I have not been so active for a while with writing these Fedora Workstation updates and part of the reason was that I felt I was beginning to repeat myself a lot, which I partly felt was a side effect of writing them so often, but with some time now since my last update I felt that time was ripe again. So what are some of the things we have been working on and what are our main targets going forward? This is not a exhaustive list, but hopefully items you find interesting. Apologize for weird sentences and potential spelling mistakes, but it ended up a a long post and when you read your own wor ..read more

Let me start by saying that I now also have a Mastodon account, so please follow me on @Cfkschaller@fosstodon.org for news and updates around Fedora Workstation, PipeWire, Wayland, LVFS and Linux in general. Fedora vs Fedora Workstation Before I start with the general development update I want to mention something I mentioned quite a few times before and that is the confusion I often find people have about what is Fedora and what is Fedora Workstation. Fedora Workstation Fedora is our overall open source project and community working on packaging components and software for the various outputs ..read more

Adding Applications to the GNOME Software Center Written by Richard Hughes and Christian F.K. Schaller This blog post is based on a white paper style writeup Richard and I did a few years ago, since I noticed this week there wasn’t any other comprehensive writeup online on the topic of how to add the required metadata to get an application to appear in GNOME Software (or any other major open source appstore) online I decided to turn the writeup into a blog post, hopefully useful to the wider community. I tried to clean it up a bit as I converted it from the old white paper, so hopefully all in ..read more

Since Kopper got merged today upstream I wanted to write a little about it as I think the value it brings can be unclear for the uninitiated. Adam Jackson in our graphics team has been working for the last Months together with other community members like Mike Blumenkrantz implementing Kopper. For those unaware Zink is an OpenGL implementation running on top of Vulkan and Kopper is the layer that allows you to translate OpenGL and GLX window handling to Vulkan WSI handling. This means that you can get full OpenGL support even if your GPU only has a Vulkan driver available and it also means you ..read more

Wim Taymans laying out the vision for the future of Linux multimedia PipeWire has already made great strides forward in terms of improving the audio handling situation on Linux, but one of the original goals was to also bring along the video side of the house. In fact in the first few releases of Fedora Workstation where we shipped PipeWire we solely enabled it as a tool to handle screen sharing for Wayland and Flatpaks. So with PipeWire having stabilized a lot for audio now we feel the time has come to go back to the video side of PipeWire and work to improve the state-of-art for video cap ..read more

So I have spoken about what is our vision for Fedora Workstation quite a few times before, but I feel it is often useful to get back to it as we progress with our overall effort.So if you read some of my blog posts about Fedora Workstation over the last 5 years, be aware that there is probably little new in here for you. If you haven’t read them however this is hopefully a useful primer on what we are trying to achieve with Fedora Workstation. The first few years after we launched Fedora Workstation in 2014 we focused on lot on establishing a good culture around what we where doing with Fedor ..read more

Been some time since my last update, so I felt it was time to flex my blog writing muscles again and provide some updates of some of the things we are working on in Fedora in preparation for Fedora Workstation 35. This is not meant to be a comprehensive whats new article about Fedora Workstation 35, more of a listing of some of the things we are doing as part of the Red Hat desktop team. NVidia support for Wayland One thing we spent a lot of effort on for a long time now is getting full support for the NVidia binary driver under Wayland. It has been a recurring topic in our bi-weekly calls wit ..read more

As we are heading towards April and the release of Fedora Workstation 34 I wanted to post an update on what we are working on for this release and what we are looking at going forward. 2020 was a year where we focused a lot on polishing what we had and getting things past the finish line and Fedora Workstation 34 is going to be the culmination of that effort in many ways. Wayland: The big ticket item we have wanted to close off on was Wayland, because while Wayland has been production ready for most of us for a while, there was still some cases it didn’t cover as well as X.org. The biggest of ..read more

Wim Taymans talking about current state of PipeWire Wim Taymans did an internal demonstration yesterday for the desktop team at Red Hat of the current state of PipeWire. For those still unaware PipeWire is our effort to bring together audio, video and pro-audio under Linux, creating a smooth and modern experience. Before PipeWire there was PulseAudio for consumer audio, Jack for Pro-audio and just unending pain and frustration for video. PipeWire is being done with the aim of being ABI compatible with ALSA, PulseAudio and JACK, meaning that PulseAudio and Jack apps should just keep working ..read more

This weekend the X1 Carbon with Fedora Workstation went live in North America on Lenovos webstore. This is a big milestone for us and for Lenovo as its the first time Fedora ships pre-installed on a laptop from a major vendor and its the first time the worlds largest laptop maker ships premium laptops with Linux directly to consumers. Currently only the X1 Carbon is available, but more models is on the way and more geographies will get added too soon. As a sidenote, the X1 Carbon and more has actually been available from Lenovo for a couple of Months now, it is just the web sales that went onl ..read more