I'm really glad you sent this out, Matt, because it hooks into a couple things I was going to bring up in our other conversation. (Apologies for not replying to you yet)
On Fri, Oct 21, 2016 at 1:11 PM, Matthew Miller <mattdm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The startup-scene dev message board Hacker News has an "Ask HN"
section, and I used it to ask what developers want from a desktop in
2017. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12703836 > Here's a summary
of what they said:
* Make upgrades painless.
This is often presented as "make it LTS or rolling", but in digging
further, it's almost always "I don't want to have to devote a day of
downtime to upgrading twice a year".
I don't think LTS would really fit into Fedora's over all view of being the first with new features, however a Rolling release is something that I think we should keep an eye on at all times. Even if we don't explicit target it / offer it, its a worthwhile goal to have in the back of our minds just because it ensures consistency of updates and stability. Cheers to AdamW for his OpenQA work! Rawhide's been pretty stable on my laptop, even with RPMFusion enabled.
* Other improvements to updates (not necessarily upgrades): make them
happen in the background, and provide a way to roll back if something
isn't good. Also this for user tweaks rather than just updates.
A la OpenSuse with Snapper, which hooks into a previous topic: Grubby needs work if we want to offer rollbacks.
* Give the ability to have package X move at a pace I choose. Separate
dev stack from base OS.
Means separate installations of software stacks, and a firmer split between "This is the pristine state offered by the distro, and this is everything the user did ontop of it."
* Hardware compatibility just works. (Wifi, sound, HDMI, graphics,
suspend, etc.)
Kernel / driver work, getting better every release.
* Mixed DPI multi-monitor support.
Thankfully this got sorted out lately, at least under Gnome.
* Look nice, better fonts, general usability, etc.
I know we don't have the goal of being "The Windows replacement", but its worth remembering that being a developer and being an end user are not mutually exclusive. Every change we make that benefits end users also benefits developers as well, though not in the same way. Better font rendering (F24) don't make it easier to cross-compile applications, but they do improve over all quality of life of developers.
Would it worth it to start polling the community / companies that we know use RHEL / Fedora, ask them what are some changes that they always make before deploying it to end users (extensions, tweaks, default apps, etc) and see what keeps coming up? For example, if every single company or group that we poll all say "Oh we always install the Dash To Dock extension", then lets look into shipping Dash To Dock (or getting it integrated upstream, if we want to stick to upstream) by default, obviously its wanted functionality, and it would reduce setup time for new installs, plus it would make Gnome seem a little less alien to new Gnome users, since they could mentally reference OS X, or Xubuntu, or Unity for how things work.
* Cross-distro packaging
Snaps / Flatpaks / AppImage
* Containerized GUI apps
Containerized or just sandboxed? Containerized means docker or LXC, Sandboxed could be the above.
--
Matthew Miller
<mattdm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Fedora Project Leader
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