
Fedora dev: “HN feedback on what they want from their Desktop – We got it” - broodbucket
https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2017/04/03/hackernews-feedback-on-what-they-want-from-their-desktop-we-got-it/
======
lima
I'm using a 4k screen and a HiDPI thinkpad (T460p) for my workstation and it
works amazingly well even today.

Was a wild ride since Skylake + 4k + docking station became stable only
recently with Linux 4.9, but scaling always worked.

Here's what it takes:

Xft DPI and hinting settings (font rendering):

    
    
        # .Xresources
    
        Xft.dpi:        144
        Xft.hinting:    1
        Xft.hintstyle:  hintslight
        Xft.antialias:  1
        Xcursor.size:   48
        Xcursor.theme:  Adwaita
    

xrandr DPI setting (important for IntelliJ, i3 and the like):

    
    
        xrandr --dpi 144
    

Put it into .xinitrc, Gnome autostart, i3 config or wherever your DE runs
stuff at session startup. I also run it after resuming since it sometimes
resets itself.

Now, the most important part - the Gnome scaling settings. Instead of
increasing the scaling factor, I leave it at 1x and only increase the text
scaling. It's a fractional value and applications still resize appropriately
(bonus: reduces the amount of whitespace):

    
    
        gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface text-scaling-factor 1.5
        gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface scaling-factor 1
    

Worked well with everything I use (Evolution, virt-manager, LibreOffice,
Terminal...).

IntelliJ works fine out of the box with java-1.8.0-openjdk. I recommend the
Iosevka font, but any font will work.

Latest Chromium respects the settings and support scaling by a fractional
value.

When I'm using a low-res screen, I simply render at a high resolution and then
scale it down:

    
    
        xrandr --output eDP-1 --off
        xrandr --output DP-2-1 --left-of eDP-1
        xrandr --output DP-2-1 --right-of DP-2-2
        xrandr --output DP-2-2 --scale 1.5x1.5 --pos 0x0
        xrandr --output DP-2-1 --scale 1.5x1.5 --pos 2880x0
    

While it looks _slightly_ off, you get used to it quickly and I spend most of
my workday looking at a downscaled screen without any discomfort.

The result is pretty much perfect and comparable (if not better) to macOS with
a recent distro. I'm happy to help anyone who is struggling to get this
working!

On a more general note, the recent changes in Fedora are amazing! Out-of-box
experience went from "a lot worse than Ubuntu" to best-in-class.

~~~
BoorishBears
The reduced-resolution thing has been a trick for ages, I just refused to use
the 4k screen I paid a premium for at half res with horrid (seriously, horrid
complete with artifacts and fuzz, I even patched xrandr to disable bi-cubic
filtering trying to make it ok and still couldn't stand it) looking text
aliasing.

I'm impressed you'd call that "pretty much perfect and comparable (if not
better) to macOS with a recent distro"

Pretty much sums up why I don't think I'll ever really be ok with a Linux DE
for daily usage. If that's what your users consider comparable to macOS why
bother aspiring to reach macOS's perfect (seriously, perfect, even when you
mirror across a low res screen and a high res screen it lets you use the high
res screen at a higher size with perfect scaling) handling of any mix of
resolutions.

~~~
lima
I think you misunderstood the scaling part. I'm scaling _down_ from 4k to
1080p for my old monitors.

The 4k screen is at its native resolution. Anything else would be sinful :)

~~~
rhinoceraptor
4k at native (unless you're using a single, >30 inch display) is too small. I
use two 4k, 28 inch monitors and everything is too small at native resolution.

I ran in to a lot of issues doing the xrandr downscaling (my two displays
would overlap), so I've just been using Windows partition since this is my
gaming PC. My linux partition is Arch, I hope Gnome supports easy fractional
scaling soon. Something similar to the display scaling menu on Mac OS would be
really nice.

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
4K native with the scaling factor cranked up to match.

~~~
sevensor
Which is how I run Sway on my laptop --- thank you!

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
No problem :)

------
sandGorgon
This is incredible. I had written a comment on the original thread on why I
had moved to fedora after 14 years of using Ubuntu and this post confirms that
I made the right choice.

For some unkNown reason, Fedora is considered "bleeding edge" and
unstable..While Ubuntu is considered mainstream. The truth is that fedora is
probably the most polished Linux distribution out there right now..Including a
brilliant UI experience.

