LibreOffice Math
by Michael Catanzaro
Hi all,
If we choose to include LibreOffice in Workstation, I'd like to include
LibreOffice Math as well. LibreOffice Math was not included in Fedora
20, which is really confusing if you're trying to add a formula to a
document. To do this, go to Insert -> Object -> Formula in Writer. This
works in other distros, but in Fedora the menu item is insensitive,
without any explanation why.
You can't install it from the software center, probably since we have
the desktop file set to NoDisplay=true since we don't want it showing up
as a separate application in the overview.
I don't know if it's included by default in F21 or not, but it was
missing from F20 which is why I ask.
Michael
9 years, 7 months
Release notes have a launcher - maybe we should remove that
by Elad Alfassa
Hello all.
As you may know, we ship a launcher called "Release Notes" in our
default install.
During the F18 Launcher Purge[1] Allan asked the docs team to remove
it from the default install, but his request was rejected[2].
But now we have guidelines[3], and the guidelines state:
* An "app" is an application as defined by the GNOME 3 HIG[4]
* An app launcher SHOULD Launch software that is an actual app - see
the GNOME 3 HIG for the exact definition
And the release notes, well, are not an app (per the definition in the
GNOME 3 HIG).
Moreover, I don't really think users expect to find release notes
inside the OS itself - no other OS does that.
We can link to the release notes in our download page, our help page
on the website (which will be linked from start.fpo once I finish
implementing the new designs we got), and a bookmark in Firefox
(pointing to a local copy of the release notes) - so the release notes
won't exactly be invisible or inaccessible.
We could also go the extra step (of craziness) and copy the release
note PDF into the liveuser's Document directory (in the kickstart),
where it will be indexed by tracker and thus accessible via documents
and people who search for "release notes" in the shell would be able
to find it (why would they do that? I don't know). It's possible, but
for me it seems extremely crazy and unnecessary.
While I'm aware what I'm suggesting here might be a little bit
controversial, I do think it is something which we should consider.
[1] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Design/F18_Launcher_Purge
[2] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=846316
[3] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/User:Elad/Draft_app_guidelines
[4] https://people.gnome.org/~tobiasmue/hig3/application-basics.html
--
-Elad Alfassa.
9 years, 7 months
UX Issues with default install (Gnome)
by Adam Batkin
Since it was mentioned during the Workstation WG meeting that there may
be some "developer focused UX testing", I figured this was a good time
to point out a few things that I think would make the out-of-the-box
developer (or any other user) experience better. I'm trying really hard
to make Gnome work for me, but I'm constantly tempted to go back to
XFCE. I would much rather stick with defaults (Gnome), since I know it
will always be better supported and offer better integration.
Note that I'm now running the F21 channel (pre-alpha I guess you would
call it) so everything is up-to-date - Gnome 3.13.91).
* Lack of contrast between focuses and non-focused windows
I think this may have actually gotten worse since 3.12
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=735779
* Switching to a virtual desktop loses active window focus
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=735135
* Keyboard shortcuts launch apps in background
I have the same exact problem with a hotkey to launch konsole
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=699685
* Lots and lots of focus issues. I found a bunch of random Gnome
Bugzillas and I don't know which ones exactly describe the problems
that I experience, but let's just say that window focus behavior
is broken. For example, in Firefox, I open the About Firefox dialog
and when I dismiss it (either by hitting Esc or clicking the X) the
main Firefox window no longer has the focus (no window does!)
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=645035
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=678320
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=708254
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=732762
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=690693
Together the above issues make the user experience pretty much unusable.
Random and unpredictable focus changes/problems, coupled with the
inability to easily identify the focused window makes it impossible to
know what will happen when I press a key.
Other things that I think would help, but aren't deal-breakers:
* Gratuitous use of white-space on UI components
As a developer, I want as much "stuff" to fit on my screen as possible
and lots of extra spacing around widgets is wasting real estate
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=659647
* Make it possible to not display the shield
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=696330
And a few more things with no Bugzillas that I know of (these problems
mostly arose when I upgraded, since Frippery stopped working, and rather
than fixing it, I decided to use the built-in Applications Menu and
Window List plugins, since they ship with Fedora):
* The Window List is great, except for two problems and one suggestion:
* Again, active vs inactive window has almost no contrast difference
* It always shows windows from all virtual desktops. Not only is this
undesired behavior, but if a window is set to "Always on Visible
Workspace" then it will show the window "n" times where n is the number
of workspaces
* It would be great if the Window list could show the actual tray
icons (instead of a count) as well as the actual virtual desktops
* I wish the clock could go back into the corner (I use lots of other
computers and on all other computers the clock is in the corner, so my
eye always goes there automatically)
* I wish there was an easy way to get an icon bar along the top bar
(like Frippery Panel Favorites)
* I'd prefer horizontal instead of vertical virtual desktops
Sure, most of those issues could be solved by using Frippery (though the
new Window List and Applications Menu is much prettier) but shipping
useful tools out of the box would be better than having to find and
install an addon every time.
It would also be good if the Return to Monitor extension would be
updated and shipped as part of Fedora
(https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/842/return-to-monitor/) since
many fullscreen apps cause all of the windows to rearrange themselves on
multi-head setups.
