Hi, last week I asked on my Czech blog what people are missing on the Linux desktop, mainly Fedora Workstation. It was picked by all major Czech Linux sites and received literally hundreds of responses. I went through them and created a summary for you. Some of it are well-known issues/features, some points were new to me. If something is not clear, just let me know and I'll be happy to explain it:
INSTALLER It was mentioned several times as something that put off users when trying Fedora. In pretty much all cases it was partitioning that was the problem (too complicated, different to what they're used to). Some of the experiences were a couple of years old, so it might have improved, but apparently we still have reserves here. One of the more concrete points: * Missing ability to choose where to place the bootloader (it's there, but very well hidden and cumbersome to set up).
UPDATES Quite a few people complained about having to restart to install updates. I know objective reasons for this, but it's important to understand that it's perceived as annoying by users and we should strive for minimizing the number of packages that need to be updated offline.
UPGRADES One of the most frequent request was an LTS version. When I asked why, the answer was typically that upgrades still bring incompatibilities, regressions, lost settings. The most frequently mentioned offender was NM, other mentioned problems were mostly hardware related (regressions in graphics, dockin station support, sound).
SHELL * the Activities hot corner is triggered too easily. We used to have the "pressure" feature on X11 which prevented accidental triggering, but it seems to be gone on Wayland. It's a UX problem for many users. * Ability to turn off effects on less powerful computers. * Some extensions make the Shell crash. * Switching between keyboard layouts loses focus (e.g. when you press Super+Space while e.g. typing in a search field you need to click to the search field again to continue typing) * When you use one of the tiling gestures you then can't change the size of the tiled window. * There is no presentation mode which would disable notifications, screensaver inhibitor etc. * Multitouch gestures more widely used and unified across the desktop (GTK vs Qt).
GDM * You can not turn NumLock on by default. * You have to restart to switch from GNOME Classic to GNOME (perhaps a bug in F25?).
WAYLAND Not really big surprises here: * Missing remote desktop (one of the most frequent comments at all). * Missing color picker support. * Missing screen sharing. * Missing something like xdotool (shotcuts for window manipulations, e.g. to show/hide a window of certain app)
SETTINGS * Many people complained about splitting settings into g-c-c and g-t-t, tried to explain the reason, but nevertheless it's one of the most common complaints.
LOCALIZATION Users don't get a fully localized system after installing Fedora. Many languages don't have all l10n packages on the installation ISO and users have to run 'sudo dnf install langpacks-*' manually to install missing packages, but most users don't have a clue about this and just think that the missing localization is not in Fedora at all. Mainly LibreOffice suffers from this not being localized at all. This is a long known problem and we should really fix it and install the missing packages automatically either during installation or in the initial experience. There have been a couple of other complaints about locatization, everything language specific. But localization seems to be very important to users and they're very sensitive to untranslated pieces of UI, especially if it's what's perceived as part of the system, it makes the system look amateurish.
PDF Many complaints about PDF support, mostly: * Evince doesn't support non-ascii characters in PDF forms, this is a major problem for many people. * Some PDF forms refuse to work with anything but Acrobat Reader although they may work just fine with Evince, faking a reader's identity might be a solution here. * Incomplete support for PDF 1.7.
DIALOGS * "file save dialog" doesn't have "Recent" any more and if you save a couple of files in the same location, you have to go through the full path every time instead of clicking Recent and pick the destination folder directly.
APPLICATIONS * gnome-software has problems to fetch content (e.g. screenshots) behind a proxy. * A new chat app (unlikely to happen due to the nature of current IM services). * More modern and better looking presentation templates and graphs in LibreOffice. * Ability to install Android apps. * Difficult Thunderbird<->Evolution migration. * OneDrive integration in Nautilus/GOA. * Firefox should have tabs integrated into the title bar just like on Window. * Cannot connect to GOA accounts after log out and log in to the account (it's a known systemd bug, but a pretty annoying one and we have had it for several releases already). GPU as expected a very hot area, most frequent complaints: * Nvidia driver is hard to install and it breaks with kernel updates. * Support for switchable graphics cards (not sure the complainers have tried F25 and newer). * Support for video output through different cards.
HARDWARE People ask for supported laptop models where stuff like suspend, hot keys, wifi, bluetooth would be quaranteed to work on Fedora. * Canon printers need to be set up after every kernel update. * Better battery life. * Missing a "Pan/Scroll" feature in Wacom tablet support. * Fedora support for ARM laptops (Chromebooks). * Bad support for screen between 120 and 192 DPI which is a vast majority of monitors with better DPI in the market. Users can partly fix it by manual tweaks (larger fonts etc.), but they can't be done per screen.
SOUND * Can't control volume of a connected bluetooth speaker (general problem or device specific?). * PulseAudio doesn't remember settings for multichannel setups after restart.
GRUB * a tool on a live ISO the user can boot and fix their broken bootloader.
BUG HANDLING A couple of users complained that bug reports in RHBZ get ignored which discourages them to report problems.
Jiri
Hi Jiri,
What kind of partitioning were they trying to set up? Eg were they doing dual boot or trying to achieve a particular configuration?
~m
On May 2, 2017 10:47:19 AM EDT, Jiri Eischmann eischmann@redhat.com wrote:
Hi, last week I asked on my Czech blog what people are missing on the Linux desktop, mainly Fedora Workstation. It was picked by all major Czech Linux sites and received literally hundreds of responses. I went through them and created a summary for you. Some of it are well-known issues/features, some points were new to me. If something is not clear, just let me know and I'll be happy to explain it:
INSTALLER It was mentioned several times as something that put off users when trying Fedora. In pretty much all cases it was partitioning that was the problem (too complicated, different to what they're used to). Some of the experiences were a couple of years old, so it might have improved, but apparently we still have reserves here. One of the more concrete points:
- Missing ability to choose where to place the bootloader (it's there,
but very well hidden and cumbersome to set up).
UPDATES Quite a few people complained about having to restart to install updates. I know objective reasons for this, but it's important to understand that it's perceived as annoying by users and we should strive for minimizing the number of packages that need to be updated offline.
UPGRADES One of the most frequent request was an LTS version. When I asked why, the answer was typically that upgrades still bring incompatibilities, regressions, lost settings. The most frequently mentioned offender was NM, other mentioned problems were mostly hardware related (regressions in graphics, dockin station support, sound).
SHELL
- the Activities hot corner is triggered too easily. We used to have
the "pressure" feature on X11 which prevented accidental triggering, but it seems to be gone on Wayland. It's a UX problem for many users.
- Ability to turn off effects on less powerful computers.
- Some extensions make the Shell crash.
- Switching between keyboard layouts loses focus (e.g. when you press
Super+Space while e.g. typing in a search field you need to click to the search field again to continue typing)
- When you use one of the tiling gestures you then can't change the
size of the tiled window.
- There is no presentation mode which would disable notifications,
screensaver inhibitor etc.
- Multitouch gestures more widely used and unified across the desktop
(GTK vs Qt).
GDM
- You can not turn NumLock on by default.
- You have to restart to switch from GNOME Classic to GNOME (perhaps a
bug in F25?).
WAYLAND Not really big surprises here:
- Missing remote desktop (one of the most frequent comments at all).
- Missing color picker support.
- Missing screen sharing.
- Missing something like xdotool (shotcuts for window manipulations,
e.g. to show/hide a window of certain app)
SETTINGS
- Many people complained about splitting settings into g-c-c and g-t-t,
tried to explain the reason, but nevertheless it's one of the most common complaints.
LOCALIZATION Users don't get a fully localized system after installing Fedora. Many languages don't have all l10n packages on the installation ISO and users have to run 'sudo dnf install langpacks-*' manually to install missing packages, but most users don't have a clue about this and just think that the missing localization is not in Fedora at all. Mainly LibreOffice suffers from this not being localized at all. This is a long known problem and we should really fix it and install the missing packages automatically either during installation or in the initial experience. There have been a couple of other complaints about locatization, everything language specific. But localization seems to be very important to users and they're very sensitive to untranslated pieces of UI, especially if it's what's perceived as part of the system, it makes the system look amateurish.
PDF Many complaints about PDF support, mostly:
- Evince doesn't support non-ascii characters in PDF forms, this is a
major problem for many people.
- Some PDF forms refuse to work with anything but Acrobat Reader
although they may work just fine with Evince, faking a reader's identity might be a solution here.
- Incomplete support for PDF 1.7.
DIALOGS
- "file save dialog" doesn't have "Recent" any more and if you save a
couple of files in the same location, you have to go through the full path every time instead of clicking Recent and pick the destination folder directly.
APPLICATIONS
- gnome-software has problems to fetch content (e.g. screenshots)
behind a proxy.
- A new chat app (unlikely to happen due to the nature of current IM
services).
- More modern and better looking presentation templates and graphs in
LibreOffice.
- Ability to install Android apps.
- Difficult Thunderbird<->Evolution migration.
- OneDrive integration in Nautilus/GOA.
- Firefox should have tabs integrated into the title bar just like on
Window.
- Cannot connect to GOA accounts after log out and log in to the
account (it's a known systemd bug, but a pretty annoying one and we have had it for several releases already). GPU as expected a very hot area, most frequent complaints:
- Nvidia driver is hard to install and it breaks with kernel updates.
- Support for switchable graphics cards (not sure the complainers have
tried F25 and newer).
- Support for video output through different cards.
HARDWARE People ask for supported laptop models where stuff like suspend, hot keys, wifi, bluetooth would be quaranteed to work on Fedora.
- Canon printers need to be set up after every kernel update.
- Better battery life.
- Missing a "Pan/Scroll" feature in Wacom tablet support.
- Fedora support for ARM laptops (Chromebooks).