The only doubt I had was whether fedora is taken seriously inside redhat...And
this post pretty much takes care of that.

~~~
ccozan
I can report my non-stop 21 years usage of redhat based distributions ( well,
along other Unices ).

Never was I left down. Fedora from 24-25 version is so polished, I can't
believe myself when all the hardware works just as expected and the screen is
such a beauty.

Edit: I have to mention that I am also a diehard KDE fan. Plasma 5.8 is just
amazing.

~~~
s_kilk
A few questions:

\- Is KDE a first-class citizen in Fedora-land? Everything I see about Fedora
seems to focus on Gnome as the one-true-desktop

\- How's the battery/power situation? I've seen some reviews find fault with
battery performance under Fedora 25 as being worse than before (supposedly
because of Wayland)

~~~
bwat49
I get slightly better battery life in wayland

------
captainmuon
I'm a bit late to the party, but what I'd like most from Fedora (and by
extension, Gnome / Systemd, ... devs) is something on the meta level.

This isn't meant to sound harsh, but I don't know how to say it. Please don't
do the cascade of attention-deficient teenagers thing. Please take backwards
compatibility seriously. And please give me a stable distribution.

Stable doesn't mean a years old Firefox. CentOS is not stable, it is stale.
Stable _can_ mean always going with the latest and greatest software. But it
means I write a program now, and I can be sure it works 5 years later with no
or minimal changes - and importantly, not looking fallen out-of-time! A frozen
Gnome 3.24 is not stable, it is stale once development moves on. Gnome was
stable in, say, ~2.14 - 2.28 (I'm just making the numbers up) - it was still
receiving new features, widgets, themes. The same applies to Fedora as a
whole.

If you have to ship multiple versions of libraries, then be it so. But even
better would be to influcence the developers to avoid breaking changes. Take
backwards compatibility religiously, like Microsoft. I know it is not easy,
but that is what I'd really love to see (before e.g. three finger guestures).

There is a big overlap between Fedora developers, and
Gnome/Glib/Systemd/Networkmanager/Wayland/... developers, so you are in a
great position to do so.

All in all, I like do Fedora. As others have said, it is really polished, like
Ubuntu used to be. I used to use Debian and Ubuntu, but when things started
moving and breaking under me (and in order to get up to date things I couldn't
just live on a ESR) I moved to Windows. Once the Wayland dust settles, I'm
definitely looking to move back to Linux/Fedora again.

~~~
reacweb
Yes! IMHO a stable distribution is more important than new features. The fact
that 16.04 has broken my network access because of my NAS mount point is one
more proof that people at ubuntu and gnome are still trying to mimic windows
and have not understood the differentiating advantages of unix: stability and
network.

At work, my most used windows applications are firefox, putty, Xming and VNC
viewer to access hundreds of sites (Portuguese, Nederlands, home computer and
all the linux computers of the enterprise with a X11 display forward). Tunnels
are configured in putty so that I can show my current projects without putting
them on internet. My wife traveling with her laptop can wake the home PC (wake
on lan) and mount the disks (sshfs) to access files.

I do not want to spend hours fixing system issues (like I did before on
windows). I just want a stable system where I can add some minor
customizations (like the PES preview [http://torvalds-
family.blogspot.fr/2010/01/embroidery-gaah.h...](http://torvalds-
family.blogspot.fr/2010/01/embroidery-gaah.html)) and add some docker images
with tailored development environments.

------
SwellJoe
I've found Fedora HiDPI support tolerable, but still weaker than Windows. As
the article notes, fractional scale isn't do-able.. I have a 15" 4k
laptop...2x isn't quite right, as I can't quite fit a comfortably sized
browser window alongside a comfortably wide terminal window. My ideal
development environment has a browser and a term splitting the screen not
quite in half (browser slightly bigger).

The tiling features are weaker in Gnome than in Windows, now, as well (which
is kinda sad, since tiling window managers originated on Linux/UNIX/BSD
systems). I can drag to the side for each of my windows, and then drag the
center bar to get just the right balance between browser size and terminal
size. On Linux, I've got some kind of tiling plugin, but it requires me to
specify window size by selecting from a 4x4 grid. So, more cumbersome to get
my screen setup, and with less control; it's the perfect storm of poor UI:
Harder to use while doing less.