I know that's a lot, but I'm pretty sure that everything above
constitute basic UX needs. Certainly XFCE (and for the most part, KDE,
though that has other problems) (and also Windows and Mac) handle these
situations nicely. I really think it would be beneficial to Fedora if
the default desktop experience was able to handle this.
Thanks,
-Adam Batkin
9 years, 7 months
Workstation WG Meeting Minutes for 2014-09-10
by Josh Boyer
=======================================
#fedora-meeting: Workstation WG meeting
=======================================
Meeting started by jwb at 15:00:44 UTC. The full logs are available at
http://meetbot.fedoraproject.org/fedora-meeting/2014-09-10/workstation.20...
.
Meeting summary
---------------
* init (jwb, 15:00:44)
* Alpha status (jwb, 15:05:40)
* gnome .91 update pushed to stable. should be in next compose (jwb,
15:10:39)
* .92 update will contain bugfixes that came out of the GNOME test day
(jwb, 15:13:15)
* QT/KDE (jwb, 15:14:43)
* ACTION: jwb or mclasen to follow up on QT theming (jwb, 15:17:42)
* integrated way of installing KDE is out of scope for F21.
groupinstall likely the best option (jwb, 15:31:19)
* ACTION: juhp_ to try KDE install on Workstation and see how it does.
more testers welcome (jwb, 15:31:35)
* UX testing (jwb, 15:34:30)
* ACTION: ryanlerch_ to work with langdon and mizmo on intial
developer focused UX testing plans (jwb, 15:42:28)
* Task list review (jwb, 15:48:28)
* LINK: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Workstation/Tasklist (jwb,
15:48:33)
* ACTION: jwb to move some unlanded items to F22 list in wiki (jwb,
15:54:00)
* media (jwb, 16:00:25)
* ACTION: cwickert to work out details of dual-arch workstation
ambassador DVD on list (jwb, 16:14:30)
* next Workstation meeting is Sept 24th. (jwb, 16:16:18)
Meeting ended at 16:16:30 UTC.
Action Items
------------
* jwb or mclasen to follow up on QT theming
* juhp_ to try KDE install on Workstation and see how it does. more
testers welcome
* ryanlerch_ to work with langdon and mizmo on intial developer focused
UX testing plans
* jwb to move some unlanded items to F22 list in wiki
* cwickert to work out details of dual-arch workstation ambassador DVD
on list
Action Items, by person
-----------------------
* cwickert
* cwickert to work out details of dual-arch workstation ambassador DVD
on list
* juhp
* juhp_ to try KDE install on Workstation and see how it does. more
testers welcome
* juhp_
* juhp_ to try KDE install on Workstation and see how it does. more
testers welcome
* jwb
* jwb or mclasen to follow up on QT theming
* jwb to move some unlanded items to F22 list in wiki
* langdon
* ryanlerch_ to work with langdon and mizmo on intial developer
focused UX testing plans
* mclasen
* jwb or mclasen to follow up on QT theming
* ryanlerch
* ryanlerch_ to work with langdon and mizmo on intial developer
focused UX testing plans
* ryanlerch_
* ryanlerch_ to work with langdon and mizmo on intial developer
focused UX testing plans
* **UNASSIGNED**
* (none)
People Present (lines said)
---------------------------
* jwb (129)
* cwickert (38)
* mclasen (36)
* juhp_ (25)
* kalev (24)
* ryanlerch_ (23)
* dgilmore (12)
* langdon (11)
* satellit (9)
* zodbot (7)
* drago01 (7)
* sgallagh (6)
* otaylor (5)
* laangdon (5)
* satellit__e (1)
* ltinkl (0)
* ryanlerch (0)
* juhp (0)
* cschalle (0)
Generated by `MeetBot`_ 0.1.4
.. _`MeetBot`: http://wiki.debian.org/MeetBot
9 years, 7 months
Workstation Meeting 2014-09-09
by Josh Boyer
Hi All,
Below is an agenda for tomorrow's regularly scheduled WG meeting. As
always, if you have something you'd like to add, please let me know.
josh
* Alpha status
- TC6 status, pending fixes, etc
* QT/KDE
- We need to figure out the story for this for F21/F22
* UX testing
- Ryan and Máirín have mentioned a few times that they are
interested in doing some UX testing on Workstation
* Task list review
9 years, 7 months
Re: Workstation Meeting 2014-09-10
by Josh Boyer
Sorry, date fail. The meeting is Wednesday 2014-09-10.
josh
On Sep 9, 2014 7:27 PM, "Josh Boyer" <jwboyer(a)fedoraproject.org> wrote:
>
> Hi All,
>
> Below is an agenda for tomorrow's regularly scheduled WG meeting. As
> always, if you have something you'd like to add, please let me know.
>
> josh
>
> * Alpha status
> - TC6 status, pending fixes, etc
>
> * QT/KDE
> - We need to figure out the story for this for F21/F22
>
> * UX testing
> - Ryan and Máirín have mentioned a few times that they are
> interested in doing some UX testing on Workstation
>
> * Task list review
9 years, 7 months
Memory usage i686 vs. x86_64
by Owen Taylor
I took an action item at this weeks Workstation Working Group meeting to look into what the relative memory usage is of i686 vs. x86_64 for the workstation image. Are there cases (such as VMs) where we would want to recommend i686 because it uses less memory.
