Workstation/Tasklist

Fedora Workstation Tasklist

This document aims to outline the tasks planned for the workstation as derived from the Workstation/Workstation_PRD and Workstation/Technical_Specification. Also some general information on how to get involved.

How to get involved

There are two good steps to take to get involved. First you should decide where you think you would want to get involved. Are you a Coder? Web developer? Tester? Designer? Marketing? The tables beneath show some of the tasks we are currently looking at. We would love your help with any of them. If you are interested in joining one of these efforts send an email to the desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org introducing yourself to the project. Follow that up with either contacting the people listed directly or contact one of the working group leaders, for instance through the Fedora Workstation IRC channel, who will help put you in touch. Some of these tasks will also require you to get involved with various upstream communities.

Wayland

Project Name	Developer/Owner	Status	Justification
IBUS in Wayland	Rui Matos	Wayland protocol needs defining	IBUS is the input system we rely in in Fedora for a large range of languages. We need IBUS support to be to notch in order not have switching to Wayland be a regression for our international userbase
Colour management in Wayland	Richard Hughes	Done	We have a lot of users who rely on our great colour management support, like artists and animators. This is another area where we do not want to risk regressing with the Wayland switch
Input devices in Wayland	Peter Hutterer	Top priority, blocking a lot of other items	No desktop is useable without proper input devices, be that touchpad, wacom tablets, mice and similar. libinput is seeing very active development.
Xwayland	Adam Jackson/Jasper St Pierre	Working to get Mutter and Xwayland to collaborate	We need X support both for legacy applications and we will also keep relying on certian X technologies for the core desktop for a transition period
xsettings replacement for Wayland	Ryan Lortie looking at this?	unassigned not a short-term priority	If we ever want be be able to run the desktop without requiring some form of X Window support, then this needs to be resolved.
GDM integration / session handling	Ray Strode/Jasper St Pierre	As we phase in Wayland we want users to be able to freely switch between the running an X session and a Wayland session.
clutter-gtk/subsurface	Bastien Nocera	not working yet
dnd	Benjamin Otte	At the drafting state	Drag and Drop support is another area where we do not want to regress as we move to Wayland
wacom	Peter Hutterer, Carlos Garnacho	Not yet begun, will look at it later	This is a crucial tool for animators and graphics artists wanting to use our platform. Working closely with Wacom on this.
On-screen keyboard	Rui Matos/David King	Not yet begun, needs to be synced with IBUS support. A protocol needs to be defined	Important for especially non-desktop use of Wayland
keyboard layouts	Rui Matos	Patches needs polishing/finishing. Close to being ready for review
mouse accessibilty	GNOME a11y team
hot corner / pointer barriers	Rui Matos	Not begun
touchpad support	Peter Hutterer/Rui Matos	blocks on libinput release, clutter patch exists
HiDPI display support	Owen Taylor	Wayland	We want perfect support for HiDPI displays with Wayland as going forward those are probably going to end up being the default displays on any new system.

General Graphics

Project Name	Developer/Owner	Status	Justification
Multimonitor handling	Monitor stacking. Edge resistance, etc	Florian Muellner	A lot of developers and sysadmins use multimonitor setups. We need to have best of class handling of these kind of setups.
Optimus	Bastien Nocera	Mode switch UI	Better support for Optimus systems are also important for a long range of power users and developers.
EGL		Work on Nvidia enabling technologies in the graphics stack (basically try to help move some of their proposal forward to help encourage their Wayland support quicker)	People like game developers, animation artists and similar require the binary Nvidia driver for their work, we need to work with NVidia to make sure it works really well with Wayland.

Fedora workstation

Terminal developer features

Project Name	Developer/Owner	Status	Justification
automatic title updates	Debarshi Ray	not done; difficult to integrate in bash	This feature will make working with a large quantity of terminals easier as identifying each one will be a lot easier.
long-running job notification	Debarshi Ray	not done; difficult to integrate in bash
theme changes (white-on-black)	Debarshi Ray	not done; exploring a Fedora patch
bring back transparency	Debarshi Ray	Done, patch in Fedora	A lot of users like this feature for a varity of reasons. Upstream not interested so we will maintain it as a Fedora patch.
improve preference dialogs	Allan Day	negotiating changes with upstream
search provider	Debarshi Ray	done
better tiling	Debarshi Ray	upstream designers wary of tiling - exploring as an extension now	Another crucial feature for developers working with a lot of terminals.
launch new window	Debarshi Ray	reverted after negative feedback; exploring other option
Allow to search selected text on Web	Allan Day	Under discussion
Allow to send selected text to a pastebin	Allan Day	Under discussion

