Last week, I was at the Usenix LISA conference in Washington, DC. If you are not familiar, LISA is "Large Installation System Administration", and this is the premiere conference for professional sysadmins.
We had a Fedora booth and evening "birds of a feather" session, and I was pleased by how popular and positive the response was. Almost everyone who I spoke with Fedora in some capacity (or else apologetically said that they run only RHEL). I think I had one Ubuntu user and a couple of FreeBSD advocates come by. This was in contrast to LinuxCon, where people were generally *positive*, but often ran other distributions or had run Fedora in the past but didn't anymore. Here, even the people just coming by the booth to get a sticker for the raffle usually talked about their use of Fedora when I asked.
I would say that about a third of the people I spoke with ran Fedora on servers only, another third on their desktop only, and another third with a mix. It is very important for Fedora to continue to appeal to this group in every capacity, including on the desktop. I didn't keep careful stats, but there seemed to be a pretty even split between Gnome and other desktops. There were two particular themes that I heard over and over about desktop in particular:
- need for better multi-monitor support - handling of many multiple terminal windows
And, not particular to desktop, the general theme of managing updates and upgrades in a less overwhelming way.
I don't think any of those bullets are a surprise to anyone. Sysadmins as a class generally aren't shy about their opinions on software, and while as noted the response was generally positive (a couple of people noted how good-looking the Fedora desktop is), there was a lot to say about the above. One specific complaint I heard several times is that the overview just gives a wall of rectangles -- I introduced those people to the Native Window Placement extension. That's getting into the details, though.
The basic take-away was that this is, after all these years, a _really_ loyal base of Fedora desktop users. I *really* think it's worth our while to listen to their needs and make their experience the best possible.
Hey,
----- Original Message ----- <snip>
- need for better multi-monitor support
We already have a redesigned Settings panel for external displays in F20. We'd probably need to get more into specifics here (how many monitors, whether they're completely static, where the main monitor is, and whether the problem is usage after the desktop is setup, or really problems in setting up a specific layout).
- handling of many multiple terminal windows
Your advice of an extension is probably best in the short term. There are a number of them, including tiling ones that are probably the sort of thing people running loads of terminals would use.
One specific complaint I heard several times is that the overview just gives a wall of rectangles -- I introduced those people to the Native Window Placement extension. That's getting into the details, though.
That's probably something that needs more detailed bug reports as well. The answer would be quite different if the problem was loads of applications, loads of applications in terminals, or just loads of terminals, for example. And the solutions might not all be directly in gnome-shell changes either.
Cheers
On Thu, Nov 14, 2013 at 08:18:51 -0500, Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org wrote:
- handling of many multiple terminal windows
What were they looking for here? I use workspace switcher on XFCE with 12 or 15 workspaces and use each workspace for a standard application or terminal window with an ssh connection to a particular host. By being consistent about what is where it is easy to go to a desired application or terminal session.
On 11/14/2013 10:39 AM, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
On Thu, Nov 14, 2013 at 08:18:51 -0500, Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org wrote:
- handling of many multiple terminal windows
What were they looking for here? I use workspace switcher on XFCE with 12 or 15 workspaces and use each workspace for a standard application or terminal window with an ssh connection to a particular host. By being consistent about what is where it is easy to go to a desired application or terminal session.
FWIW what I've observed in an unrelated usability study (one we did for systemd that involved working with terminals) is in gnome-shell, when you go to the overview you have a bunch of black rectangles (the terminal thumbs) that all look the same, so the task of identifying which black rectangle was the right one to click on to get the terminal you needed was challenging.
~m
On Thu, Nov 14, 2013 at 5:09 PM, Máirín Duffy duffy@fedoraproject.org wrote:
FWIW what I've observed in an unrelated usability study (one we did for systemd that involved working with terminals) is in gnome-shell, when you go to the overview you have a bunch of black rectangles (the terminal thumbs) that all look the same, so the task of identifying which black rectangle was the right one to click on to get the terminal you needed was challenging.