- Bad support for screen between 120 and 192 DPI which is a vast
majority of monitors with better DPI in the market. Users can partly fix it by manual tweaks (larger fonts etc.), but they can't be done per screen.
SOUND
- Can't control volume of a connected bluetooth speaker (general
problem or device specific?).
- PulseAudio doesn't remember settings for multichannel setups after
restart.
GRUB
- a tool on a live ISO the user can boot and fix their broken
bootloader.
BUG HANDLING A couple of users complained that bug reports in RHBZ get ignored which discourages them to report problems.
Jiri
Máirín Duffy píše v Út 02. 05. 2017 v 19:42 -0400:
Hi Jiri,
What kind of partitioning were they trying to set up? Eg were they doing dual boot or trying to achieve a particular configuration?
I think there was only one specific comment and that was the user who complained about a missing option to choose where to install the bootloader. He tried to install it next to Debian 8 which was on /dev/sda and wanted to install Fedora on /dev/sda1 and not to touch /dev/sda at all which means also installing the bootloader on /dev/sda1.
I think most of the other complaints were about installing into dualboot. Although they were not really specific, my impression from them and also from local installfests is that people usually end up in the manual partitioning, which is tricky, instead of using the automatic partitioning. I don't know why. My wild guess is that they want to keep some control over it not to lose data or don't have think that Anaconda can handle Windows dualboot installations in a mostly automated mode.
Jiri
On May 2, 2017 10:47:19 AM EDT, Jiri Eischmann eischmann@redhat.com wrote:
Hi, last week I asked on my Czech blog what people are missing on the Linux desktop, mainly Fedora Workstation. It was picked by all major Czech Linux sites and received literally hundreds of responses. I went through them and created a summary for you. Some of it are well- known issues/features, some points were new to me. If something is not clear, just let me know and I'll be happy to explain it:
INSTALLER It was mentioned several times as something that put off users when trying Fedora. In pretty much all cases it was partitioning that was the problem (too complicated, different to what they're used to). Some of the experiences were a couple of years old, so it might have improved, but apparently we still have reserves here. One of the more concrete points:
- Missing ability to choose where to place the bootloader (it's
there, but very well hidden and cumbersome to set up).
UPDATES Quite a few people complained about having to restart to install updates. I know objective reasons for this, but it's important to understand that it's perceived as annoying by users and we should strive for minimizing the number of packages that need to be updated offline.
UPGRADES One of the most frequent request was an LTS version. When I asked why, the answer was typically that upgrades still bring incompatibilities, regressions, lost settings. The most frequently mentioned offender was NM, other mentioned problems were mostly hardware related (regressions in graphics, dockin station support, sound).
SHELL
- the Activities hot corner is triggered too easily. We used to
have the "pressure" feature on X11 which prevented accidental triggering, but it seems to be gone on Wayland. It's a UX problem for many users.
- Ability to turn off effects on less powerful computers.
- Some extensions make the Shell crash.
- Switching between keyboard layouts loses focus (e.g. when you
press Super+Space while e.g. typing in a search field you need to click to the search field again to continue typing)
- When you use one of the tiling gestures you then can't change the
size of the tiled window.
- There is no presentation mode which would disable notifications,
screensaver inhibitor etc.
- Multitouch gestures more widely used and unified across the
desktop (GTK vs Qt).
GDM
- You can not turn NumLock on by default.
- You have to restart to switch from GNOME Classic to GNOME
(perhaps a bug in F25?).
WAYLAND Not really big surprises here:
- Missing remote desktop (one of the most frequent comments at
all).
- Missing color picker support.
- Missing screen sharing.
- Missing something like xdotool (shotcuts for window
manipulations, e.g. to show/hide a window of certain app)
SETTINGS
- Many people complained about splitting settings into g-c-c and g-
t-t, tried to explain the reason, but nevertheless it's one of the most common complaints.
LOCALIZATION Users don't get a fully localized system after installing Fedora. Many languages don't have all l10n packages on the installation ISO and users have to run 'sudo dnf install langpacks-*' manually to install missing packages, but most users don't have a clue about this and just think that the missing localization is not in Fedora at all. Mainly LibreOffice suffers from this not being localized at all. This is a long known problem and we should really fix it and install the missing packages automatically either during installation or in the initial experience. There have been a couple of other complaints about locatization, everything language specific. But localization seems to be very important to users and they're very sensitive to untranslated pieces of UI, especially if it's what's perceived as part of the system, it makes the system look amateurish.
PDF Many complaints about PDF support, mostly:
- Evince doesn't support non-ascii characters in PDF forms, this is
a major problem for many people.
- Some PDF forms refuse to work with anything but Acrobat Reader
although they may work just fine with Evince, faking a reader's identity might be a solution here.
- Incomplete support for PDF 1.7.
DIALOGS
- "file save dialog" doesn't have "Recent" any more and if you save
a couple of files in the same location, you have to go through the full path every time instead of clicking Recent and pick the destination folder directly.
APPLICATIONS
- gnome-software has problems to fetch content (e.g. screenshots)
behind a proxy.
- A new chat app (unlikely to happen due to the nature of current
IM services).
- More modern and better looking presentation templates and graphs
in LibreOffice.
- Ability to install Android apps.
- Difficult Thunderbird<->Evolution migration.
- OneDrive integration in Nautilus/GOA.
- Firefox should have tabs integrated into the title bar just like
on Window.
- Cannot connect to GOA accounts after log out and log in to the
account (it's a known systemd bug, but a pretty annoying one and we have had it for several releases already). GPU as expected a very hot area, most frequent complaints:
- Nvidia driver is hard to install and it breaks with kernel
updates.
- Support for switchable graphics cards (not sure the complainers
have tried F25 and newer).
- Support for video output through different cards.
HARDWARE People ask for supported laptop models where stuff like suspend, hot keys, wifi, bluetooth would be quaranteed to work on Fedora.
- Canon printers need to be set up after every kernel update.
- Better battery life.
- Missing a "Pan/Scroll" feature in Wacom tablet support.
- Fedora support for ARM laptops (Chromebooks).
- Bad support for screen between 120 and 192 DPI which is a vast
majority of monitors with better DPI in the market. Users can partly fix it by manual tweaks (larger fonts etc.), but they can't be done per screen.
SOUND
- Can't control volume of a connected bluetooth speaker (general
problem or device specific?).
- PulseAudio doesn't remember settings for multichannel setups
after restart.
GRUB
- a tool on a live ISO the user can boot and fix their broken
bootloader.
BUG HANDLING A couple of users complained that bug reports in RHBZ get ignored which discourages them to report problems.
Jiri
desktop mailing list -- desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to desktop-leave@lists.fedoraproject.org
Hi,
Wow, nice list! Thanks for putting this together. A few comments/complaints from me:
On Tue, May 2, 2017 at 9:47 AM, Jiri Eischmann eischmann@redhat.com wrote:
UPDATES Quite a few people complained about having to restart to install updates. I know objective reasons for this, but it's important to understand that it's perceived as annoying by users and we should strive for minimizing the number of packages that need to be updated offline.
First priority should be to fix our update frequency. Currently the policy is this:
* Daily notifications of available security updates * Daily notifications of all flatpak updates (no restart required, but still annoying) * Weekly notifications of other (normal) updates
I'd be interested in seeing statistics on how frequently we have security updates, but my guess is that there is a new security update every 2-3 days, so in practice we prompt users to reboot 2-3 times per week. Maybe even more? I have not been keeping track.
Problem is: most security updates are not high-priority. We do need daily notification for the most serious security updates, but the vast majority of security updates do not require expedited release. Our updates already have metadata to indicate the severity of the security issue (low/medium/high), so we should start notifying daily only for the high priority security updates and see how well that goes.
We also do not need weekly notifications of normal updates. Let's dial this back to monthly instead. With these changes, I expect we would have an order of magnitude fewer reboots.
Even the nightly flatpak apps need to not trigger daily notifications. These should either be updated monthly like everything else, or updated silently in the background (because why not?)
UPGRADES One of the most frequent request was an LTS version. When I asked why, the answer was typically that upgrades still bring incompatibilities, regressions, lost settings. The most frequently mentioned offender was NM, other mentioned problems were mostly hardware related (regressions in graphics, dockin station support, sound).
Well the LTS is definitely CentOS. There seems to be little value in us trying to compete with ourselves by offering a second LTS. I don't know how to make this more clear to users.
- Some extensions make the Shell crash.
Well that's the result of turning off the version checks. There's no way to avoid this without removing support for extensions entirely, or requiring extension authors to validate compatibility. We decided to get rid of that step, so more crashes are to be expected.
What we should probably do is have a mechanism for flagging extensions as broken, so that they can be removed from extensions.gnome.org until they are fixed.
- You have to restart to switch from GNOME Classic to GNOME (perhaps a
bug in F25?).
Definitely a bug of some sort.
WAYLAND Not really big surprises here:
- Missing remote desktop (one of the most frequent comments at all).
- Missing color picker support.
There's no color picker...? Why not? That seems really weird. This is GtkColorChooser? I'm trying it right now, via GtkWidgetFactory, and it's working perfectly fine. Is this maybe some third-party application that's broken?
LOCALIZATION Users don't get a fully localized system after installing Fedora. Many languages don't have all l10n packages on the installation ISO and users have to run 'sudo dnf install langpacks-*' manually to install missing packages, but most users don't have a clue about this and just think that the missing localization is not in Fedora at all. Mainly LibreOffice suffers from this not being localized at all. This is a long known problem and we should really fix it and install the missing packages automatically either during installation or in the initial experience.
