Bill Nottingham <notting@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Subject: Re: Fast user switching from Davyd's GNOME 2.14 preview > To: For testers of Fedora Core development releases > <fedora-test-list@xxxxxxxxxx> > Message-ID: <20060220164325.GA17008@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii > > Michel Salim (michel.salim@xxxxxxxxx) said: > > Davyd Madeley has released his latest GNOME preview: > > http://www.gnome.org/~davyd/gnome-2-14/ > > > > and it has some interesting features, such as the new fast-user > > switching interface resembling OS X's. I recall previous incarnations > > of this feature being explicitly removed from Fedora's GNOME; would > > that explain why as of now this feature is absent from the RPMs in > > -devel ? > > Yes - basically, without finding a good, solid solution to device > ownership (groups aren't it), having fast user switching on is > very problematic. > > Bill An argument in favor of including fast user switching in Fedora: I do a fair bit of work with multiseat systems, and I'm composing this on a 3-seat FC4 box (one CPU, 3 video cards/sound cards/keyboards/mice). I think we're going to see a lot more multiseat systems in the future, because X11R7 has made it much easier to set them up and because they make a lot of sense in certain contexts - including libraries, classrooms, kiosks, developing nations, even home offices. There are a lot of design decisions currently being made on the desktop which reflect a single-user paradigm, and which do not work well with any multiuser graphical setup, whether multiseat, LTSP, fast user switching (FUS), or some other scheme (such as browser-based VNC access). One simple example: when an audio CD is inserted into an FC4 multiseat system, gnome-cd starts by default on _all_ of the user's desktops. One of the processes is able to grab the drive and play the tunes, but all of the other gnome-cd processes start consuming 100% CPU. This is an obvious problem and there's probably a simple fix - at least for the CPU usage spike - but the gnome-cd developers may never have considered this use case nor encountered the problem in testing. FUS is by far the simplest and least expensive (effort, hardware) way to test out simultaneous desktop users (true, they're not using the desktop simultaneously, but the desktops are running simultaneously). By including FUS capability in Fedora Core, we could expose more people to the issues affecting multiple desktops and hopefully get some light shining on what are presently viewed as corner cases. In other words, we'll see FUS working well sooner if we turn it on now when it mostly-works rather than waiting for it to get fixed first; all multiuser configurations will benefit from the wider exposure of the community to multiple simultaneous desktops, not just FUS; and we'll reduce the number of single-user design and coding decisions that will later have to be retrofitted for multiuser operation. -- Chris Tyler -- fedora-test-list mailing list fedora-test-list@xxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe: https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/fedora-test-list