Fedora is a big project, and it’s hard to keep up with everything. This series highlights interesting happenings in five different areas every week. It isn’t comprehensive news coverage — just quick summaries with links to each.
Refreshing our Objectives
When we created the Fedora Council to succeed the previous Fedora Board, one of our goals was for the new body to take an active role in leadership and in finding project direction. One concrete way we do this is through Fedora Objectives. We choose two to four of these on a roughly 12-18 month timeframe, with full Council consensus and broader community discussion. We also appoint Objective Leads as auxiliary Council members, with binding votes on concerns relevant to their particular area.
Currently, the two active Objectives are the University Involvement Initiative, and Fedora Modularization, Requirements Phase — and both are basically at the end of their timeframe. At our Council meeting on Monday, March 14th, we’ll discuss how these went and what could have been better. We’ll also start exploring what to do next — we may re-select the university involvement plan for the 2016-2017 academic year, and we have a proposal for a next phase of Fedora Modularization.
What else would you like to see us focus on across the project in the next year and a half? Who do you think would be a good leader for that effort?
Wayland and Fedora 24
Wayland is the next-generation graphics stack for Linux, designed to be the successor to X11. Fedora is one of the leaders in development and adoption of this technology — but the goal is to bring it to you with minimal disruption. The plan is to have one whole release where we feel like it’s fully working as an option before we make it the default. The Fedora Workstation Working Group has decided to target Fedora 24 as the “fully working!” release, with the goal of making it the default this November for Fedora 25. Fedora (and Wayland) developer Matthias Clasen has a blog post about this, and about why it’s important —
When Fedora Workstation 24 comes out, the GNOME Wayland session will be an alternate option on the login screen. We’d really love it if you would choose it, and tell us any problems you experience (or, ideally, that it works wonderfully).
Get your Flock talk in!
Flock is Fedora’s big contributor-focused conference, alternating between North America and Europe. This year, it will be in Krakow, Poland, from August 2–5. (See more — and register! — at the Flock to Fedora web site.) Josh Boyer, part of the Flock organization team, reminds us that talk submissions are due April 8th. Note that we have some, limited funding to sponsor travel, and priority for that goes to speakers and workshop leaders. We’re particularly looking for sessions which related to existing or proposed Objectives (see above!).
Resuming the regular series “Heroes of Fedora”, Fedora contributor Adam Williamson writes about the Heroes of Fedora 23 Beta. In this post, Adam looks at the participants who helped with quality assurance testing during the beta period of Fedora 23. He ranks testers based on their comments on testing updates, number of specific validation tests run, and number of bug reports submitted. These metrics are calculated using specific tools in Fedora’s infrastructure, such as fedmsg, openQA, and Bugzilla. Thank you to all of these QA Heroes, and to everyone else who helped make Fedora 23 such a great release!
Do conferences bring new contributors to Fedora?
A few weeks ago, I mentioned
Jul BEN
It would be interesting to know what will change with the switch to Wayland, on the graphics stack side, in details (to know about 3D rendering, if others desktop environments than Gnome will be using Wayland as the ‘X server’ – so used to using this name !).
Etna
Wayland is not an ‘X server’. It’s a protocol for DEs to use.
Ben
Call it Wayland or Weston if you prefer but its first purpose is basically to ‘replace the Xorg server’ (the first layer of the GUI stack) but this is definitely not what you said, a ‘protocol for Desktop Environments’, .
Ben
Nope. Its first purpose was to replace the X server. Call it Wayland or Weston, this is definetely not ‘a protocol for Desktop Environments’.
FYI : https://wayland.freedesktop.org/
Etna
Read the second paragraph of your own link…
Ben
First sentences on first and second paragraphes :
‘Wayland is intended as a simpler replacement for X, easier to develop and maintain. GNOME and KDE are expected to be ported to it.
Wayland is a protocol for a compositor to talk to its clients as well as a C library implementation of that protocol.’
You’re happy, I’m happy, we’re both right, great -_-
So ‘this is definetely not ‘a protocol for Desktop Environments’ ; my point was (and still is) this is not JUST what you said, sorry,
Peter
Wayland will be an option when you log in with Gnome desktop. Will it be an option for KDE users too?
Etna
Right now in Fedora 23, KDE is still not an option when trying to use Wayland, although that is more upstream’s responsibility to get KWin and all the other bits working.
For Gnome, i find it not forgivable that F23 does not provide WRandR for setting and defining custom resolutions. Isn’t WRandR supposed to be a vital part of the Wayland stack much like XRandR is for X?
puresaredager
Heroes of F23 Beta
24 maybe?)))
Matthew Miller
Not yet — F24 beta isn’t out yet. This is a report based on last year’s work.
Chris
Forgive me if this is a bad idea/already being worked on, but perhaps a good goal might be to make Fedora easier for newcomers in some ways. For me it was the little things in Fedora that got to me. The font rendering. The inability to play mp3/mp4 files. It should be easier for people to get access to those abilities. It wasn’t until I discovered Fedy/RPMfusion that I got good font rendering, mp3 support, and some essential programs for me (kdenlive, steam, vlc). I’ve heard this discussed before. If Fedora isn’t willing to provide some software, it should at least tell its users what to do in case they require it. This would be very handy for those who need proprietary drivers/software. Perhaps collaborating with Fedy/RPMfusion might be the key. I don’t know. But some essential things are not available in standard Fedora. This does not help attract newcomers. Font rendering is a big one. I found that using the Atom Editor without Fedy’s font tweaks to be awful because the fonts looked bad. When it comes to stuff like this, something should be done. Perhaps make it easier to add repos. Have a section in Gnome software/another program dedicated to other repos, including popular ones like RPMfusion and Copr repos. The community could upvote/downvote and comment on repos, and users could easily add them. I’m not sure, honestly. But fixing these things would make Fedora a very attractive distribution to newcomers.