I'm still more productive in Linux than in Windows. Windows is a _mess_ for
developing across many languages...I've literally got five different Perl
installations (that I know about), only one was intentionally installed, and
they all fight with each other, and I never can get the path right to make all
of my stuff Just Work. At least three different Pythons (I intentionally
installed a Python 2.7 and a Python 3.x, but a third came along with some
other package). The Python's are waging a turf war, too, and things never seem
to work right. Also, multiple versions of gcc and development environment;
only one actually works (probably due to paths, again). At least I only have
one Ruby interpreter installed on the system (that I know of).

But, at least the graphics drivers are solid, and the quality of the general
Windows user experience has increased dramatically since I last used it for
any work.

Nonentheless, I love Fedora. It's my favorite desktop OS, and has been for
many years. I've tried Ubuntu, but find I don't really agree with a lot of
their choices. They seem to leap before thinking things through, sometimes, in
an effort to be on the cutting edge. And, a lot of their "invented here" stuff
is often inferior to the stuff the rest of the community has been working on.

~~~
lima
Please try the text-scaling-factor trick I detailed above and report back. I'm
curious.

Try i3 as tiling WM. It might look intimidating at first, but it really
improves productivity (and I say that as someone who refused to use one for
far too long).

~~~
SwellJoe
I've used i3 and xmonad in the past when I was having RSI issues, but found
they impeded my productivity on some fronts, so when my RSI faded and I was
able to mouse/touchpad again, I switched back to default Gnome (this was also
around the time Gnome 3 came along, and I quite like Gnome 3 in most regards).
I'm not really intimidated by tiling window managers, I just prefer a hybrid
approach. There's a lot to like about the default Gnome experience.

But, it may be worth another try. My way of interacting with my OS has changed
a lot over the years; I really prefer to just install the distro and start
using it. Very little customization, so that when I move to a different
machine it's not a big bunch of customizations to bring over (that may or may
not work on the next version of the distro, or whatever). But, not being able
to split up my screen in exactly the way I want is definitely hindering my
productivity, so maybe another round with tiling window managers is the way
forward.

------
karlmdavis
As a couple of other folks have mentioned, it’s important to keep in mind that
the premise of that original post was, "what could Ubuntu do better?" In that
context, what you DON’T see there are the things that Ubuntu does well
already, but that folks feel might be lacking in Fedora.

Speaking for myself, I can tell you that a HUGE part of the reason I stick
with Ubuntu are their LTS releases. Those are just super important to me: more
than most anything, I value a desktop that I don’t have to overhaul/reinstall
on a frequent basis. Ubuntu’s five years of support puts it way out ahead of
Fedora’s one.

(As a developer, I of course need to stay more up to date than the LTSes
themselves are, but that’s what /usr/local/ is for. It’s trivial to keep those
things up to date myself, and frankly, even Fedora would be too slow for me
with most of that.)

[Note: I also cross-posted this comment on the blog itself.]

~~~
mattdm
Doing an LTS release is every expensive, and since the bulk of Fedora is done
by community volunteers rather than 9-to-5 packagers, it's not something we
can really fairly ask.

One of the funny things we often get is "Fedora should be LTS. Or rolling-
release!", which is odd because these things are generally at complete odds —
no change, or constant change.

We think we have a better approach: consistent, quality-checked releases which
it's easy to upgrade between. Personal anecdote: I just updated my system to
F26 Alpha — started the process, went to lunch, came back and found it done.
No hit to my productivity.

And, as I just mentioned in another post, we're working on another thing,
[Modularity]([https://docs.pagure.org/modularity/](https://docs.pagure.org/modularity/)),
which will allow us to provide consistent applications and interfaces across
those releases.

~~~
karlmdavis
I totally get that -- and it's a perfectly reasonable stance. Every distro
doesn't have to be all things to all users. Yay for distro choice!

But I'd keep my more general point in mind, too: that thread had the wrong
question and the wrong audience to answer the "what should Fedora do?"
question. You might try to start a similar, separate Fedora-specific thread in
a few months and see what feedback you get. I'd bet it'll be significantly
different.

~~~
mattdm
I actually _did_ several months ago (with a desktop and developer-audience
focus):
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12703836](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12703836)

------
partycoder
The GNOME Tweak tool can help configuring GNOME for HiDPI settings through
scaling factors. Also changing fonts, themes and such.

The default GNOME themes are functional but I never enjoyed them much. Sam
Hewitt made an excellent theme for GNOME, including a full icon and cursor
set. It really does improve the look and feel of GNOME.

[https://snwh.org/paper](https://snwh.org/paper)

~~~
phkahler
Another poster said to install the tweak tool. WHY is the tool used to change
such settings not installed by default?

