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