We had requests to also show application icons in addition to the window previews in the past[0], but of course that doesn't help the multiple-terminal case at all ...
On Thu, Nov 14, 2013 at 17:17:14 +0100, Florian Müllner fmuellner@gnome.org wrote:
On Thu, Nov 14, 2013 at 5:09 PM, Máirín Duffy duffy@fedoraproject.org wrote:
FWIW what I've observed in an unrelated usability study (one we did for systemd that involved working with terminals) is in gnome-shell, when you go to the overview you have a bunch of black rectangles (the terminal thumbs) that all look the same, so the task of identifying which black rectangle was the right one to click on to get the terminal you needed was challenging.
We had requests to also show application icons in addition to the window previews in the past[0], but of course that doesn't help the multiple-terminal case at all ...
I actually prefer not having an indication of which app is running, nor do I want previews. That way I don't need to worry about showing someone my screen while I'm doing a workspace switch. The key for me is consistently having the same app/ssh connection in the same workspace, so i don't need a preview to know which workspace to switch to.
On 11/14/2013 02:56 PM, Bastien Nocera wrote:
Hey,
----- Original Message -----
<snip> > > - need for better multi-monitor support We already have a redesigned Settings panel for external displays in F20. We'd probably need to get more into specifics here (how many monitors, whether they're completely static, where the main monitor is, and whether the problem is usage after the desktop
I'm pretty sure they have been talking about suspend and resume or removing laptop to or from the docking station when people find themselves doing turning monitor of and on again dance, even unplug them afterwards, to get get both of them working again *not* the display settings application ( i've never heard anyone complain about that ). At least that's one of the complaints I always here when people talk about Fedora and multi monitors on these parts.
JBG
On 11/14/2013 11:17 AM, Florian Müllner wrote:
We had requests to also show application icons in addition to the window previews in the past[0], but of course that doesn't help the multiple-terminal case at all ...
I have had that extension installed though, and it does help at least though for distinguishing between the grey and white rectangles (firefox, thunderbird, irc, gnote, gedit, etc.).
But yeah, the answer for terminals is not so simple.
~m
On 11/14/2013 09:56 AM, Bastien Nocera wrote:
Hey,
----- Original Message -----
<snip> > - need for better multi-monitor support We already have a redesigned Settings panel for external displays in F20. We'd probably need to get more into specifics here (how many monitors, whether they're completely static, where the main monitor is, and whether the problem is usage after the desktop is setup, or really problems in setting up a specific layout).
Do you know if there was any user testing done on this re-design?
Because, personally, I am finding the redesign a major step backwards for configuring my 2 monitor + 1 cintiq setup. (in the process of filing a handful of bugs right now)
cheers, ryanlerch
On Thu, 2013-11-14 at 08:18 -0500, Matthew Miller wrote:
Last week, I was at the Usenix LISA conference in Washington, DC. If you are not familiar, LISA is "Large Installation System Administration", and this is the premiere conference for professional sysadmins.
[...]
There were two particular themes that I heard over and over about desktop in particular:
- need for better multi-monitor support
As Bastien said, we'd really need more specifics on this one - there are some general issues we know of (e.g. vertically stacked monitors don't work well) - but I'm uncertain what ones would be of relevance to sysadmins. I'm not even sure what the breakdown for sysadmins is between laptops and desktops - which have very different considerations for multi-monitors.
- handling of many multiple terminal windows
I'd like to see us exploring the idea of being smart about remote connections to remote servers, and not just considering them to be ssh run inside a generic terminal. If you have a 'remote terminal' app that knows what server you are connected to, it can export a GNOME Shell search provider:
* That can show both servers that you are connected to, and servers you might want to connect to (from your history, from ~/.ssh/known_hosts)
* That can handle both windows and tabs and switch you to the right window or the right tab.