All supported languages need to be on the installation ISO, even if it makes the ISO twice as large. Non-English locales like Czech should not be second-class citizens in Fedora. We should fix this. A larger ISO would be unfortunate for users stuck on metered connections, but this is something you only have to download once.
There have been a couple of other complaints about locatization, everything language specific. But localization seems to be very important to users and they're very sensitive to untranslated pieces of UI, especially if it's what's perceived as part of the system, it makes the system look amateurish.
On the other hand, it's not our job to provide a good translation into every language for every app. Hopefully the Czech-speaking community can step up to help the Fedora and GNOME translation project. I know that GNOME at least has a very active Czech translator, Marek; he would probably like to hear specific feedback.
PDF Many complaints about PDF support, mostly:
- Evince doesn't support non-ascii characters in PDF forms, this is a
major problem for many people.
- Some PDF forms refuse to work with anything but Acrobat Reader
although they may work just fine with Evince, faking a reader's identity might be a solution here.
- Incomplete support for PDF 1.7.
One problem here is that some PDFs use Adobe JavaScript. 99% of these PDFs are malicious and use it to install Windows viruses, but some of them are legit. Evince does not support JavaScript. (And frankly, that's probably for the better.) I don't know how many PDFs this affects.
- Firefox should have tabs integrated into the title bar just like on
Window.
We should ship with Epiphany preinstalled. Firefox on GNOME is such a joke. How many months was the GNOME integration theme broken last year? ;)
- Cannot connect to GOA accounts after log out and log in to the
account (it's a known systemd bug, but a pretty annoying one and we have had it for several releases already).
This is an accepted F26 blocker, so it's going to get fixed one way or another.
BUG HANDLING A couple of users complained that bug reports in RHBZ get ignored which discourages them to report problems.
We must close all GNOME packages to bug reports. GNOME problems just have to be reported upstream. We can't handle the volume on Red Hat Bugzilla, which half the relevant maintainers do not check.
We also need to do some major, major work on ABRT client-side, maybe even rewrite the client side app from scratch.
Michael
On Tue, 2017-05-02 at 19:32 -0500, Michael Catanzaro wrote:
Our updates already have metadata to indicate the severity of the security issue (low/medium/high), so we should start notifying daily only for the high priority security updates and see how well that goes.
Well - shouldn't you at least make an effort to announce this change very prominently to packagers *before* making it? They may, at present, not be paying a lot of attention to that field, if it's well known that it doesn't affect the prominence or frequency of notifications in practice.
On Tue, May 2, 2017 at 7:56 PM, Adam Williamson adamwill@fedoraproject.org wrote:
Well - shouldn't you at least make an effort to announce this change very prominently to packagers *before* making it? They may, at present, not be paying a lot of attention to that field, if it's well known that it doesn't affect the prominence or frequency of notifications in practice.
Yes.
On Tue, 2017-05-02 at 19:32 -0500, Michael Catanzaro wrote:
Even the nightly flatpak apps need to not trigger daily notifications. These should either be updated monthly like everything else, or updated silently in the background (because why not?)
Bandwidth and transfer caps. I definitely do *not* want you downloading several hundred megabytes of LO "silently in the background" while I'm on a capped network connection.
On Tue, 2017-05-02 at 19:32 -0500, Michael Catanzaro wrote:
BUG HANDLING A couple of users complained that bug reports in RHBZ get ignored which discourages them to report problems.
We must close all GNOME packages to bug reports. GNOME problems just have to be reported upstream. We can't handle the volume on Red Hat Bugzilla, which half the relevant maintainers do not check.
This would be a major problem for the release validation process. We need to be able to track the *downstream* status of release blocking fixes. An upstream bug is not a good way to do this.
On Tue, May 2, 2017 at 7:59 PM, Adam Williamson adamwill@fedoraproject.org wrote:
This would be a major problem for the release validation process. We need to be able to track the *downstream* status of release blocking fixes. An upstream bug is not a good way to do this.
Probably the best solution is not to actually forbid filing bugs, but to have a bot that adds a comment that the bug is unlikely to be reviewed on Red Hat Bugzilla and instructing the user as to how to report the bug upstream. Then we can just ignore that comment when we need a bug for release validation purposes etc.
Michael
On Tue, 2017-05-02 at 20:59 -0500, Michael Catanzaro wrote:
On Tue, May 2, 2017 at 7:59 PM, Adam Williamson adamwill@fedoraproject.org wrote:
This would be a major problem for the release validation process. We need to be able to track the *downstream* status of release blocking fixes. An upstream bug is not a good way to do this.
Probably the best solution is not to actually forbid filing bugs, but to have a bot that adds a comment that the bug is unlikely to be reviewed on Red Hat Bugzilla and instructing the user as to how to report the bug upstream. Then we can just ignore that comment when we need a bug for release validation purposes etc.
OK. And to be honest, this isn't limited to release validation and blocker bugs. What generally happens when an RHBZ report gets kicked upstream is the bug gets fixed...upstream. Often it only gets fixed on git master, which means it will likely *never* get fixed in the Fedora release it was actually filed against. If we're lucky the fix might also be committed to the most recent stable branch, which is probably the GNOME in the most recent Fedora release, so if there's ever another point release on that branch (often there aren't any after .2), the fix might *eventually* make its way back to the most recent Fedora release. But if we're at .2, or the bug was filed on the previous stable Fedora release, the fix may well never actually make it back to the Fedora release the reporter is running without someone taking ownership and bugging people to commit to different branches, do point releases, and ship updates to Fedora.
On May 3, 2017, at 00:34, Adam Williamson adamwill@fedoraproject.org wrote:
On Tue, 2017-05-02 at 20:59 -0500, Michael Catanzaro wrote: On Tue, May 2, 2017 at 7:59 PM, Adam Williamson adamwill@fedoraproject.org wrote:
This would be a major problem for the release validation process. We need to be able to track the *downstream* status of release blocking fixes. An upstream bug is not a good way to do this.
Probably the best solution is not to actually forbid filing bugs, but to have a bot that adds a comment that the bug is unlikely to be reviewed on Red Hat Bugzilla and instructing the user as to how to report the bug upstream. Then we can just ignore that comment when we need a bug for release validation purposes etc.
OK. And to be honest, this isn't limited to release validation and blocker bugs. What generally happens when an RHBZ report gets kicked upstream is the bug gets fixed...upstream. Often it only gets fixed on git master, which means it will likely *never* get fixed in the Fedora release it was actually filed against. If we're lucky the fix might also be committed to the most recent stable branch, which is probably the GNOME in the most recent Fedora release, so if there's ever another point release on that branch (often there aren't any after .2), the fix might *eventually* make its way back to the most recent Fedora release. But if we're at .2, or the bug was filed on the previous stable Fedora release, the fix may well never actually make it back to the Fedora release the reporter is running without someone taking ownership and bugging people to commit to different branches, do point releases, and ship updates to Fedora.
Other than more point releases and more branches, what's really the solution? I only see three real options: we convince upstream to do more point releases; we 'fork' it and do our own point releases, regardless of upstream; or we just bite the bullet and always ship latest Gnome, even if that means bumping major versions.
Is there a fourth option to you, Adam? Other than the status quo I mean.
On Wed, 2017-05-03 at 00:51 -0400, Eric Griffith wrote:
On May 3, 2017, at 00:34, Adam Williamson adamwill@fedoraproject.org wrote:
On Tue, 2017-05-02 at 20:59 -0500, Michael Catanzaro wrote: On Tue, May 2, 2017 at 7:59 PM, Adam Williamson adamwill@fedoraproject.org wrote:
This would be a major problem for the release validation process. We need to be able to track the *downstream* status of release blocking fixes. An upstream bug is not a good way to do this.
Probably the best solution is not to actually forbid filing bugs, but to have a bot that adds a comment that the bug is unlikely to be reviewed on Red Hat Bugzilla and instructing the user as to how to report the bug upstream. Then we can just ignore that comment when we need a bug for release validation purposes etc.
OK. And to be honest, this isn't limited to release validation and blocker bugs. What generally happens when an RHBZ report gets kicked upstream is the bug gets fixed...upstream. Often it only gets fixed on git master, which means it will likely *never* get fixed in the Fedora release it was actually filed against. If we're lucky the fix might also be committed to the most recent stable branch, which is probably the GNOME in the most recent Fedora release, so if there's ever another point release on that branch (often there aren't any after .2), the fix might *eventually* make its way back to the most recent Fedora release. But if we're at .2, or the bug was filed on the previous stable Fedora release, the fix may well never actually make it back to the Fedora release the reporter is running without someone taking ownership and bugging people to commit to different branches, do point releases, and ship updates to Fedora.
Other than more point releases and more branches, what's really the solution? I only see three real options: we convince upstream to do more point releases; we 'fork' it and do our own point releases, regardless of upstream; or we just bite the bullet and always ship latest Gnome, even if that means bumping major versions.
Is there a fourth option to you, Adam? Other than the status quo I mean.
Apply patches to downstream package builds. It's not that difficult, and we do it relatively often. But it requires someone to care about downstream, and it has to be *tracked* downstream, which is the point of this subthread. It's not appropriate for an upstream bug tracker; so far as the *upstream* tracker is concerned, the bug's fixed as soon as the commit hits git master, usually.
On May 3, 2017, at 00:55, Adam Williamson adamwill@fedoraproject.org wrote:
On Wed, 2017-05-03 at 00:51 -0400, Eric Griffith wrote:
On May 3, 2017, at 00:34, Adam Williamson adamwill@fedoraproject.org wrote:
On Tue, 2017-05-02 at 20:59 -0500, Michael Catanzaro wrote: On Tue, May 2, 2017 at 7:59 PM, Adam Williamson adamwill@fedoraproject.org wrote:
This would be a major problem for the release validation process. We need to be able to track the *downstream* status of release blocking fixes. An upstream bug is not a good way to do this.