Software Installer

Project Name	Developer/Owner	Status	Justification
use hawkey, already the case in rawhide	Richard Hughes	done in rawhide, F21
performance	Richard Hughes	done (?)
folder configuration	Richard Hughes	done
fedora account integration	Richard Hughes	deferred until post-3.12/post f21
fedora hosting + generation for app data	Fedora Rel. Engineering	q.v. https://fedorahosted.org/rel-eng/ticket/5721
better app data	community	Underway, looking at making part of Fedora packaging guidelines	The Application installer is the primary method for our users to find new software. Having good application installer metadata for all Fedora software meant to be installed with the software installer is thus crucial for our end user experience.
Third-party repo (chrome, etc)	Currently blocked
Chrome/firefox webapps	Richard Hughes/Tomas Popela	A lot of desktop development these days actually come in the form of webapps. We need to integrate these apps into out platform so that they help drive people to our platform and not away from it.
Install alternative desktops	Allan Day	needs design	While the product aims at a strongly integrated vertical system we do want to allow those users who want it to install other options even if that means they lose out on a big part of the value proposition we are trying to bring to the table with the Workstation product. Need to take care to figure out how to do it in a way that is actually useful to users yet also not introducing risk of breaking core workstation experience through for instance library incompatibilities and similar.
Install developer tools	Allan Day	needs design	A lot of developer tools are command line and thus might not be a great fit for the application installer. Could be that for instance the Developer assistance is a better home for installing such tools. Or maybe a 3rd separate tool.
full touch support in GTK+	Carlos Garnacho	being worked on for GNOME 3.14	Modern laptops and all-in-one desktops are being shipped with touchscreens. If we do not have decent touchscreen support this will start to count as a disadvantage for our product and platform. Applications needs to be made touch aware on a case by case basis as makes sense.
btrfs	Kernel team/Jon McCann	Design user interface for rollback feature - https://blogs.oracle.com/erwann/entry/zfs_on_the_desktop_zfs	The rollback feature that btrfs will give us can improve system robustness and upgrade pains significantly. btrfs has unfortunately taken a long time to mature, but hopefully with Facebook investing heavily in it, that will quickly change.
Docking station teardown behaviour	Design team/Jon McCann	design needed	A lot of developers, sysadmins and other power users use a docking station at the office and then bring their laptops home in the evening to continue working. Currently we don't have a great behaviour for dealing with the external monitor appearing/disappearing, with all apps just migrating to the internal screen on disconnect.
Application grouping support	Design team/Jon McCann	design needed	Developers and devops are task oriented more than application oriented and we want to have a way to group a large set of application/windows together and be able to deal with them as a group. So that you can have for instance 5 terminals and a browser with 10 tabs set to specific pages associated with one project and another set of applications and terminals for another project.
Design work for Developer Assistant	Allan Day	Initial discussions had with Dev.Exp. Team	The developer assistant is likely to become of our core value adds. Need to make sure it evolves in harmony with the rest of the developer experience we are providing and that features end up in the right place.

Container technologies

In order to provide a more robust setup for application developers to deploy on Linux we are working hard on providing a top of the line desktop container implementation. It will build upon the popular and successful Docker containers, but with extra features important for desktop use.

Project Name	Developer/Owner	Status	Justification
OverlayFS	jwb/dhowells	kernel-playground COPR includes overlayfs - Contact person Alex Larsson for non-kernel/Docker integration	This is one of the features we need to be able to do desktop containers in a nice and efficient way. This will in fact also be very useful for any kind of containers so the expectation is that once we manage to land this all Docker containers will use it.
kdbus	Done by Lennart and Kay	Expected to get merged over summer, kernel-playground COPR will eventually include it	Important in order to have an efficient way to do data transport between containers.
Define 'portals' policy	David King	need to do some experimental prototyping	more than for server containers, desktop containers need to be able to access various system services, like online accounts.

General Features

Project Name	Developer/Owner	Status	Justification
Scriptless RPMS for desktop	None assigned	Good way for new community members to get involved.	We want to avoid requiring scripts to be called from RPMS as far as possible as any such manual steps increase the risk for bugs and issues happening during upgrades. Working on removing the need for such things will increase overall system robustness and make upgrades less of a challenge. It also makes our updates more alike to image based installations. gsettings schemas gconf schemas im modules - this cache doesn't add much value, could make it optional gio modules – make optional pango modules – make optional pixbuf loaders – make optional systemd unit - not a cache – just annoying post scripts
Rygel, Chromecast etc., firewall interaction	Tomas Worner and Bastien Nocera	Being prototyped and discussed	We want desktop services to work flawlessly for users without having to fiddle with the firewall settings. Especially as the firewall getting in the way has a tendency to make people simply disable the firewall.

Applications features

Project Name	Developer/Owner	Status
Firefox GTK3 port	Martin Stransky	Patches under review
Firefox screensaver inhibition	Martin Stransky	blocking on GTK3 port, Patches under review
Chromium screensaver inhibition	Tomas Popela	waiting on completion of Evolution webkit port
Desktop log viewer -get per-application logs	David King	patch exists
Desktop log viewer -hook up GLib logging to the journal	David King	will land in 3.13
Desktop log viewer - add support for activate-by-message id to journal	David King	needs discussion with systemd guys
Desktop log viewer - clean up logs	David King	suitable for crowdsourcing
Desktop log viewer - move log-triggered actions (eg SMART) from gsd	David King	not happening this cycle
Boxes GPU passthrough	Zeeshan Ali	Need hardware, NVidia promised to provide some
Boxes side-by-side VMs	Zeeshan Ali
Boxes actions without selection mode	Zeeshan Ali
Chrome Apps integration	Tomas Popela	Need to discuss with Chrome guys upstream

Qt apps integration

Project Name	Developer/Owner	Status
Adwaita theme for Qt		No GTK3 engine/CSS better
High Contrast theme
Input – ibus		verify
notifications		verify
application menu		Verify
window decorations in Wayland (CSD)		verify
system caches		discuss
xsettings replacement for Wayland		discuss

Other

Project Name	Developer/Owner	Status	Justification
Fleet Commander	Matthew Barnes	Proof of concept under development	We want our systems to be deployed in large software engineering organizations. Providing good tools for managing such deployments could be an important differentiator for us.
Virtual 3D for SPICE	David Arlie	Need more community involvement to move forward
Polari IRC client		Already somewhat done, need community involvement to take to production level
Totem UI refresh	Bastien Nocera	done
HIG Guidelines	Allan Day
Screencasting with audio		Need community member involvement
improve git GUI tool		more like sourcetree?	Great tooling is a big part of the issue we need to address. Especially as we try to lure developers away from MacOS making sure our development tools like gitg are top notch is crucial.
eclipse-jbosstools integration?		talk to jboss team about linuxapps and their needs