* If available, can show distinguishing visual representations of servers, like an icon
To start or resume working on bugzilla.gnome.org, I'd love to be able to hit <Super>bugz<Enter>.
This is addition to all the other cool things you can do in such a program. Colin Walters mentioned today that he has revived work on his 'hotssh' program - we should try adding a search provider to that.
- Owen
Hi,
----- Original Message -----
I'd like to see us exploring the idea of being smart about remote connections to remote servers, and not just considering them to be ssh run inside a generic terminal. If you have a 'remote terminal' app that knows what server you are connected to, it can export a GNOME Shell search provider:
[...snip cool ideas...]
This is addition to all the other cool things you can do in such a program. Colin Walters mentioned today that he has revived work on his 'hotssh' program - we should try adding a search provider to that.
As an aside, we also already ship vinagre which has a start toward ssh integration.
--Ray
On Thu, 2013-11-14 at 12:45 -0500, Owen Taylor wrote:
On Thu, 2013-11-14 at 08:18 -0500, Matthew Miller wrote:
Last week, I was at the Usenix LISA conference in Washington, DC. If you are not familiar, LISA is "Large Installation System Administration", and this is the premiere conference for professional sysadmins.
[...]
There were two particular themes that I heard over and over about desktop in particular:
- need for better multi-monitor support
As Bastien said, we'd really need more specifics on this one - there are some general issues we know of (e.g. vertically stacked monitors don't work well) - but I'm uncertain what ones would be of relevance to sysadmins. I'm not even sure what the breakdown for sysadmins is between laptops and desktops - which have very different considerations for multi-monitors.
Some complaints I've heard, off the top of my head:
- no way of saying "launch on this monitor" - window placement is forgetful when hotplugs are involved - GLX doesn't work with multiple GPUs and Xinerama (with Mesa anyway) - "workspace only on primary display" is often unexpected - no way to apply session layout settings to gdm
- ajax
On 11/14/2013 09:56 AM, Bastien Nocera wrote:
Hey,
----- Original Message -----
<snip> > - need for better multi-monitor support We already have a redesigned Settings panel for external displays in F20. We'd probably need to get more into specifics here (how many monitors, whether they're completely static, where the main monitor is, and whether the problem is usage after the desktop is setup, or really problems in setting up a specific layout).
Additionally, i have also just filed a handful of bugs upstream detailing the issues that i am experiencing:
* https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=712309 * https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=712321 * https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=712325 * https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=712329
cheers, ryanlerch
On 11/14/2013 01:51 PM, Adam Jackson wrote:
- no way of saying "launch on this monitor"
Somewhat related to this is when dialogs for the same app pop up on a different monitor. E.g. I spent a lot of time in LibreOffice and I've noticed a lot of times when I open up a dialog (like, say, 'Sections' or 'Fonts') it pops up on the second monitor, where I'm not looking, so I keep clicking thinking LO has crashed or something.
Another way this manifests... if you're in Evolution or Thunderbird on screen 1 and open up an attachment - depending on the app it opens up in, the attachment will display on screen 2. Again unexpected. Happens when opening something from nautilus sometimes.
~m
On Thu, Nov 14, 2013 at 8:55 PM, Máirín Duffy duffy@fedoraproject.org wrote:
On 11/14/2013 01:51 PM, Adam Jackson wrote:
- no way of saying "launch on this monitor"
Somewhat related to this is when dialogs for the same app pop up on a different monitor. E.g. I spent a lot of time in LibreOffice and I've noticed a lot of times when I open up a dialog (like, say, 'Sections' or 'Fonts') it pops up on the second monitor, where I'm not looking, so I keep clicking thinking LO has crashed or something.
Another way this manifests... if you're in Evolution or Thunderbird on screen 1 and open up an attachment - depending on the app it opens up in, the attachment will display on screen 2. Again unexpected. Happens when opening something from nautilus sometimes.