Probably the best solution is not to actually forbid filing bugs, but to have a bot that adds a comment that the bug is unlikely to be reviewed on Red Hat Bugzilla and instructing the user as to how to report the bug upstream. Then we can just ignore that comment when we need a bug for release validation purposes etc.
OK. And to be honest, this isn't limited to release validation and blocker bugs. What generally happens when an RHBZ report gets kicked upstream is the bug gets fixed...upstream. Often it only gets fixed on git master, which means it will likely *never* get fixed in the Fedora release it was actually filed against. If we're lucky the fix might also be committed to the most recent stable branch, which is probably the GNOME in the most recent Fedora release, so if there's ever another point release on that branch (often there aren't any after .2), the fix might *eventually* make its way back to the most recent Fedora release. But if we're at .2, or the bug was filed on the previous stable Fedora release, the fix may well never actually make it back to the Fedora release the reporter is running without someone taking ownership and bugging people to commit to different branches, do point releases, and ship updates to Fedora.
Other than more point releases and more branches, what's really the solution? I only see three real options: we convince upstream to do more point releases; we 'fork' it and do our own point releases, regardless of upstream; or we just bite the bullet and always ship latest Gnome, even if that means bumping major versions.
Is there a fourth option to you, Adam? Other than the status quo I mean.
Apply patches to downstream package builds. It's not that difficult, and we do it relatively often. But it requires someone to care about downstream, and it has to be *tracked* downstream, which is the point of this subthread. It's not appropriate for an upstream bug tracker; so far as the *upstream* tracker is concerned, the bug's fixed as soon as the commit hits git master, usually.
Fair enough, guess now the question just comes down to if we have people who care enough to do the patching, but also the time to track bug fixes committed to upstream git master for all the big gnome components.
On Tue, May 2, 2017 at 11:34 PM, Adam Williamson adamwill@fedoraproject.org wrote:
OK. And to be honest, this isn't limited to release validation and blocker bugs. What generally happens when an RHBZ report gets kicked upstream is the bug gets fixed...upstream. Often it only gets fixed on git master, which means it will likely *never* get fixed in the Fedora release it was actually filed against. If we're lucky the fix might also be committed to the most recent stable branch, which is probably the GNOME in the most recent Fedora release, so if there's ever another point release on that branch (often there aren't any after .2), the fix might *eventually* make its way back to the most recent Fedora release. But if we're at .2, or the bug was filed on the previous stable Fedora release, the fix may well never actually make it back to the Fedora release the reporter is running without someone taking ownership and bugging people to commit to different branches, do point releases, and ship updates to Fedora.
Some maintainers are better about doing stable releases than others. Of course we can patch things downstream, but in general, if we're doing that, the patch is probably needed by other distros too. So when you run into such situations, feel free to ping me or any other release team member, and we will try to get a release. Once it is released upstream, Kalev's scripts will have a Fedora update rolling quickly thereafter.
Michael
Michael Catanzaro píše v Út 02. 05. 2017 v 19:32 -0500:
Hi,
Wow, nice list! Thanks for putting this together. A few comments/complaints from me:
On Tue, May 2, 2017 at 9:47 AM, Jiri Eischmann eischmann@redhat.com wrote:
UPDATES Quite a few people complained about having to restart to install updates. I know objective reasons for this, but it's important to understand that it's perceived as annoying by users and we should strive for minimizing the number of packages that need to be updated offline.
First priority should be to fix our update frequency. Currently the policy is this:
* Daily notifications of available security updates * Daily notifications of all flatpak updates (no restart required, but still annoying) * Weekly notifications of other (normal) updates
I'd be interested in seeing statistics on how frequently we have security updates, but my guess is that there is a new security update every 2-3 days, so in practice we prompt users to reboot 2-3 times per week. Maybe even more? I have not been keeping track.
Problem is: most security updates are not high-priority. We do need daily notification for the most serious security updates, but the vast majority of security updates do not require expedited release. Our updates already have metadata to indicate the severity of the security issue (low/medium/high), so we should start notifying daily only for the high priority security updates and see how well that goes.
We also do not need weekly notifications of normal updates. Let's dial this back to monthly instead. With these changes, I expect we would have an order of magnitude fewer reboots.
Even the nightly flatpak apps need to not trigger daily notifications. These should either be updated monthly like everything else, or updated silently in the background (because why not?)
It'd be worth to analyze more. I'm not sure there is one size that fits all needs. There are certainly users (my mom for instance) who just use Fedora and don't care about updates at all, so for them the best are updates as least frequent as possible as long as we keep them safe. Then there is a group of people who welcome daily updates, but don't want to go through the hassle of restarting for them. And I also often hear that people miss automatic updates of Flatpaks because if you use a couple of nightly versions, manual updating every day is just tiresome.
UPGRADES One of the most frequent request was an LTS version. When I asked why, the answer was typically that upgrades still bring incompatibilities, regressions, lost settings. The most frequently mentioned offender was NM, other mentioned problems were mostly hardware related (regressions in graphics, dockin station support, sound).
Well the LTS is definitely CentOS. There seems to be little value in us trying to compete with ourselves by offering a second LTS. I don't know how to make this more clear to users.
Well, I think we have consensus here. The solution should not be Fedora LTS. There are deployments where Fedora is not simply suitable and we should just recommend RHEL/CentOS as the LTS version. Upgrades of Fedora have improved a lot in the recent years, but apparently they're not still on the level at which users feel comfortable just upgrading instead of using LTS. I'd like to look at the NM problems, I've never had a problem with it, but NM losing settings etc. after upgrading was really one of the most frequent complaints.
- Some extensions make the Shell crash.
Well that's the result of turning off the version checks. There's no way to avoid this without removing support for extensions entirely, or requiring extension authors to validate compatibility. We decided to get rid of that step, so more crashes are to be expected.
What we should probably do is have a mechanism for flagging extensions as broken, so that they can be removed from extensions.gnome.org until they are fixed.
- You have to restart to switch from GNOME Classic to GNOME
(perhaps a bug in F25?).
Definitely a bug of some sort.
WAYLAND Not really big surprises here:
- Missing remote desktop (one of the most frequent comments at
all).
- Missing color picker support.
There's no color picker...? Why not? That seems really weird. This is GtkColorChooser? I'm trying it right now, via GtkWidgetFactory, and it's working perfectly fine. Is this maybe some third-party application that's broken?
What they meant was the color picker which allows you to pick a color of a random pixel on the screen like in GIMP. That's not possible with Wayland AFAIK.
LOCALIZATION Users don't get a fully localized system after installing Fedora. Many languages don't have all l10n packages on the installation ISO and users have to run 'sudo dnf install langpacks-*' manually to install missing packages, but most users don't have a clue about this and just think that the missing localization is not in Fedora at all. Mainly LibreOffice suffers from this not being localized at all. This is a long known problem and we should really fix it and install the missing packages automatically either during installation or in the initial experience.
All supported languages need to be on the installation ISO, even if it makes the ISO twice as large. Non-English locales like Czech should not be second-class citizens in Fedora. We should fix this. A larger ISO would be unfortunate for users stuck on metered connections, but this is something you only have to download once.
I've been an ambassador for EMEA and I know how big problem this is for people in developing countries. They're often stuck with connections like <=1 Mbps. Having an ISO that is 3-4 GB in size could actually make them download another distro instead. Ubuntu also downloads the l10n packages post-install.
There have been a couple of other complaints about locatization, everything language specific. But localization seems to be very important to users and they're very sensitive to untranslated pieces of UI, especially if it's what's perceived as part of the system, it makes the system look amateurish.
On the other hand, it's not our job to provide a good translation into every language for every app. Hopefully the Czech-speaking community can step up to help the Fedora and GNOME translation project. I know that GNOME at least has a very active Czech translator, Marek; he would probably like to hear specific feedback.
PDF Many complaints about PDF support, mostly:
- Evince doesn't support non-ascii characters in PDF forms, this is
a major problem for many people.
- Some PDF forms refuse to work with anything but Acrobat Reader
although they may work just fine with Evince, faking a reader's identity might be a solution here.
- Incomplete support for PDF 1.7.
One problem here is that some PDFs use Adobe JavaScript. 99% of these PDFs are malicious and use it to install Windows viruses, but some of them are legit. Evince does not support JavaScript. (And frankly, that's probably for the better.) I don't know how many PDFs this affects.
- Firefox should have tabs integrated into the title bar just like
on Window.
We should ship with Epiphany preinstalled. Firefox on GNOME is such a joke. How many months was the GNOME integration theme broken last year? ;)
- Cannot connect to GOA accounts after log out and log in to the
account (it's a known systemd bug, but a pretty annoying one and we have had it for several releases already).
This is an accepted F26 blocker, so it's going to get fixed one way or another.
BUG HANDLING A couple of users complained that bug reports in RHBZ get ignored which discourages them to report problems.
We must close all GNOME packages to bug reports. GNOME problems just have to be reported upstream. We can't handle the volume on Red Hat Bugzilla, which half the relevant maintainers do not check.
We also need to do some major, major work on ABRT client-side, maybe even rewrite the client side app from scratch.
Michael _______________________________________________ desktop mailing list -- desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to desktop-leave@lists.fedoraproject.org
----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Catanzaro" mike.catanzaro@gmail.com To: "Discussions about development for the Fedora desktop" desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org Sent: Tuesday, May 2, 2017 8:32:20 PM Subject: Re: User's Feedback
<SNIP>
BUG HANDLING A couple of users complained that bug reports in RHBZ get ignored which discourages them to report problems.
