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.

Older tasks

Previous task lists are maintained in this archive page.

Fedora Workstation 27

Project Name	Developer/Owner	Status	Justification/Comment
RHEL developer program integration	Debarshi Ray		We want to make it easy for Fedora workstation users to enroll in the RHEL developer program and set up RHEL vms
Make Optimus setup work smoothly	Adam Jackson, Hans de Goede & More	in progress	This mostly works now, but there are some cases like XWayland that needs further work.
Optimus support	Bastien Nocera	initial support integrated	Design work here: https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/OS/DualGPU. Better support for dual-GPU (Intel+nvidia, or Intel+AMD) systems. Also important for a long range of power users and developers.
Optimus support for wayland	Jonas Adahl	in progress	Branches awaiting review
Remote Windows Apps	Ondrej Holy and Alexander Bokovoy	In Progress	GOA account handling for Windows terminal server and remote windows applications.
Qt - hi-dpi support	Martin Bříza & Jan Grulich	done	Make sure Qt applications support hi-dpi scaling when running on high resolution displays (experimental patches to land soon in qt5/rawhide). The topic explained here: http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/highdpi.html
Fractional scaling support	Jonas Adahl	done	https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-shell-list/2017-June/msg00000.html
gnome-shell - Better tiling	Florian Muellner	in progress upstream patches here: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=751857	Another crucial feature for developers working with a lot of terminals.
gnome-software - rpm-ostree support	Kalev Lember, Richard Hughes	done	needed for atomic workstation https://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-software/log/?h=wip/kalev/rpm-ostree
rpm-ostree - polkit support	Kalev Lember	done	needed for the previous item https://github.com/projectatomic/rpm-ostree/pull/825
Boxes - file transfers from vm	Zeeshan Ali		https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=730259

Fedora Workstation 28

Project Name	Developer/Owner	Status	Justification/Comment
RDP integration in Boxes	Felipe Borges	done	Integrating RPD support into Boxes to replace Vinagre
Boxes - file transfers to vm	Felipe Borges	done	https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=730259
Print Job Authentication	Marek Kašík	In Progress
GTK Print Dialog Redesign	Marek Kašík	In Progress
GNOME Usage (tech preview)	Felipe Borges & Petr Štětka	done	A new app replacing System Monitor and Baobab, plan is to have it as a tech preview in Fedora 28
GTK List Box	Felipe Borges	In Progress	Bringing drag'n'drop support
power tunables		research underway	Some of the kernel tunables such as SATA link power management and USB autosuspend can make a difference of multiple watts. These need to be investigated and udev/kernel configuration adjusted as appropriate.

Fedora Workstation 29

Project Name	Developer/Owner	Status	Justification/Comment
Wayland support in Firefox	Martin Stransky	in progress	Almost finished.
Boxes - OVF/OVA import/export of vms	Kalev Lember	done	https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=723008
PDF - support for non-ascii char in forms	Marek Kašík	in progress	Add support for non-ascii characters in PDF forms to Evince. This is a crucial feature for many languages.
Moving desktop from Nautilus to GS extension	Carlos Soriano	In Progress	Removing the desktop feature from Nautilus and moving it to a GS extension
QGnomePlatform - draw decorations for Qt apps on Wayland	Jan Grulich	Stalled Qt vs Mutter compatiblity issues	On Wayland, Mutter doesn't draw server side decorations any more, to have unified decorations for Qt apps we have to draw it on the client side using QGnomePlatform.
Run Qt5 apps on Wayland	Jan Grulich	Stalled Qt vs Mutter compatibility issues	Run Qt5 apps natively on Wayland and smooth all compatibility issues with Mutter.
Design improvements of Anaconda for Workstation Live	Jiri Eischmann		After removing spokes to set up accounts, the second hub screen looks empty and not visually pleasing, let's give it a better look.