I did some very basic tests of this - I installed and booted the Fedora-Live-Workstation-{i686,x86_64}-21-Alpha-TC5.iso images in a VM and looked at the 'free -h' numbers after some light usage:
VM Configuration
================
20 GiB hard drive max, 4GiB memory, resolution 1024x768
(I used a 4GB VM to make sure that there would still be free memory throughout the experiment, and nothing would get paged out to swap or discarded.)
Measurements
============
Bootup, login, open terminal
i686
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 3.5G 700M 2.8G 9.5M 19M 297M
-/+ buffers/cache: 383M 3.1G
x86_64
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 3.9G 910M 3.0G 1.6M 18M 305M
-/+ buffers/cache: 586M 3.3G
Open firefox, log into facebook and gmail, maximize window
i686
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 3.5G 960M 2.5G 10M 19M 354M
-/+ buffers/cache: 586M 2.9G
x86_64
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 3.9G 1.3G 2.6G 2.0M 20M 385M
-/+ buffers/cache: 910M 3.0G
Open libreoffice writer, maximize window, type a few characters (leaving firefox open)
i686
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 3.5G 1.1G 2.4G 10M 21M 459M
-/+ buffers/cache: 612M 2.9G
x86_64
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 3.9G 1.4G 2.5G 2.3M 21M 487M
-/+ buffers/cache: 929M 3.0G
Conclusions
===========
The i686 vs. x86_64 difference was larger than I expected. For actively in use pages, there seems to be a consistent ~50% expansion in memory usage from i686 to x86_64. Overall, the situation is better than this because the cache usage doesn't expand as much - there seems to be only a slight expansion in the size of cached pages.
I suspect a user using Fedora day-to-day on a 2GB system is likely to have a better experience with an i686 userspace. If the user gets an extra 500GB of memory by using i686, that's likely going to outweigh any performance benefits of the 64-bit instruction set. If the user is just starting Fedora in a VM to try it out or to test something, it's less likely the difference will matter.
Even for low memory systems, a problem with recommending i686 is that if the user later upgrades the memory on the system, they would have to reinstall.
Caveats
=======
I claim no generality to these numbers - different workloads have different mixes between raw data, pointers, and executable code - and also do not claim that the particular numbers are repeatable between different users or different points of time. (The use of my gmail and Facebook accounts as part of the test especially adds variability, but reflects what users are actually doing on the desktop.)
9 years, 7 months
Re: [RFC] non-KVM graphics/IO drivers in our default install media
by quickbooks office
Can we atleast have the following packages installed by default:
dkms kernel-headers kernel-devel
Then it is one less step of things to do for installing the VirtualBox
guest additions.
On Wed, Sep 3, 2014 at 3:04 PM, Liam <liam.bulkley(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Sep 3, 2014 9:44 AM, "Elad Alfassa" <elad(a)fedoraproject.org> wrote:
>>
>> On Wed, Sep 3, 2014 at 4:34 PM, Matthias Clasen <mclasen(a)redhat.com>
>> wrote:
>> > On Wed, 2014-09-03 at 09:21 -0400, Josh Boyer wrote:
>> >
>> >>
>> >> Briefly, 1) we aren't staffed for it, 2) it encourages crappy behavior
>> >> on the part of the module authors by providing disincentive to getting
>> >> it upstream, 3) it's a maintenance hassle, 4) we typically already
>> >> have alternatives (this is particularly true in the case of virt), 5)
>> >> it's yet another entry in an already rapidly expanding test matrix
>> >> that has to be checked off (which goes back to item 1), etc etc.
>> >>
>> >> I consider myself to be fairly open to many things. Carrying
>> >> virtualbox modules out-of-tree when the authors refuse to even submit
>> >> them upstream for review and have no intention of ever doing so is not
>> >> one of those things. This is one of the few items where I simply say
>> >> no.
>> >
>> > Do I sense a possible conflict of interest here ?
>> >
>> > I think Alberto's argument that including such drivers will make it a
>> > lot easier to try the workstation on popular virtualization solutions
>> > carries some weight and deserves to be discussed, instead of rejected
>> > out-of-hand.
>> >
>> > --
>> > desktop mailing list
>> > desktop(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
>> > https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
>>
>> Well, I have used VirtualBox guest additions before, they break every
>> time VirtualBox is updated (and you need to update and rebuild them)
>>
> For guests we control the versions via installs (not counting the recomposes
> that were talked about to keep new installs up to date). All we'd need to do
> is support ONE version of vb, and provide a dl link to THAT version.
> As for these anecdotes about vb not working, the fact is ANY users we
> acquire via this method are new users we may not have gotten otherwise. The
> question is whether or not the work to support that single version of vb is
> so great as to outweigh the potential of new users.
>
>
> --
> desktop mailing list
> desktop(a)lists.fedoraproject.org
> https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
9 years, 7 months