------
miloshadzic
I'm using Fedora again as my desktop after some years on OS X. Things that I'd
like to see:

* A better email app. Currently none can be said to work very well. I'm actually considering mutt at this point

* A better Gnome Calendar. I think this is coming in the next release.

* A PDF viewer that supports highlighting.

~~~
pliptvo
> A PDF viewer that supports highlighting.

Tried Okular?

> A better email app. Currently none can be said to work very well. I'm
> actually considering mutt at this point

Switching to Mu4e was the best thing I ever did to my emails. If someone
doesn't know/doesn't want to pick up Emacs then I'd recommend Mutt all the
way.

~~~
miloshadzic
> Tried Okular?

Not yet, but I might. I'm trying to stay on the GTK/Gnome side of things.

Re: the email client, I'm no longer an emacs user unfortunately :)

------
s_kilk
Pretty cool to see some acknowledgement from the Fedora crowd, but almost
everything listed here is "maybe in a future release" rather than being
present now.

~~~
arjie
I mean, if they were present now, people wouldn't have been asking for it,
would they?

~~~
lima
If anything, Fedora is closest to having it working. It's not like it already
works on other distros.

------
herbst
Amazing response. In the Ubuntu thread many people argued as if the issue were
Linux. me and I assume others as well are tired from answering that this all
is long fixed in some way or another especially if you can not show them a
friendly easy guide that just works. Glad to know fedora got that all covered.

Will forward to my fancy pants friends with 4k touch screen laptops

------
RandyRanderson
My advice: Instead of supporting a bunch of hardware poorly make _one_ laptop
like the macbook pro with:

* 2 ram slots

* 2 M.2 SSD slots

* a decent kb

* a decent touchpad

* a decent screen

* discrete graphics

* good battery management (you can do this because it's only one)

* thunderbolt 3

* at least 3 usb ports

* no dvd

* ONE TRRS audio port

* ethernet

* HDMI for legacy reasons

forget about

* thinnest

* lightest

* or any other 'best' quality - it just has to be good

* touchscreen - no one uses this after day 2 or wants fingerprints on their screen

You will sell a lot of these.

~~~
xorcist
> discrete graphics

Who needs this? It is the one thing I tell people to stay away from when
they're shopping for hardware.

If you can get by with integrated graphics, do it. It saves energy and a whole
lot of frustration. Stick with upstreamed drivers only if you want to keep
your sanity.

~~~
RandyRanderson
Not all, but a lot of ppl use the GPU for games, 3d modelling , machine
learning or encoding vids. Enough that adding the chip removes a lot of
complaints.

Also, historically Intel 3d drivers haven't been great.

If you work on the drivers (again you can because you only have to support one
config) you can switch bt the two and get pretty good batt usage.

Finally, this is one of the big complaints many mac users have.

------
broodbucket
If anyone's interested in trying Fedora I'd suggest checking out Korora, it
bundles the Fedora base with nice themes and some essential
packages/repositories that Fedora refuses to bundle based on their free
software guidelines (like VLC) and some more sensible defaults (like Firefox
as default browser instead of Epiphany).

[https://kororaproject.org/](https://kororaproject.org/)

~~~
petre
Nice. I see it has Cinnamon, Mate, XFCE, Gnome and KDE flavours just like
*ubuntu.

~~~
johnnydoebk
Fedora has those, too:
[https://spins.fedoraproject.org/](https://spins.fedoraproject.org/)

------
rkv
I've tried running newer CentOS and Fedora GNOME environments but they always
feel so much slower than Xfce or unity. When I open ps it shows gnome-shell
constantly using 10% cpu and 20-30% memory. Opening menus and switching
desktops is such a pain with all the delay. I found this true with Virtual
Machines as well.

~~~
bkor
It doesn't use any CPU when idle for me? It does use a bunch when switching
workspaces. But after that it drops back to 0%. It should NOT use CPU
constantly.

There are memory leaks without any extensions, but usually it's an extension
which causes the memory to increase.