We must close all GNOME packages to bug reports. GNOME problems just have to be reported upstream. We can't handle the volume on Red Hat Bugzilla, which half the relevant maintainers do not check.
We also need to do some major, major work on ABRT client-side, maybe even rewrite the client side app from scratch.
Michael
This feels like a non-solution to me. First of all it is very arbitrary. So you are supposed to file all other bugs in Fedora bugzilla except the ones that happen to have a GNOME Bugzilla entry? And we are also asking our users to be able to differentiate between application bugs and packaging bugs, which in some cases might be hard even for very technically proficient users. As for the volume, to be fair it is not like we are able to handle the upstream volume either. So having all Fedora bugs filed upstream doesn't ensure they are looked at.
My take here is that if we have a Fedora package then as part of owning that Fedora package comes a responsibility to look at Fedora bugzilla and if need be file upstream bugs for issues. As we move forward and more things are maybe provided as upstream flatpaks and rpms it would be natural to send users upstream with bugs too for those packages, but for the core operating system I think we will always have to have a local bugzilla. That said I don't have a clear idea how we can solve the volume issue though, apart from relying on things like ABRT to help us prioritize what bugs realistically gets looked at. Also for bugs it is obvious we don't have the resources to move on, maybe we should be better at closing them and saying that we don't have the resources (that is not a suggestion to blanket close all bugzilla entries in one bugzilla or the other though).
Christian
On Wed, May 3, 2017 at 6:02 AM, Michael Catanzaro mike.catanzaro@gmail.com wrote:
Hi,
Wow, nice list! Thanks for putting this together. A few comments/complaints from me:
On Tue, May 2, 2017 at 9:47 AM, Jiri Eischmann eischmann@redhat.com wrote:
LOCALIZATION
Users don't get a fully localized system after installing Fedora. Many languages don't have all l10n packages on the installation ISO and users have to run 'sudo dnf install langpacks-*' manually to install missing packages, but most users don't have a clue about this and just think that the missing localization is not in Fedora at all. Mainly LibreOffice suffers from this not being localized at all. This is a long known problem and we should really fix it and install the missing packages automatically either during installation or in the initial experience.
All supported languages need to be on the installation ISO, even if it makes the ISO twice as large. Non-English locales like Czech should not be second-class citizens in Fedora. We should fix this. A larger ISO would be unfortunate for users stuck on metered connections, but this is something you only have to download once.
Do we have Install ISO for Workstation product? AFAIK langpacks are not included on Live ISO because of some size limitation. I will again say that I tried to convince dnf developers to add re-resolve transaction functionality in dnf but they did not accept this request few releases ago and we concluded on weakdeps approach. If dnf developers would have given similar API functionality of re-resolving transaction like we have in yum then it was very easy switch from yum langpacks to dnf langpacks plugin and translation packages would have been added into the initial transaction using anaconda langpacks plugin. Another thing since we moved to edition/product Live releases (from f21) we stopped the install iso and thus we lost the way to trigger extra (langpacks) package installation during anaconda installation. I am considering the case here that end user will not be having any internet connection at all.
There have been a couple of other complaints about locatization,
everything language specific. But localization seems to be very important to users and they're very sensitive to untranslated pieces of UI, especially if it's what's perceived as part of the system, it makes the system look amateurish.
On the other hand, it's not our job to provide a good translation into every language for every app. Hopefully the Czech-speaking community can step up to help the Fedora and GNOME translation project. I know that GNOME at least has a very active Czech translator, Marek; he would probably like to hear specific feedback.
If Fedora trans people can help then good to discuss this on trans list.
Regards, Parag
Problem is: most security updates are not high-priority. We do need daily notification for the most serious security updates, but the vast majority of security updates do not require expedited release. Our updates already have metadata to indicate the severity of the security issue (low/medium/high), so we should start notifying daily only for the high priority security updates and see how well that goes.
Are you sure about that? in my opinion, any security update is high priority.
Well that's the result of turning off the version checks. There's no way to avoid this without removing support for extensions entirely, or requiring extension authors to validate compatibility. We decided to get rid of that step, so more crashes are to be expected.
No. Version checks are not related to the gnome-shell crashes. The gnome-shell architecture is the cause. Having erratic gnome-shell extensions in a compositor is risky. Having a JavaScript engine in a compositor is risky. Missing debugging features for broken gnome-shell extensions make it very hard to hunt down these bugs. Since the version check was removed, I didn't get more crashes than before.
See also: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1367666 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1401217 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1334226 https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=704388 https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=776940 https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=699610 https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=691529
What we should probably do is have a mechanism for flagging extensions as broken, so that they can be removed from extensions.gnome.org until they are fixed.
More importantly, we need a way to hunt down these bugs. Right now I don't see one.
We must close all GNOME packages to bug reports. GNOME problems just have to be reported upstream. We can't handle the volume on Red Hat Bugzilla, which half the relevant maintainers do not check.
Do I read this correctly as *please report all non-packaging bugs upstream* correctly?
We also need to do some major, major work on ABRT client-side, maybe even rewrite the client side app from scratch.
+1 for the gui, see https://github.com/abrt/gnome-abrt/issues/49
----- Original Message ----- <snip>
We also need to do some major, major work on ABRT client-side, maybe even rewrite the client side app from scratch.
+1 for the gui, see https://github.com/abrt/gnome-abrt/issues/49
Most of the problematic UI code in gnome-abrt doesn't live in that repository but in libreport.
On Tue, May 30, 2017 at 12:18:51PM -0000, Christian Stadelmann wrote:
Are you sure about that? in my opinion, any security update is high priority.
Well, consider CVE-2017-1000367. This lets users with limited sudo access escalate to full root. That's very, very problematic and high priority in certain situations — but on the other hand, our default configuration is to either not use sudo at all (no `wheel` users) or to grant full root-equivalent access *anyway*.
On Wed, May 3, 2017 at 12:47 AM, Jiri Eischmann eischmann@redhat.com wrote:
Hi, last week I asked on my Czech blog what people are missing on the Linux desktop, mainly Fedora Workstation. It was picked by all major Czech Linux sites and received literally hundreds of responses. I went through them and created a summary for you. Some of it are well-known issues/features, some points were new to me. If something is not clear, just let me know and I'll be happy to explain it:
INSTALLER It was mentioned several times as something that put off users when trying Fedora. In pretty much all cases it was partitioning that was the problem (too complicated, different to what they're used to). Some of the experiences were a couple of years old, so it might have improved, but apparently we still have reserves here. One of the more concrete points:
- Missing ability to choose where to place the bootloader (it's there,
but very well hidden and cumbersome to set up).
UPDATES Quite a few people complained about having to restart to install updates. I know objective reasons for this, but it's important to understand that it's perceived as annoying by users and we should strive for minimizing the number of packages that need to be updated offline.
UPGRADES One of the most frequent request was an LTS version. When I asked why, the answer was typically that upgrades still bring incompatibilities, regressions, lost settings. The most frequently mentioned offender was NM, other mentioned problems were mostly hardware related (regressions in graphics, dockin station support, sound).
SHELL
- the Activities hot corner is triggered too easily. We used to have
the "pressure" feature on X11 which prevented accidental triggering, but it seems to be gone on Wayland. It's a UX problem for many users.
- Ability to turn off effects on less powerful computers.
- Some extensions make the Shell crash.
- Switching between keyboard layouts loses focus (e.g. when you press
Super+Space while e.g. typing in a search field you need to click to the search field again to continue typing)
- When you use one of the tiling gestures you then can't change the
size of the tiled window.
- There is no presentation mode which would disable notifications,
screensaver inhibitor etc.
- Multitouch gestures more widely used and unified across the desktop
(GTK vs Qt).
GDM
- You can not turn NumLock on by default.
- You have to restart to switch from GNOME Classic to GNOME (perhaps a
bug in F25?).
WAYLAND Not really big surprises here:
- Missing remote desktop (one of the most frequent comments at all).
- Missing color picker support.
- Missing screen sharing.
- Missing something like xdotool (shotcuts for window manipulations,
e.g. to show/hide a window of certain app)
SETTINGS
- Many people complained about splitting settings into g-c-c and g-t-t,
tried to explain the reason, but nevertheless it's one of the most common complaints.
LOCALIZATION Users don't get a fully localized system after installing Fedora. Many languages don't have all l10n packages on the installation ISO and users have to run 'sudo dnf install langpacks-*' manually to install missing packages, but most users don't have a clue about this and just think that the missing localization is not in Fedora at all. Mainly LibreOffice suffers from this not being localized at all. This is a long known problem and we should really fix it and install the missing packages automatically either during installation or in the initial experience. There have been a couple of other complaints about locatization, everything language specific. But localization seems to be very important to users and they're very sensitive to untranslated pieces of UI, especially if it's what's perceived as part of the system, it makes the system look amateurish.
PDF Many complaints about PDF support, mostly:
- Evince doesn't support non-ascii characters in PDF forms, this is a
major problem for many people.
- Some PDF forms refuse to work with anything but Acrobat Reader
although they may work just fine with Evince, faking a reader's identity might be a solution here.
- Incomplete support for PDF 1.7.
DIALOGS
- "file save dialog" doesn't have "Recent" any more and if you save a
couple of files in the same location, you have to go through the full path every time instead of clicking Recent and pick the destination folder directly.
APPLICATIONS
- gnome-software has problems to fetch content (e.g. screenshots)
behind a proxy.
- A new chat app (unlikely to happen due to the nature of current IM
services).
- More modern and better looking presentation templates and graphs in
LibreOffice.
- Ability to install Android apps.
- Difficult Thunderbird<->Evolution migration.
- OneDrive integration in Nautilus/GOA.
- Firefox should have tabs integrated into the title bar just like on
Window.