Is your mouse pointer on the second monitor when any of this happens?
On Thu 14 Nov 2013 02:58:11 PM EST, drago01 wrote:
Is your mouse pointer on the second monitor when any of this happens?
No, because of the layout of my monitors this is physically difficult to do. (I have them vertically stacked physically, but they are connected horizontally since the vertical support is broken.)
~m
On Thu, Nov 14, 2013 at 09:56:52AM -0500, Bastien Nocera wrote:
----- Original Message -----
<snip> > - need for better multi-monitor support
We already have a redesigned Settings panel for external displays in F20. We'd probably need to get more into specifics here (how many monitors, whether they're completely static, where the main monitor is, and whether the problem is usage after the desktop is setup, or really problems in setting up a specific layout).
The problem I have been having is that I have configured Xorg to rotate my four montiors, but that configuration is ignored and/or overridden by GNOME with GDM starts.
I finally figured out the fix:
1. Make sure the Xrandr plugin is enabled:
gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.plugins.xrandr active true
2. Use the Display Settings control panel to set things up the way I want.
3. Manually copy the file ~/.config/monitors.xml to /etc/gnome-settings-daemon/xrandr/monitors.xml
Step #3 was the unexpected and un-user-friendly step. None of this was documented that I could find.
I think I had originally disabled the xrandr plugin in older Fedoras because turning off a monitor caused all hell to break loose--the monitor positioning/rotation was scrambled and in some cases it wouldn't come back correctly at all without restarting the X server (maybe driver bugs here).
So, there are several problems here. First, all the documentation out there that says to use /etc/X11/xorg.conf to configure your multi-monitor setup system-wide doesn't work with Gnome 3 on Fedora 19 in my experience.
Second, there is no discoverable/documented user-friendly way to set the system-wide/GDM monitor configuration.
Third, there may be some bad interactions with the Xrandr plugin in the face of hardware configuration changes or simply powering off/on monitors.
On Thu, Nov 14, 2013 at 12:14:34PM -0500, Máirín Duffy wrote:
On 11/14/2013 11:17 AM, Florian Müllner wrote:
We had requests to also show application icons in addition to the window previews in the past[0], but of course that doesn't help the multiple-terminal case at all ...
I have had that extension installed though, and it does help at least though for distinguishing between the grey and white rectangles (firefox, thunderbird, irc, gnote, gedit, etc.).
But yeah, the answer for terminals is not so simple.
For many years, I've have this set this in my tsch .login (and make sure the terminal is set to process the .login file):
#!/bin/tcsh if ($TERM == "xterm" || $TERM == "xterm-color" || $TERM == "gnome-terminal") then echo "\033]2;($tty) $USER@$SHORTHOST\007" alias precmd 'echo -n "\033]2;($tty) $USER@$SHORTHOST ($cwd)\007"' endif
This causes the terminal title bar to change like this:
(pts/1) cra@host (/home/cra)
which I then use to identify which terminal to click on in Overview mode. It works very nicely.
On Thu, 2013-11-14 at 12:45 -0500, Owen Taylor wrote:
- handling of many multiple terminal windows
I'd like to see us exploring the idea of being smart about remote connections to remote servers, and not just considering them to be ssh run inside a generic terminal. If you have a 'remote terminal' app that knows what server you are connected to, it can export a GNOME Shell search provider:
That can show both servers that you are connected to, and servers you might want to connect to (from your history, from ~/.ssh/known_hosts)
That can handle both windows and tabs and switch you to the right window or the right tab.
If available, can show distinguishing visual representations of servers, like an icon
Some ideas along these lines are collected here:
https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/Whiteboards/TerminalBrainstorm
We'll be looking at getting some of these implemented for GNOME 3.12. Our initial target list includes:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=711059 Notifications for long-running commands https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=711060 Always update the terminal title for the running command https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=711075 Include a gnome-shell search provider
As Bastien said, we'd really need more specifics on this one - there are some general issues we know of (e.g. vertically stacked monitors don't work well) - but I'm uncertain what ones would be of relevance to sysadmins. I'm not even sure what the breakdown for sysadmins is between laptops and desktops - which have very different considerations for multi-monitors.
