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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 24

Project Name Developer/Owner Status Justification
GTK+ - application keybinding overview Matthias Clasen done https://wiki.gnome.org/Design/OS/HelpOverlay#System_Shortcuts
Codecs - openh264 Kalev Lember, Wim Taymans in progress Build openh264 codecs in koji and make them available through a repo hosted by cisco
Optimus support Bastien Nocera hardware shipped Better support for dual-GPU (intel+nvidia) systems. Also important for a long range of power users and developers. Mode switch UI - https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=704387, https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=734346 also relevant. Note that this is about supporting it with the nouveau driver ("Prime"). Better support with the proprietary nvidida driver depends on vendor-neutral dispatch for libGL
GL Dispatch, EGL streams, EGL device Adam Jackson While we would be depending on NVidia supporting this to make a practical step forward for most users I expect us to have the framework ready for Fedora 24
Make Optimus setup work smoothly Adam Jackson Once the GL Dispatch works land, ensure that setting up a system to use Optimus becomes simple
Boxes GPU passthrough Zeeshan Ali 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
Laptop certification improvements Marek Kasik
battery life monitoring Owen Taylor research underway Put a system in place that allows us to evaluate power consumption under well-defined scenarios on an ongoing basis
integrate alpm fixes in kernel and enable them Josh Boyer See mjg's post here: http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/34868.html
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.
GSSAPI in libsoup Tomas Popela Adding GSSAPI to libsoup which will enable us to add ImD integration features in different parts of the desktop.
Firefox Enterprise Login Jan Horak 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.
GDM kdc proxy access Ray Strode, Alexander Bokovoy planning Integrate two-factor authentication into GDM
Goa Kerberos improvements Debarshi Ray planning
Fleet Commander Alberto Ruiz 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.
Remote Windows Apps Ondrej Holy and Debarshi Ray GOA account handling for Windows terminal server and remote windows applications
Software Installer - Integrate distro upgrade Kalev Lember design here gnome-software should inform the user when an upgrade of the OS is available, and offer to start it. https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=712149 https://fedorahosted.org/rel-eng/ticket/6081
Software Installer - Third-party repo (chrome, etc) under discussion in FESCO https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Workstation/3rdPartyApps#Third-Party_Software_in_Fedora_Workstation https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1229395
Software Installer - xdg-app support Richard Hughes planning
Mac Port of Live USB Creator Martin Briza in progress Port of Fedora Live USB Creator to OS X
Introduce pinos Wim Taymans
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
gnome-builder - xdg-app support Christian Hergert planning
Wayland pointer locking and confinement - protocol Jonas Ådahl in progress, targeting 1.10 needed for many games, see here: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/wayland-devel/2015-May/022315.html
Wayland pointer locking and confinement - compositor implementations Jonas Ådahl in progress needed for many games
Wayland pointer locking and confinement - SDL support Jonas Ådahl in progress needed for many games
Wayland - remoting Jonas Adahl prototyping Offer remote access to Wayland sessions over VNC (and perhaps other protocols)
Wayland support in Firefox Martin Stransky in progress The main prerequisite - GTK3-port - is pretty much finished. If Firefox is not stable enough on Wayland by F24, we will use XWayland and keep Wayland backend experimental for early adopters
Wayland support in LibreOffice Caolan McNamara in progress LibreOffice has been ported to GTK3 (experimental option in F23), that's the main prerequisite for Wayland support. Now, it's stalled on menu placement in GTK.
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 - test Qt/KDE apps under Wayland/XWayland Jan Grulich Wayland should become default in F24, test if Qt/KDE apps can run on Wayland/XWayland in GNOME.
Qt - hi-dpi support Jan Grulich 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
Qt - accessibility Jan Grulich Verify if setting accessibility features such as screen reader works in Qt/KDE applications in Workstation.
Qt - High Contrast theme Martin Briza Accessibility is important for us and should work without a hitch accross toolkits
Qt - enforcing Adwaita theme Martin Briza/Jan Grulich Make sure Qt apps running on GNOME really use Adwaita theme
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.
gnome-shell - bring weather and music notifications back Florian Muellner Integrate Summer of Code project results
Eclipse port to GTK3 Red Hat Tools team done As of Fedora 22 Eclipse default to GTK 3.x with improvements/fixes ongoing

Future ideas

Project Name Developer/Owner Status Justification
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
Boxes - OVF/OVA import/export of vms Kalev Lember in progress https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=723008
Boxes - file transfers from/to vm Zeeshan Ali https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=730259
Wayland - mouse accessibility GNOME a11y team Feature parity with X
Wayland - input device information Jonas Ådahl Feature parity with X
Wayland - IBUS Rui Matos Wayland protocol needs defining, sync with Daiki Ueno from the IBus side 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
Wayland On-screen keyboard Rui Matos Not yet begun, needs to be synced with IBUS support. A protocol needs to be defined Important for especially non-desktop use of Wayland
Wayland - Wacom support Peter Hutterer, Carlos Garnacho in progress, split in "tablet" and "buttonset". both planned for 1.10 This is a crucial tool for animators and graphics artists wanting to use our platform. Working closely with Wacom on this. feature partity with X
kdbus Systemd team proposed, but not merged in 4.1, kernel-playground COPR has it Important in order to have an efficient way to do data transport between containers.
kbus glib support David King in progress Needed to benefit from kdbus in the desktop
Initial setup - skip timezone Matthias Clasen Anaconda will add a way for us to learn if the user configured the timezone during installation (or if it was detected by geoip). In that case, we don't want to ask the user again, but skip that step.
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
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.
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 - Chrome/firefox webapps Tomas Popela Stalled on the proprietary soft inclusion 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.
Software Installer - user feedback Richard Hughes blocked on Fedora account integration deferred until post
Software Installer - Install alternative desktops Allan Day little interest from KDE side 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.
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 - hook up GLib logging to the journal David King
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
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.
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/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.

Scriptless RPMS for desktop

None assigned in progress File triggers are enabled in F24 rawhide. Need to actually use this functionality now. 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 - file triggers in place
  • gconf schemas - not worth doing
  • im modules - file triggers in place
  • gio modules - file triggers in place
  • pixbuf loaders - file triggers in place
  • systemd units - not a cache, just annoying post scripts
  • desktop file mime extraction - file triggers in place
  • mime database updates - file triggers in place
  • app data validation: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1149141
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
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
Deal better with binary NVidia driver Peter Jones Change the behaviour of grubby so that using the NVidia driver with Fedora becomes a smoother experience
UI enablement of VDI mode Make this more discoverable - gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface enable-animations false