- Cannot connect to GOA accounts after log out and log in to the
account (it's a known systemd bug, but a pretty annoying one and we have had it for several releases already).
GPU as expected a very hot area, most frequent complaints:
- Nvidia driver is hard to install and it breaks with kernel updates.
- Support for switchable graphics cards (not sure the complainers have
tried F25 and newer).
- Support for video output through different cards.
HARDWARE People ask for supported laptop models where stuff like suspend, hot keys, wifi, bluetooth would be quaranteed to work on Fedora.
- Canon printers need to be set up after every kernel update.
- Better battery life.
- Missing a "Pan/Scroll" feature in Wacom tablet support.
- Fedora support for ARM laptops (Chromebooks).
- Bad support for screen between 120 and 192 DPI which is a vast
majority of monitors with better DPI in the market. Users can partly fix it by manual tweaks (larger fonts etc.), but they can't be done per screen.
SOUND
- Can't control volume of a connected bluetooth speaker (general
problem or device specific?).
- PulseAudio doesn't remember settings for multichannel setups after
restart.
GRUB
- a tool on a live ISO the user can boot and fix their broken
bootloader.
BUG HANDLING A couple of users complained that bug reports in RHBZ get ignored which discourages them to report problems.
Jiri
Is it worth trying to track some of these in the Fedora Workstation pagure queue?
I know some of these are upstream fixes, but we might be able to track them primarily in the pagure queue, and maybe discuss some temporary workarounds to ship while they are being fixed upstream.
--ryanlerch
desktop mailing list -- desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to desktop-leave@lists.fedoraproject.org
Ryan Lerch píše v St 03. 05. 2017 v 10:38 +1000:
On Wed, May 3, 2017 at 12:47 AM, Jiri Eischmann <eischmann@redhat.com
wrote: Hi, last week I asked on my Czech blog what people are missing on the Linux desktop, mainly Fedora Workstation. It was picked by all major Czech Linux sites and received literally hundreds of responses. I went through them and created a summary for you. Some of it are well- known issues/features, some points were new to me. If something is not clear, just let me know and I'll be happy to explain it:
INSTALLER It was mentioned several times as something that put off users when trying Fedora. In pretty much all cases it was partitioning that was the problem (too complicated, different to what they're used to). Some of the experiences were a couple of years old, so it might have improved, but apparently we still have reserves here. One of the more concrete points:
- Missing ability to choose where to place the bootloader (it's
there, but very well hidden and cumbersome to set up).
UPDATES Quite a few people complained about having to restart to install updates. I know objective reasons for this, but it's important to understand that it's perceived as annoying by users and we should strive for minimizing the number of packages that need to be updated offline.
UPGRADES One of the most frequent request was an LTS version. When I asked why, the answer was typically that upgrades still bring incompatibilities, regressions, lost settings. The most frequently mentioned offender was NM, other mentioned problems were mostly hardware related (regressions in graphics, dockin station support, sound).
SHELL
- the Activities hot corner is triggered too easily. We used to
have the "pressure" feature on X11 which prevented accidental triggering, but it seems to be gone on Wayland. It's a UX problem for many users.
- Ability to turn off effects on less powerful computers.
- Some extensions make the Shell crash.
- Switching between keyboard layouts loses focus (e.g. when you
press Super+Space while e.g. typing in a search field you need to click to the search field again to continue typing)
- When you use one of the tiling gestures you then can't change the
size of the tiled window.
- There is no presentation mode which would disable notifications,
screensaver inhibitor etc.
- Multitouch gestures more widely used and unified across the
desktop (GTK vs Qt).
GDM
- You can not turn NumLock on by default.
- You have to restart to switch from GNOME Classic to GNOME
(perhaps a bug in F25?).
WAYLAND Not really big surprises here:
- Missing remote desktop (one of the most frequent comments at
all).
- Missing color picker support.
- Missing screen sharing.
- Missing something like xdotool (shotcuts for window
manipulations, e.g. to show/hide a window of certain app)
SETTINGS
- Many people complained about splitting settings into g-c-c and g-
t-t, tried to explain the reason, but nevertheless it's one of the most common complaints.
LOCALIZATION Users don't get a fully localized system after installing Fedora. Many languages don't have all l10n packages on the installation ISO and users have to run 'sudo dnf install langpacks-*' manually to install missing packages, but most users don't have a clue about this and just think that the missing localization is not in Fedora at all. Mainly LibreOffice suffers from this not being localized at all. This is a long known problem and we should really fix it and install the missing packages automatically either during installation or in the initial experience. There have been a couple of other complaints about locatization, everything language specific. But localization seems to be very important to users and they're very sensitive to untranslated pieces of UI, especially if it's what's perceived as part of the system, it makes the system look amateurish.
PDF Many complaints about PDF support, mostly:
- Evince doesn't support non-ascii characters in PDF forms, this is
a major problem for many people.
- Some PDF forms refuse to work with anything but Acrobat Reader
although they may work just fine with Evince, faking a reader's identity might be a solution here.
- Incomplete support for PDF 1.7.
DIALOGS
- "file save dialog" doesn't have "Recent" any more and if you save
a couple of files in the same location, you have to go through the full path every time instead of clicking Recent and pick the destination folder directly.
APPLICATIONS
- gnome-software has problems to fetch content (e.g. screenshots)
behind a proxy.
- A new chat app (unlikely to happen due to the nature of current
IM services).
- More modern and better looking presentation templates and graphs
in LibreOffice.
- Ability to install Android apps.
- Difficult Thunderbird<->Evolution migration.
- OneDrive integration in Nautilus/GOA.
- Firefox should have tabs integrated into the title bar just like
on Window.
- Cannot connect to GOA accounts after log out and log in to the
account (it's a known systemd bug, but a pretty annoying one and we have had it for several releases already). GPU as expected a very hot area, most frequent complaints:
- Nvidia driver is hard to install and it breaks with kernel
updates.
- Support for switchable graphics cards (not sure the complainers
have tried F25 and newer).
- Support for video output through different cards.
HARDWARE People ask for supported laptop models where stuff like suspend, hot keys, wifi, bluetooth would be quaranteed to work on Fedora.
- Canon printers need to be set up after every kernel update.
- Better battery life.
- Missing a "Pan/Scroll" feature in Wacom tablet support.
- Fedora support for ARM laptops (Chromebooks).
- Bad support for screen between 120 and 192 DPI which is a vast
majority of monitors with better DPI in the market. Users can partly fix it by manual tweaks (larger fonts etc.), but they can't be done per screen.
SOUND
- Can't control volume of a connected bluetooth speaker (general
problem or device specific?).
- PulseAudio doesn't remember settings for multichannel setups
after restart.
GRUB
- a tool on a live ISO the user can boot and fix their broken
bootloader.
BUG HANDLING A couple of users complained that bug reports in RHBZ get ignored which discourages them to report problems.
Jiri
Is it worth trying to track some of these in the Fedora Workstation pagure queue?
I know some of these are upstream fixes, but we might be able to track them primarily in the pagure queue, and maybe discuss some temporary workarounds to ship while they are being fixed upstream.
I'll leave this up to the workstation working group. So far I've been opening bugs upstream, but things like the missing localization files are purely problems of Workstation, so it'd make sense at least for those.
Jiri
Hey,
----- Original Message -----
Hi, last week I asked on my Czech blog what people are missing on the Linux desktop, mainly Fedora Workstation. It was picked by all major Czech Linux sites and received literally hundreds of responses. I went through them and created a summary for you. Some of it are well-known issues/features, some points were new to me. If something is not clear, just let me know and I'll be happy to explain it:
This kind of mega bug list is really unactionable. Somebody needs to take all the feedback, review it, and then start *separate* discussions about specific items.
There's a bunch of items in there that are plain bugs, and a few that make no sense because they ask for things that already exist[1]. Reviewing and removing those items would shrink the apparent task, and avoid megathreads where nothing much ends up happening.
Cheers
[1]: There's been a GSettings key for disabling animations for at least 7 years, there probably was a GConf one for 10 years before that too.
Bastien Nocera píše v St 03. 05. 2017 v 05:05 -0400:
Hey,
----- Original Message -----
Hi, last week I asked on my Czech blog what people are missing on the Linux desktop, mainly Fedora Workstation. It was picked by all major Czech Linux sites and received literally hundreds of responses. I went through them and created a summary for you. Some of it are well- known issues/features, some points were new to me. If something is not clear, just let me know and I'll be happy to explain it:
This kind of mega bug list is really unactionable. Somebody needs to take all the feedback, review it, and then start *separate* discussions about specific items.
There's a bunch of items in there that are plain bugs, and a few that make no sense because they ask for things that already exist[1]. Reviewing and removing those items would shrink the apparent task, and avoid megathreads where nothing much ends up happening.
It was not meant to be an actionable list, I just wanted to share what users see as the main pain points. I've already filed a couple of bugs about those problems and am making action items for problems in components my team is responsible for. If I have time, I'll try to process the rest into actionable items, too.
[1]: There's been a GSettings key for disabling animations for at least 7 years, there probably was a GConf one for 10 years before that too.
Well, then it's a problem of discoverability. People just don't know about this key and they rather use an extension (Inpatient). I think running Fedora Workstation on an older computer is enough common to have it at least in the Tweak Tool.
Jiri
On Wed, 3 May 2017, 11:38 Jiri Eischmann, eischmann@redhat.com wrote:
Well, then it's a problem of discoverability. People just don't know about this key and they rather use an extension (Inpatient). I think running Fedora Workstation on an older computer is enough common to have it at least in the Tweak Tool.
It's already there: https://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-tweak-tool/tree/gtweak/tweaks/tweak_group...