~~~
rkv
I don't use any extensions. On idle, with only a terminal open it jumps from
3% to 26% CPU. I'm under the impression that it has to do with my hardware
since I've tried various CentOS and Fedora versions and the issue persists.

> 31.2 26.1 gnome-sh+

------
z3t4
Forum feedback, like HN feedback, is too extreme, and unless your product is
exclusively marketed at the HN crowd, such feedback will be close to useless.
You might have a big problem, for example, non-hackers can not write e-mails
in Ubuntu, while HN-crowd are worried about battery life. So instead of taking
one hour to fix the e-mail problem for thousands of users, you spend thousands
of man-hours to marginally improve battery life to please a handful of users.

------
Tharkun
My biggest gripe with Fedora is Gnome. Modern Gnome has the worst (out of the
box) window management I've ever encountered. Its default alt-tab behaviour is
_insane_ (you have to use alt-tab + arrow keys to navigate multiple terminal
instances because it automagically groups things in an unusable manner).
Virtual Desktops used to better, now they're more basic and less versatile.
When my touchpad is disabled, Gnome somehow thinks this is a mistake and
enables it against my will, with no option to disable it.

Yes, there are workarounds for all these issues. My favourite workaround is
installing awesomewm and refusing to touch Gnome.

~~~
justryry
Funny, window switching is my favorite feature of Gnome 3.

I use alt-tab to change application, alt-` to change windows of the
application. Quite easy to navigate IMO. It never occurred to me to use the
arrow keys inside of the window switcher.

The one thing I do miss is a good tiling layout. There's a few plugins out
there but not one I found actually works.

------
goombastic
The biggest grouse I have with most linux desktops I have is the font
rendering. I understand that it is to do with the patents on cleartype etc,
but its been so many years with this problem

~~~
miloshadzic
With the latest freetype ([https://www.freetype.org/freetype2/docs/subpixel-
hinting.htm...](https://www.freetype.org/freetype2/docs/subpixel-
hinting.html)), and hinting off, there's not a lot to complain about.

------
Karunamon
Don't get me wrong, warts regarding high DPIs have existed for far too long
and definitely need some love, but I'm a bit sadder the few complaints I see
about design direction were not taken on board.

Running what appears to be a touch UI (definition: very few buttons, those
that exist are large, lots of dead space, information density very low) with a
mouse feels shockingly unproductive, and at least personally, conveys the
impression of working with a mobile app toy rather than a workstation used for
getting work done.

GNOME3's launcher: [http://i1-news.softpedia-
static.com/images/news2/GNOME-3-16-...](http://i1-news.softpedia-
static.com/images/news2/GNOME-3-16-1-Brings-Improvements-to-Evolution-Boxes-
and-Orca-478638-2.jpg)

You can't look at this and not see shades of iOS's Springboard. Very touch
friendly on small mobile device screens, very wasteful on large ones, like the
kind most of us have at our desks.

...and like the kind that most of G3's users will be running it on.

I'm forced to write off G3 as yet another misguided attempt to unify touch and
mouse UIs, in an attempt to appeal to the kind of newbie user that _wouldn 't
even be running G3 in the first place_.

~~~
soperj
I use it regularily. Never even thought about it, because i just hit the super
key and start typing. Finds what I want to launch every time.

~~~
Karunamon
Except for the fact that it monopolizes the whole screen? Windows 8's start
screen was panned for the same reason; there's no reason to send the user's
state to the background for something that objectively does not require it.

An example of doing the same thing, the Right Way, would be Quicksilver or
Spotlight on MacOS.

What's the use case for the launcher (activities menu) on G3? If you've
invoked it, either by throwing your mouse to the corner or by hitting the
super key, you either want to:

1\. Start something

2\. Close something

3\. Switch to something (that being an open app or a virtual desktop).

Zero of these cases require, or even benefit from backgrounding all open
windows. Compare and contrast with the Win7-Era start menu and taskbar, or
Ubuntu Unity's sidebar, or MacOS's Dock.

~~~
soperj
What's the advantage of just using a little bar on the screen to search for
what you want to launch, or close, or switch to? Because when I'm on windows 7
and looking for what I want to switch to on the start bar, i'm definitely not
using the rest of the screen for anything. I'm looking for the right little
icon to click.

Tell me why it's the "Right Way".

