Reinventing the Fedora desktop

Now that Fedora 10 is nearing completion, it is time to start looking forward to the shape of Fedora 11. Matthias Clasen started a discussion with a post to the Fedora-desktop list, including a pointer to the whiteboard where people can fill in their ideas. The page contains some ideas guaranteed to warm an editor's heart and a few which inspire rather less enthusiasm.

So what are the Fedora desktop people pondering? Some of the ideas include:

• Removing icons from the desktop menus. The reasoning behind this change would appear to be "Windows and OS X do it that way."

• Fixing up power management. Among other things, those posting to the wiki note "When the user changes the brightness, he doesn't appreciate if the computer turns it right back down again"; better late than never. Better power management also involves turning off blinking cursors, which would also be a welcome change.

• "Better fonts" is on the list; that seems to translate to better and easier ways for users to install new fonts. There is some wondering about whether the current packaging system is really the best way to deal with fonts.

• The volume control has been singled out for special attention. One of its claimed problems is the vast number of sliders which can appear for a complex audio device; it is true that it can become overwhelming. But playing "find the hidden slider" when some audio source is inaudible is not a better state of affairs. There is also a worrisome note to the effect that Windows has a better volume control because it is not removable. So, in the future, we may have a volume control whether we want it or not.

• Replacing the panel altogether, along the lines of the ideas bashed out at the recent GNOME hackfest, is under consideration. This would, of course, be a major change to the desktop which would not be welcomed by all users.

• Somebody has noticed that the flurry of "notification" windows can get a little irritating. So different approaches to notifications are being considered.

• A new approach to system settings is also under consideration. The idea would be to get away from the "preferences" and "administration" menus in favor of a single window with a search feature.

• There is talk of better location awareness, but it appears to be limited to mundane tasks like setting the time zone automatically. It seems like it should be possible to set more ambitious goals in this area.

• The Fedora developers note that Ubuntu beat them to shipping a working "guest user" implementation. Surely they will now contribute to improving that implementation, rather than making their own...right?

• Evidently users should not be asked to distinguish between hibernating the system (which saves memory to disk and powers off) and suspending (which keeps main memory powered up). To avoid this problem, Fedora might implement a "hybrid suspend" which saves to disk but still keeps RAM energized for a fast restart. There are a number of practical problems to solve in this area, not the least of which being that waiting for a full hibernate when you want to suspend the system quickly can be obnoxious.

• Fast boot is, naturally, on the list.

There is a lot more on the list - far more than the Fedora developers can hope to implement (or even integrate) in the near future. But the process is a good one, and some of these ideas will certainly show up in future Fedora releases. With any luck at all, the Linux desktop will continue to improve for a long time.

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