----- Original Message -----
Bastien Nocera píše v St 03. 05. 2017 v 05:05 -0400:
Hey,
----- Original Message -----
Hi, last week I asked on my Czech blog what people are missing on the Linux desktop, mainly Fedora Workstation. It was picked by all major Czech Linux sites and received literally hundreds of responses. I went through them and created a summary for you. Some of it are well- known issues/features, some points were new to me. If something is not clear, just let me know and I'll be happy to explain it:
This kind of mega bug list is really unactionable. Somebody needs to take all the feedback, review it, and then start *separate* discussions about specific items.
There's a bunch of items in there that are plain bugs, and a few that make no sense because they ask for things that already exist[1]. Reviewing and removing those items would shrink the apparent task, and avoid megathreads where nothing much ends up happening.
It was not meant to be an actionable list, I just wanted to share what users see as the main pain points. I've already filed a couple of bugs about those problems and am making action items for problems in components my team is responsible for. If I have time, I'll try to process the rest into actionable items, too.
[1]: There's been a GSettings key for disabling animations for at least 7 years, there probably was a GConf one for 10 years before that too.
Well, then it's a problem of discoverability. People just don't know about this key and they rather use an extension (Inpatient). I think running Fedora Workstation on an older computer is enough common to have it at least in the Tweak Tool.
It's already in gnome-tweak-tool as mentioned in another mail, but more importantly it will make no difference to the machine's performance. You could apply snake oil and disable the animations.
The GNOME Events box machines are respectively 7 and 10 years now, I believe (see the section at the bottom: http://www.hadess.net/2015/04/jdll-2015.html)
Both machines are capable of running GNOME, playing videos, and launching multiple applications at the same time. The only things that make a difference are the amount of RAM in the machine, so we can open multiple applications without swapping, and whether the storage device is a spinning hard disk, or a faster Flash drive.
Being able to disable animations could still be an accessibility setting, but it will have no impact on people's ability to run GNOME and applications on older machines.
In fact, I'd go as far as saying that the animations not being smooth should be considered a bug. That'd mean synchronous I/O in mutter, or a horrible block I/O scheduler in the Linux kernel.
Bastien Nocera píše v St 03. 05. 2017 v 06:50 -0400:
----- Original Message -----
Bastien Nocera píše v St 03. 05. 2017 v 05:05 -0400:
Hey,
----- Original Message -----
Hi, last week I asked on my Czech blog what people are missing on the Linux desktop, mainly Fedora Workstation. It was picked by all major Czech Linux sites and received literally hundreds of responses. I went through them and created a summary for you. Some of it are well- known issues/features, some points were new to me. If something is not clear, just let me know and I'll be happy to explain it:
This kind of mega bug list is really unactionable. Somebody needs to take all the feedback, review it, and then start *separate* discussions about specific items.
There's a bunch of items in there that are plain bugs, and a few that make no sense because they ask for things that already exist[1]. Reviewing and removing those items would shrink the apparent task, and avoid megathreads where nothing much ends up happening.
It was not meant to be an actionable list, I just wanted to share what users see as the main pain points. I've already filed a couple of bugs about those problems and am making action items for problems in components my team is responsible for. If I have time, I'll try to process the rest into actionable items, too.
[1]: There's been a GSettings key for disabling animations for at least 7 years, there probably was a GConf one for 10 years before that too.
Well, then it's a problem of discoverability. People just don't know about this key and they rather use an extension (Inpatient). I think running Fedora Workstation on an older computer is enough common to have it at least in the Tweak Tool.
It's already in gnome-tweak-tool as mentioned in another mail, but more importantly it will make no difference to the machine's performance. You could apply snake oil and disable the animations.
The GNOME Events box machines are respectively 7 and 10 years now, I believe (see the section at the bottom: http://www.hadess.net/2015/04/jdll-20 15.html)
Both machines are capable of running GNOME, playing videos, and launching multiple applications at the same time. The only things that make a difference are the amount of RAM in the machine, so we can open multiple applications without swapping, and whether the storage device is a spinning hard disk, or a faster Flash drive.
I use Fedora Workstation on an EndlessPC. It's not a particularly powerful machine, but it's sold with an GS-based system, and I wouldn't call it a smooth experience even without any apps opened. My mom's T400 is at the edge.
Being able to disable animations could still be an accessibility setting, but it will have no impact on people's ability to run GNOME and applications on older machines.
That's correct, I must admit after some testing. Maybe people just confuse it with the low-graphics mode (or whatever they call it) from Ubuntu/Unity which is tuned to work on less powerful computers and where the effects are disabled and think that disabling effects in GS would have the same impact on performance.
Jiri
----- Original Message ----- <snip>
Both machines are capable of running GNOME, playing videos, and launching multiple applications at the same time. The only things that make a difference are the amount of RAM in the machine, so we can open multiple applications without swapping, and whether the storage device is a spinning hard disk, or a faster Flash drive.
I use Fedora Workstation on an EndlessPC. It's not a particularly powerful machine, but it's sold with an GS-based system, and I wouldn't call it a smooth experience even without any apps opened.
The problem on those machines is probably something else. There's performance problems with every BayTrail and CherryTrail devices out there when using gnome-shell. The perceived performance is worse than on those 10 year-old machines I was telling you about which tells you that something else is wrong. The GPU is at least 10x faster than it was 10 years ago and yet, it struggles.
The problem could be memory bandwidth. I know that Carlos Garnacho's mutter patches in 3.24 already sped things up greatly.
My mom's T400 is at the edge.
With a conventional hard drive? A 40€/40$ SSD, and some 2nd-hand RAM would probably make a world of difference.
Being able to disable animations could still be an accessibility setting, but it will have no impact on people's ability to run GNOME and applications on older machines.
That's correct, I must admit after some testing. Maybe people just confuse it with the low-graphics mode (or whatever they call it) from Ubuntu/Unity which is tuned to work on less powerful computers and where the effects are disabled and think that disabling effects in GS would have the same impact on performance.
This is the problem with providing whatever medicine is requested when the patient self-diagnoses :)
In fact, I'd go as far as saying that the animations not being smooth should be considered a bug. That'd mean synchronous I/O in mutter, or a horrible block I/O scheduler in the Linux kernel.
I've never seen smooth gnome-shell overview animations on my Intel Clarkdale (2 Cores, 4 Threads, 3.2GHz Frequency, 733MHz GPU Frequency) system from 2010. Same on different other machines, all newer (and better iGPU). Seems like you are pretty lucky.
Especially the fade in transition on user login has never been smooth either: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=747599
Anyway, animations should be disabled on virtual machines, but they are not: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=771311
Maybe animations should even be disabled on all machines older than (e.g.) 5 years by default.
----- Original Message -----
In fact, I'd go as far as saying that the animations not being smooth should be considered a bug. That'd mean synchronous I/O in mutter, or a horrible block I/O scheduler in the Linux kernel.
I've never seen smooth gnome-shell overview animations on my Intel Clarkdale (2 Cores, 4 Threads, 3.2GHz Frequency, 733MHz GPU Frequency) system from 2010. Same on different other machines, all newer (and better iGPU). Seems like you are pretty lucky.
Especially the fade in transition on user login has never been smooth either: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=747599
Anyway, animations should be disabled on virtual machines, but they are not: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=771311
Regression caused by this? https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=745104
I was told that the virgl support would be built into Fedora to go along with the GNOME releases. That was added in GNOME 3.20.
Maybe animations should even be disabled on all machines older than (e.g.) 5 years by default.
I've seen smooth animations on 8/10-year old machines, though an SSD upgrade will help the effects of the sub-par scheduler for interactive uses.
Regression caused by this? https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=745104
No clue.
I've seen smooth animations on 8/10-year old machines, though an SSD upgrade will help the effects of the sub-par scheduler for interactive uses.
Interesting. I have SSDs on all my systems too.
On 2017-05-02 16:47, Jiri Eischmann wrote:
- Firefox should have tabs integrated into the title bar just like on
Window.
This is https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1234433 - Andreas
On 02/05/17 07:47 AM, Jiri Eischmann wrote:
HARDWARE People ask for supported laptop models where stuff like suspend, hot keys, wifi, bluetooth would be quaranteed to work on Fedora.
Hot-keys issues should be resolved starting from kernel 4.9.x on majority of modern laptops. It turned out vendors used new handling method supported by Windows 8.1+. See https://patchwork.kernel.org/patch/9318649/
SOUND
- Can't control volume of a connected bluetooth speaker (general
problem or device specific?).
- PulseAudio doesn't remember settings for multichannel setups after
restart.
* Additionally, USB microphone is an issue as I was doing a video presentation for a client. * The equalizer needs more love.
On Tue, May 02, 2017 at 04:47:19PM +0200, Jiri Eischmann wrote:
- Switching between keyboard layouts loses focus (e.g. when you press
Super+Space while e.g. typing in a search field you need to click to the search field again to continue typing)
This doesn't seem to be true here. I tried F24 with Xorg and F25 with wayland, and in both cases, focus seems to be retained. I tried firefox (an entry box and the search box) and gnome-terminal and emacs. In all cases pressing super-space switches the layout without moving the focus. I have focus-follows-mouse, but this shouldn't matter, since the pointer isn't moved.
On a related issue, there was a focus bug with focus-follows-mouse which was pretty annoying — with the following sequence: switch workspace, move mouse, switch workspace back, the focus would not follow and the window not under mouse would have the focus. With F25 / wayland this is not an issue anymore.
gnome-shell and the whole stack has definitely come a long way...