~~~
Karunamon
For one, you can look between the start menu and and an open window. More than
once I've need to run some obscure command or some program I didn't even know
was installed, and I can just glance over to my documentation to make sure
I've got it right.

My eyes have muscles that allow me to move them where required. Most people
do. They don't need the entire desktop blanked out for a single UI element
that might take up ~10% of the space.

Again, we're right back to mobile-first use cases- everything is fullscreen.
Except that nobody is using G3 on mobile devices, so why design in that
fashion? What's the user benefit?

~~~
ratboy666
When the "windows" key (for me the "command" key -- I use a Mac BT keyboard),
the visible windows are shrunk (but readable) and the I start to type. I can
still read the window contents (1920x1080 11" display, 10 point touch). The
desktop is not blanked out. On that selection screen, I have fast-start icons,
and the desktop selector. Yes, it is "different" but I find it more usable
than either Windows or Mac.

Of course, that may be due to familiarity. My primary platform _is_ a mobile
device, but I also use Gnome 3 (Fedora) on desktops. We use Mate on RHEL 7 on
our larger display configurations (4x4K monitor in a 2x2 grid and 3x4K in
horizontal configurations). But, on those configurations, we lock down and
don't offer start menus to the end-user at all (kiosk style application).

I do like Gnome 3 for general use, though.

------
brightball
As a happy Fedora 25 user over the last 2 months since parting ways with OSX,
I'm really happy to hear about what's coming.

------
gens
Gnome3 devs never asked for feedback. Gnome3 devs never cared.

But they sure do like to write blog posts about hip stuff.

~~~
thewhitetulip
I never liked Gnome3, I don't know why, it might be because it uses way too
much chrome space at the top, lot of wasted space.

------
bantunes
I'd settle for better font rendering, and a better way to debug which
extension causes Redshift to not work or makes the logout dialog take 20
seconds to show up (with the desktop frozen in the meantime). Extension
debugging needs love.

~~~
miloshadzic
Try to install freetype 2.7. It's a bit of a hassle(you need to get the source
rpm from fedora 26 and build it), but will improve text rendering a lot.

------
chris_wot
Nice if Bastien could fix this bug:

[https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=650371](https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=650371)

------
Alupis
Cached version:

[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Hy9yBE...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Hy9yBE39x8QJ:https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2017/04/03/hackernews-
feedback-on-what-they-want-from-their-desktop-we-got-
it/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us)

~~~
sp332
That doesn't load for me. The text-only version does though.
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Hy9yBE3...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:Hy9yBE39x8QJ:https://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2017/04/03/hackernews-
feedback-on-what-they-want-from-their-desktop-we-got-
it/&num=1&hl=en&gl=us&strip=1&vwsrc=0)

------
ohm
Last time I tried Fedora after using Ubuntu, the minimize/maximize button was
missing on windows.

Turns out gnome team decided to remove it and Fedora does not restore the
setting while Ubuntu does.

This might seem childish but the fact that I had to make a change to the
interface as a first step just after installation completely turned me off
from the distribution.

~~~
bflesch
I've repeatedly stumbled over these kinds of decisions by the gnome team. As a
teenager I actually donated to the gnome foundation and I was very proud to
receive some stickers via mail, but over the past years I realized that
somehow their incentives are not aligned with mine.

Who in their right mind would remove those buttons? It can only be people who
don't actually work with the system but think about further "improvements" all
day. Very frustrating.

------
JdeBP
> _a lot of the items people asked for in that thread we already have in
> Fedora Workstation_

Not really. In fact overwhelmingly not. It is a _huge_ discussion (not a
single thread, by the way) where a lot of people ask for a _lot_ of things,
many of which M. Schaller does not mention at all. M. Schaller got just 9
things out of a Hacker News discussion that now spans 4 pages. Here are _just
a few_ of the things from the discussion that M. Schaller omitted entirely,
giving some indication of the range of stuff that people asked about.

* [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14008011](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14008011)

* [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14024061](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14024061)

* [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14011179](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14011179)

* [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14010769](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14010769)

* [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14012610](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14012610)

* [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14008924](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14008924)

* [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14007458](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14007458)

* [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14007065](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14007065)

* [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14009784](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14009784)

* [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14009371](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14009371)

* [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14007369](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14007369)

* [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14009092](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14009092)

------
padraic7a
Re HiDPI;

A recent episode of the podcast Late Night Linux has a discussion of one of
the hosts' experiences with his 4k monitor and a number of Linux distros.

I think it starts at about 30 minutes in: [https://latenightlinux.com/late-
night-linux-episode-06/](https://latenightlinux.com/late-night-linux-
episode-06/)

AFAIR the best experience was with Unity 7 on Ubuntu. There is some discussion
on why support on different desktops / distros is the way it is, and how
automatic configuration might be improved, which might be of interest to HN
readers.

The chap doing the testing is the main dev / founder behind Budgie / Solus.

------
NikolaeVarius
Most of these changes, barring kernel level ones are only specific to Gnome
right?