Some complaints I've heard, off the top of my head:
- no way of saying "launch on this monitor"
- window placement is forgetful when hotplugs are involved
It's often forgetful of monitor config and layout config in general when it comes to hotplug in general whether that be via dock or cable. The previous release was generally pretty good. I travel a lot so will move between single monitor and docked options alot and in F-20 it's become some what time consuming where it mostly use to "just work" in F-19.
Peter
----- Original Message -----
From: "Máirín Duffy" duffy@fedoraproject.org To: "Discussions about development for the Fedora desktop" desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org Cc: "Matthew Miller" mattdm@fedoraproject.org Sent: Thursday, November 14, 2013 9:09:55 AM Subject: Re: LISA conference, Fedora, and the sysadmin use case.
On 11/14/2013 10:39 AM, Bruno Wolff III wrote:
On Thu, Nov 14, 2013 at 08:18:51 -0500, Matthew Miller mattdm@fedoraproject.org wrote:
- handling of many multiple terminal windows
What were they looking for here? I use workspace switcher on XFCE with 12 or 15 workspaces and use each workspace for a standard application or terminal window with an ssh connection to a particular host. By being consistent about what is where it is easy to go to a desired application or terminal session.
I think it's what mizmo referred to below - the gnome-shell case - it is just a sea of black boxes in the overview if you have too many open. and while i think there's definitely cases where people can just be more organized about their desktop usage or use workspaces more efficiently - there's also a case to be made for the admin who doesn't keep windows open to every host (anyone with any significant number of machines, basically), who might want to troubleshoot a handful of machines at once, etc.
FWIW what I've observed in an unrelated usability study (one we did for systemd that involved working with terminals) is in gnome-shell, when you go to the overview you have a bunch of black rectangles (the terminal thumbs) that all look the same, so the task of identifying which black rectangle was the right one to click on to get the terminal you needed was challenging.
While it may be more of a "developer use case" than a "sysadmin use case" - I can certainly attest to the frustration of the other half of my household with the "which black rectangle" problem - his work typically involves needing numerous multiple terminal windows open simultaneously for coding, testing, tracing issues, etc. "How am I supposed to find anything?! I can't even see what is in the windows unless I click on them..."
-robyn
~m
desktop mailing list desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
On Thu, 2013-11-14 at 13:51 -0500, Adam Jackson wrote:
On Thu, 2013-11-14 at 12:45 -0500, Owen Taylor wrote:
On Thu, 2013-11-14 at 08:18 -0500, Matthew Miller wrote:
Last week, I was at the Usenix LISA conference in Washington, DC. If you are not familiar, LISA is "Large Installation System Administration", and this is the premiere conference for professional sysadmins.
[...]
There were two particular themes that I heard over and over about desktop in particular:
- need for better multi-monitor support
As Bastien said, we'd really need more specifics on this one - there are some general issues we know of (e.g. vertically stacked monitors don't work well) - but I'm uncertain what ones would be of relevance to sysadmins. I'm not even sure what the breakdown for sysadmins is between laptops and desktops - which have very different considerations for multi-monitors.
Some complaints I've heard, off the top of my head:
- no way of saying "launch on this monitor"
- window placement is forgetful when hotplugs are involved
It's forgetful even when they're *not* involved. Every goddamn time I boot up my dual-monitor system, gedit is on the right hand monitor; every goddamn time, I drag it manually across to the left hand monitor. This is a desktop with dual displays, I don't unplug and replug them, yet the session management stuff seems to consistently fail to remember which head gedit is supposed to be on. Seems to remember other apps okay, though.
desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org