a scenario where a user get's the worst of two experiences.
The proprietary and FOSS drivers should be able to be installed at the
same
time and loaded when needed depending on the use-case. Ideally the user should default to the FOSS driver and run a GNOME Wayland session. When they play a game from Steam the proprietary drivers should be dynamically loaded as an isolated X11 session similar to what XWayland does today.
The
user should also be able to run apps with the proprietary driver if they wish but the overall desktop should be managed by the FOSS drivers.
This is technically impossible to do, because the kernel only allows one driver to drive a piece of hardware. Even if we rearchitected the kernel to allow multiple drivers in a co-operative manner, it still wouldn't be possible unless the proprietary drivers were modified to do this hand-off. The only way to achieve what you are suggesting is to unload a FOSS driver and load a proprietary driver when you started e.g. Steam. Then do the opposite when you exit the game. That is basically a tear-down of everything and you might as well reboot.
The idea is nice, but it isn't feasible at all. We have a better chance of just making the FOSS drivers as performant as the proprietary drivers. At least that is somewhat realistic.
josh -- desktop mailing list desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA512
hi This sounds sensible to me. Unfortunately, i don't know how the major graphics card manufacturers will respond. I suspect it will be something on the order of "just use our driver". I admit, from the posts i've seen here there's a clear line between people who want their systems to "just work" and people who want as much foss as possible. I'm in the second camp. I have little patience for the "just work" method, especially because it usually does not just work, someone has to do the setup and jump through the hoops Thanks Kendell clark Sent from Fedora GNU/Linux
Alex G.S. wrote:
I'm planning on working on this when we're further into the Wayland transition, as I feel that any work on X11 would be soon wasted, and I don't want to set my Optimus horses before the Wayland cart is ready.
Having the FOSS and proprietary drivers be mutually exclusive creates a scenario where a user get's the worst of two experiences.
The proprietary and FOSS drivers should be able to be installed at the same time and loaded when needed depending on the use-case. Ideally the user should default to the FOSS driver and run a GNOME Wayland session. When they play a game from Steam the proprietary drivers should be dynamically loaded as an isolated X11 session similar to what XWayland does today. The user should also be able to run apps with the proprietary driver if they wish but the overall desktop should be managed by the FOSS drivers.
Then the FOSS driver developers in the Nouveau, AMD and Intel projects could focus entirely on Wayland and standard desktop apps like Chromium and Firefox. That would accelerate the development of a usable FOSS driven Wayland desktop and most users could then make the migration.
On Mon, May 11, 2015 at 9:47 AM, Bastien Nocera bnocera@redhat.com wrote:
----- Original Message -----
Christian Schaller píe v ?t 07. 05. 2015 v 14:34 -0400: 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.
I had a talk on Fedora Workstation in front of 100 people who were mostly our target audience (developers, students,...) and I also asked them what annoys them on Linux desktop the most. Support for multiple graphics cards was the most frequent answer. No distribution has really solved this problem.
We already support multiple graphics cards...
What we don't support is matching an output to a graphics card on laptops with multiple graphics cards, leading to either lowered performance, or lowered battery life.
I'm planning on working on this when we're further into the Wayland transition, as I feel that any work on X11 would be soon wasted, and I don't want to set my Optimus horses before the Wayland cart is ready.
And for Fedora I would also add nVidia drivers. Not having multimedia support by default is a disadvantage, but it's really a matter of running one command and installing a couple of packages. But if you don't have good graphics card drivers or they break with every new release of kernel it's a dealbreaker because it can't be reliably solved by a couple of commands.
So instead of complaining about issues that can't be solved because they are not technical issues (patent-protected codecs), let's focus on problems that are technical because there is still a lot of room for improvement.
I don't think that's a good way to look at things. I don't think that having hardware support 6 months before Ubuntu is going to make people want to move from Ubuntu when things already work "well enough" (it's not as if the graphics card didn't work at all), when getting the distribution set up is still going to be a pain.
It's an important problem to look into, not something to sweep under the rug. -- desktop mailing list desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
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