~~~
lima
Much of the work on HiDPI goes into the low-level toolkits (GTK/Qt) that all
desktop environments benefit from.

------
phkahler
I want Firefox and LibreOffice to run natively on Wayland. Having them use
X-wayland is a regression IMO. Firefox has been crashing my whole session.

~~~
johnp_
Martin Stránský (Red Hat) is working on native Wayland support for Firefox and
the build time option should land soon (already r+'d), allowing his other
patches to be integrated.

[https://github.com/stransky/gecko-dev](https://github.com/stransky/gecko-dev)
[https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=635134](https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=635134)

IIRC LibreOffice should already be running natively on Wayland. (also a Red
Hat effort in mid-2015)

[https://caolanm.blogspot.com/2015/07/libreoffice-on-
wayland....](https://caolanm.blogspot.com/2015/07/libreoffice-on-wayland.html)

------
digi_owl
I can't help wonder what the response would have been had the roles been
reversed. That it was Canonical that posted such a response to a Fedora
feedback request.

BTW, that he is using a Gnome provided blog to talk about Fedora should be a
reminder of the mixing of roles that is happening around Gnome, Fedora, and
Freedesktop...

------
symlinkk
really excited to hear that you guys are working on fractional scaling. can't
wait to see it happen so I can install Fedora on my laptop again. keep up the
good work.

------
mlinksva
Sadly no mention of preinstalled hardware, one of the top requests in
Canonical thread mentioned.

------
noja
Printing in Fedora sucks. Big time. And I use it as my desktop machine.

If I ever want to print anything apart from a website, I go straight to a Mac.
The preview is realistic, it does a rotate when I tell it to, it fits the page
when I want it to. Printing in Fedora has a life of its own: it takes minutes
of troubleshooting and reprinting before I get near what I need.

------
yearofbat0
I can't believe that it's 2017 and bad battery life is still a thing.

------
merb
i still miss an official dock. :/ the extensions are quite nasty.. they don't
feel right and don't integrate very well.

------
najati83
If you are reading this: I installed Fedora recently because I wanted to try
it and I found the partitioning process to be absurdly complicated, compared
to that of Debian or Ubuntu (ubiquity). I have several partitions of several
operating systems in this disk and I was hesitant to continue because it
wasn't very clear what the partitioner was about to do with my disk.
Unfortunately that was months ago so I can't really describe what the problems
were.

~~~
mattdm
There's basically two ways to do advanced partitioning. (Of course, there's a
"just do it" automated option too.)

1\. I understand about disks, volumes, partitions, filesystems, and I want to
build it all up. 2\. I have goals (like redundancy) and would like to tell the
installer to give me that from whatever resources are available.

The former works very well for sysadmins and Linux enthusiasts (the people
likely to be quad-booting or whatever), but our research showed it was really
painful for basically everyone else -- so we have a UI focused on the latter.

That said, we definitely want Fedora to be appealing to the former class as
well. There is an Anaconda feature in the works to add a more-traditional
partition manager option as well.
[https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/AnacondaBlivetGUI](https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/AnacondaBlivetGUI)
(It's currently targetted for F26, but I'm not sure if it's going to make that
with the current schedule.)

~~~
gmluke
I see what you're saying, but I suspect the top-down approach is not the cause
of the usability issues with Anaconda. The problems are simply that it isn't
always clear which buttons do what, which partitions are about to get zapped,
and what the next action should be at any given point. It's not unusable, but
it could be easier.

The Blivet GUI looks like it could fix many of these issues.