Zbyszek
On Thu, May 4, 2017 at 2:50 AM, Zbigniew Jędrzejewski-Szmek zbyszek@in.waw.pl wrote:
On Tue, May 02, 2017 at 04:47:19PM +0200, Jiri Eischmann wrote:
- Switching between keyboard layouts loses focus (e.g. when you press
Super+Space while e.g. typing in a search field you need to click to the search field again to continue typing)
This doesn't seem to be true here. I tried F24 with Xorg and F25 with wayland, and in both cases, focus seems to be retained. I tried firefox (an entry box and the search box) and gnome-terminal and emacs. In all cases pressing super-space switches the layout without moving the focus. I have focus-follows-mouse, but this shouldn't matter, since the pointer isn't moved.
On some web pages something similar does happen: if you switch layout mid-typing, the text in the form field is selected and if you don't take notice, you lose everything typed in the previous layout. I have seen it with several forms and facebook's graph search field. Maybe there is something amiss there.
On a related issue, there was a focus bug with focus-follows-mouse which was pretty annoying — with the following sequence: switch workspace, move mouse, switch workspace back, the focus would not follow and the window not under mouse would have the focus. With F25 / wayland this is not an issue anymore.
In wayland, if you have a command running in a terminal in the background, while you are doing something else, e.g. browsing the web and the command finishes, when you click on the gnome-shell notification, which window gets focus? Because under X, even though the terminal is brought to the foreground, if you type anything, it will be in the window that previously had focus.
On Thu, May 4, 2017 at 9:07 AM, Alexander Ploumistos < alex.ploumistos@gmail.com> wrote:
On some web pages something similar does happen: if you switch layout mid-typing, the text in the form field is selected and if you don't take notice, you lose everything typed in the previous layout. I have seen it with several forms and facebook's graph search field. Maybe there is something amiss there.
I can confirm this is sometimes happening, but I don't have any example ready at the moment.
Also, a similar thing is happening with volume up/down indicators. Many games react to them as focus lost event. So some games stop playing any sounds/music for a split second (because they are programmed to stop playing sound when "minimized"), and some games even minimize automatically when I press volume up/down multimedia keys. The game window then simply disappears and I can only see it the gnome overview, which is very confusing and annoying (when this happens each time you want to adjust the volume).
If you want a simple reproducer, download Cannon Brawl Demo [1] (free) from Steam and press volume up and down multimedia keys while being in the main menu. The game window will often vanish. After debugging this for a while, it seems the "focus out" event is not sent during a single quick press of volume up/down, but if you hold the volume key for a bit longer (to increase/decrease the volume more quickly), it triggers the bug.
[1] http://store.steampowered.com/app/325760/Cannon_Brawl_Demo/
Maybe the Super+Space focus problem is similar to the volume change issues?
Kamil Paral píše v Út 09. 05. 2017 v 14:48 +0200:
On Thu, May 4, 2017 at 9:07 AM, Alexander Ploumistos <alex.ploumistos @gmail.com> wrote:
On some web pages something similar does happen: if you switch layout mid-typing, the text in the form field is selected and if you don't take notice, you lose everything typed in the previous layout. I have seen it with several forms and facebook's graph search field. Maybe there is something amiss there.
I can confirm this is sometimes happening, but I don't have any example ready at the moment.
You can open e.g. gedit, Ctrl+F, start typing to search, switch keyboard layouts and suddenly the search field and all you have typed is gone.
Jiri
On Wed, May 10, 2017 at 10:56:21AM +0200, Jiri Eischmann wrote:
Kamil Paral píše v Út 09. 05. 2017 v 14:48 +0200:
On Thu, May 4, 2017 at 9:07 AM, Alexander Ploumistos <alex.ploumistos @gmail.com> wrote:
On some web pages something similar does happen: if you switch layout mid-typing, the text in the form field is selected and if you don't take notice, you lose everything typed in the previous layout. I have seen it with several forms and facebook's graph search field. Maybe there is something amiss there.
I can confirm this is sometimes happening, but I don't have any example ready at the moment.
You can open e.g. gedit, Ctrl+F, start typing to search, switch keyboard layouts and suddenly the search field and all you have typed is gone.
I can reproduce this here.
But this seems to be a bug in gedit: if I move the focus from gedit, it always closes the search window. With focus-follows-mouse this is easy to do inadvertently, but even with click-to-focus, I might want to move the focus to another window, e.g. to select select text, and gedit closing the search popup is very annoying in either case. Most other programs don't do that.
Zbyszek
On Tue, May 2, 2017 at 8:47 AM, Jiri Eischmann eischmann@redhat.com wrote:
PDF Many complaints about PDF support, mostly:
- Evince doesn't support non-ascii characters in PDF forms, this is a
major problem for many people.
- Some PDF forms refuse to work with anything but Acrobat Reader
although they may work just fine with Evince, faking a reader's identity might be a solution here.
- Incomplete support for PDF 1.7.
The forms problem may be a lack of XFA support. [1] On the one hand, XFA is considered proprietary and is not included in the ISO standards applying to PDF; and yet on the other hand PDF 1.7 considers XFA effectively mandatory. That's confusing.
Aside from XFA, there are also limitations Evince has with XMP in PDF. A Simple-Scan document by default is PDF/A, and the creation and modification dates are wrong in Evince, related to lack of XMP support Poppler. [2] That's an unfortunate sequence, because it's good and appropriate to use PDF/A for long term preservation of documents. But then, oops, Evince can't be trusted to show the document's creation date.
Hi, last week I asked on my Czech blog what people are missing on the Linux desktop, mainly Fedora Workstation. It was picked by all major Czech Linux sites and received literally hundreds of responses. I went through them and created a summary for you. Some of it are well-known issues/features, some points were new to me. If something is not clear, just let me know and I'll be happy to explain it:
Thanks!
I'll try to add links for bug reports for some sections
INSTALLER […] UPDATES […] UPGRADES […]
SHELL […]
- Some extensions make the Shell crash.
See my answer to Michael Catanzaro below.
- Switching between keyboard layouts loses focus (e.g. when you press
Super+Space while e.g. typing in a search field you need to click to the search field again to continue typing)
I cannot reproduce on F26 or F25. Not even on gedit. Not for native X, XWayland nor Wayland applications. Seems like an old bug to me.
- When you use one of the tiling gestures you then can't change the
size of the tiled window.
See https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=645153
GDM […] WAYLAND Not really big surprises here:
- Missing remote desktop (one of the most frequent comments at all).
See https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=645153
- Missing color picker support.
- Missing screen sharing.
See https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=758920 for an example
- Missing something like xdotool (shotcuts for window manipulations,
e.g. to show/hide a window of certain app)
Known issue, see Wiki: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/How_to_debug_Wayland_problems#Many_well-known...
SETTINGS
- Many people complained about splitting settings into g-c-c and g-t-t,
tried to explain the reason, but nevertheless it's one of the most common complaints.
Hm, upstream developers often have a very different opinion on this. They tend to tell users and bug reporters, that the stuff they want to configure is too specific to be useful to the ordinary user that they prefer to hide it by default. I don't agree, but I doubt my opinion counts much. This is an upstream policy decision.
LOCALIZATION […] PDF Many complaints about PDF support, mostly:
- Evince doesn't support non-ascii characters in PDF forms, this is a
major problem for many people.
I cannot reproduce this. I can insert many different non-ASCII characters in different languages without issues. Can you please ask them for a sample file? I think this issue is specific to some PDF generators.
[…]
DIALOGS
- "file save dialog" doesn't have "Recent" any more and if you
save a couple of files in the same location, you have to go through the full path every time instead of clicking Recent and pick the destination folder directly.
See https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=781819
APPLICATIONS […]
- A new chat app (unlikely to happen due to the nature of current IM
services).
…or enough people who could maintain Empathy and Telepathy…
- More modern and better looking presentation templates and graphs in
LibreOffice.
+1
- Ability to install Android apps.
This would be very hard, I guess.
- Difficult Thunderbird<->Evolution migration.
Barely covered on Bugzilla. See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=737338 and https://github.com/tc88/filtersThunder2Evo for exceptions. It looks to me like there is only 1-2 people (mainly: Milan Crha) maintaining evolution, so this might need more manpower.
- OneDrive integration in Nautilus/GOA.
See https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=760627 for example
- Firefox should have tabs integrated into the title bar just like on
Window.
This is https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1234433 – thanks to Andreas Nilsson (see below)
- Cannot connect to GOA accounts after log out and log in to the
account (it's a known systemd bug, but a pretty annoying one and we have had it for several releases already).
See https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1340203
GPU […] HARDWARE […] People ask for supported laptop models where stuff like suspend, hot keys, wifi, bluetooth would be quaranteed to work on Fedora.
- Canon printers need to be set up after every kernel update.
- Better battery life.
Linux by default does not enable many power saving features. Just have a look at `# powertop` and go through https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Power_management and you can easily reduce your power usage by 10%…20%.
Additionally, some applications could get performance optimizations. This should be tracked somewhere. Eclipse is notorious for its massive CPU load, but other applications could be improved too.
Having (hardware) video acceleration work under Wayland would improve battery life a lot: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1305699 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1455101 https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1123536
Improving hardware video acceleration in general would be good too: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/buglist.cgi?product=GStreamer&bug_status=UNCO...
- Missing a "Pan/Scroll" feature in Wacom tablet support.
- Fedora support for ARM laptops (Chromebooks).
- Bad support for screen between 120 and 192 DPI which is a vast
majority of monitors with better DPI in the market. Users can partly fix it by manual tweaks (larger fonts etc.), but they can't be done per screen.
Could only find a reference on this: https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2017/04/03/hackernews-feedback-on-what-they-w...
SOUND […] GRUB […] BUG HANDLING A couple of users complained that bug reports in RHBZ get ignored which discourages them to report problems.
See also https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2017/04/03/hackernews-feedback-on-what-they-w... for a similar article based on feedback.
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