Future ideas

Project Name	Developer/Owner	Status	Justification
Implementation of Dropbox for the new cloud provider API	Carlos Soriano	In Progress	Implement a Dropbox daemon using the new cloud provider API
Virtual 3D for SPICE	David Arlie	progress: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2015-10/msg02418.html	Need more community involvement to move forward
Firefox Enterprise Login	Jan Horak	Stalled	Improving enterprise login experience in Firefox - GSSAPI interactions should not block the main UI, domain name should be set automatically with a realm/domain, improving prompt UI. Status: most of it implemented. The design changes hang on Mozilla. Also looking at Fleet Commander integration.
Boxes GPU passthrough	Felipe Borges	in progress	Being able to assign a separate GPU to a virtual machine is a crucial feature for a lot of developers, for instance game developers and animators https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=746345 Status: currently re-evaluating the approach, the way SPICE team is trying to achieve it via streaming seems more viable in long term.
Support for Android Apps	Tomas Popela & Stephan Bergmann	in progress	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.
IPP printer sharing	Marek Kašík & Felipe Borges	in progress	Make sharing a printer via IPP available in control-center, so that users can easily share their printers with other devices on the same network.
power tunables		research underway	Some of the kernel tunables such as SATA link power management and USB autosuspend can make a difference of multiple watts. These need to be investigated and udev/kernel configuration adjusted as appropriate.
GDM kdc proxy access	Ray Strode, Alexander Bokovoy	planning	Integrate two-factor authentication into GDM. Design work here: https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/Whiteboards/EnterpriseLogin#Tentative_Design
Goa Kerberos improvements	Debarshi Ray	planning	Make SSO experience better in epiphany, nautilus, evolution; support Kerberos with more online accounts
Screencasting with audio	Wim Taymans	Need community member involvement	We been getting requests for better screencasting support in the desktop, needs review of current status and what can be done to improve performance and features. https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/Apps/Potential/Recorder
Wayland - remoting	Jonas Adahl	in progress	Offer remote access to Wayland sessions over VNC (and perhaps other protocols)
Qt application menu	Jan Grulich	needs work	status: Qt apps can export their menus via the com.canonical.dbusmenu interface. They export the complete menubar though so we should probably just utilize the first submenu or the complete menu in one button (it's possible, yet the menus are quite complex)
Qt - accessibility	Jan Grulich		Verify if setting accessibility features such as screen reader works in Qt/KDE applications in Workstation. Link: http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/accessible.html
Software Installer - Offer a way to override 'metered' connection heuristics	Network Manager team	In progress	The idea is for !NetworkManager to offer this information on a per-connection basis, then we can offer a user override for it in the network panel https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=741725
Prefer D-Bus activation in gnome-session	Ray Strode		Part of the move to systemd user sessions
Move apps to desktop file name == bus id			Part of the move to systemd user sessions, and isolated applications. Suitable for crowd sourcing
Abrt - improve crash collection	Bastien Nocera, Abrt team	in progress	https://github.com/abrt/abrt/milestones/Fedora%2022, https://github.com/abrt/abrt/issues/891, https://github.com/abrt/abrt/issues/887
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.
Caldav support for general IMAP connector in Online accounts	Milan Crha and Debarshi Ray		the generic IMAP connector should be suplemented by a general caldav one as most email servers using IMAP would be used with a caldav server. Tasks: write a goacaldavprovider.c and glue it into evo/eds
Wayland - mouse accessibility	GNOME a11y team		Feature parity with X
Wayland - input device information	Jonas Ådahl		Feature parity with X
Wayland - IBUS	Jens Petersen	in progress	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, https://github.com/flatpak/flatpak/issues/675
Terminal -automatic title updates	Debarshi Ray	working patch posted	This feature will make working with a large quantity of terminals easier as identifying each one will be a lot easier. Feature parity with other OS's. https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=711060
Terminal - Allow to search selected text on Web	Allan Day	Under discussion: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=723088
Terminal - Allow to send selected text to a pastebin	Allan Day	Under discussion: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=723089
Multimonitor - edge resistance	Florian Muellner	Florian has an unfinished patch	A lot of developers and sysadmins use multimonitor setups. We need to have best of class handling of these kind of setups.
gnome-boxes hi-dpi support	Zeeshan Ali		The details are described here: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=726743
Fedora account integration
Pidgin integration			With 3.16, gnome-shell is much less entangled with empathy. We should look at making pidgin work nicely in GNOME
Easier langpack installation for Libreoffice	Parag Nemade		Currently langpacks for Libreoffice and KDE etc are not installed by default after a Workstation installation - ideally they should be installed more or less semi-automatically (maybe via gnome-initial-setup or gnome-software say?)
Software Installer - support 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.
Software Installer - hosting + generation of app data for Fedora	Fedora Rel. Engineering		q.v. https://fedorahosted.org/rel-eng/ticket/5721
Software Installer - hosting + generation of app data for coprs	Fedora Rel. Engineering
Desktop log viewer - per-application logs	David King	unfinished patch exists	The desktop log viewer is meant to be a good debug tool for developers and a bit easier to interact with for such purposes than the log viewer included in cockpit.
Desktop log viewer - move log-triggered actions (eg SMART, abrt) from gsd and abrt	David King	needs discussion with abrt team
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			suitable for crowdsourcing
Mylyn support added to Online accounts			Mylyn can be a portal for enabling developers easy access to a lot of developer resources
Qt - CSD under wayland	Dan Vrátil/Jan Grulich	unlikely to materialize	status: Qt Wayland apps don't run in Rawhide at all. There is support for CSDs in QtWayland but there is no application utilizing it. Upstream KDE (Martin Graesslin) is strongly against using CSDs, see http://blog.martin-graesslin.com/blog/2013/02/client-side-window-decorations-and-wayland/
eclipse-jbosstools integration?		talk to jboss team about linuxapps and their needs
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.
Wayland - xsettings replacement for Wayland		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.
gnome-shell - system keybinding overview			https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/OS/HelpOverlay#System_Shortcuts
Docking station teardown behaviour	Design team	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	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.
Drop hard xwayland dependency from mutter	Jonas Adahl
Windows network integration - Printers			Make sure assigned printers from AD show up in the print dialog when the machine is enrolled in a domain
Windows network integration - Shares			Make sure assigned file shares from AD show up in the file chooser and nautilus when the machine is enrolled in a domain
UI enablement of VDI mode		Make this more discoverable - gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface enable-animations false
Support for importing VB machines to Boxes	Felipe Borges		Being able to import virtual machines created in VirtualBox would make it easier for ppl to move to Boxes