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Schaller: Cool happenings in Fedora Workstation land

Here's a post from Christian Schaller describing a number of the desktop-oriented improvements that can be expected in the Fedora 35 release.

And I know some people will wonder why we spent so much time working with NVidia around their binary driver, but the reality is that NVidia is the market leader, especially in the professional Linux workstation space, and there are lot of people who either would end up not using Linux or using Linux with X without it, including a lot of Red Hat customers and Fedora users. And that is what I and my team are here for at the end of the day, to make sure Red Hat customers are able to get their job done using their Linux systems.


Comment posting has been disabled for this article.

Schaller: Cool happenings in Fedora Workstation land

Posted Sep 17, 2021 16:34 UTC (Fri) by pbonzini (subscriber, #60935) [Link] (47 responses)

I noted in the Pipewire screenshot that there is a checkbox "Add to blocklist".

I understand why the change was made and I'm not going to debate that. What I'd like to ask is: is the invention of new words really the best way to approach this? "Add to blocklist" is totally impenetrable to me; it's not due to the word, but because I do not understand what is being blocked. Maybe "Never apply effects to this application"? Maybe the simple on/off slider would have been preferrable without even needing any text?

Not being a native speaker, and coming from a country that is ethnically much more homogeneous than the US, my perception of language issues may be skewed. But I can't help wondering if a hurried s/black/block/;s/white/allow/ is really the way to approach it. A blacklisted command in a unit test could be better described as a skipped command; a blacklisted user is one that is denied access; a blacklisted module in Linux is ignored for autoloading; and so on.

Using more inclusive language is a bugfix, and sometimes bugfixes are better if a little bit of refactoring is applied in advance...

Schaller: Cool happenings in Fedora Workstation land

Posted Sep 17, 2021 16:42 UTC (Fri) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link] (13 responses)

The whole idea is retarded. The word blacklist never had anything to do with race, and just because some people are dumb enough to be offended by it doesn't mean those people get to demand from other people to change the way they speak. This is the same kind of reasoning that went on in socialist East Germany when they decided they would no longer use the word Führerschein (driving license), because it contains the word Führer.

Schaller: Cool happenings in Fedora Workstation land

Posted Sep 17, 2021 16:44 UTC (Fri) by pbonzini (subscriber, #60935) [Link] (2 responses)

Which part of "I understand why the change was made and I'm not going to debate that" was not clear? Should I already be regretting posting this comment? (yes, probably I should)

Schaller: Cool happenings in Fedora Workstation land

Posted Sep 17, 2021 16:47 UTC (Fri) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]

> Which part of "I understand why the change was made and I'm not going to debate that" was not clear?
Well, then don't. Doesn't mean that I can't.

Schaller: Cool happenings in Fedora Workstation land

Posted Sep 17, 2021 18:27 UTC (Fri) by bluss (guest, #47454) [Link]

With all due respect, I think your original comment should have steered more clear of the subject if you didn't want to discuss it.

Schaller: Cool happenings in Fedora Workstation land

Posted Sep 17, 2021 16:58 UTC (Fri) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (5 responses)

On the contrary, changes like these have been extremely useful in getting people like you to stick your head above the trench.

That's enough

Posted Sep 17, 2021 16:59 UTC (Fri) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (2 responses)

Both of you: stop here. Seriously.

That's enough

Posted Sep 17, 2021 18:59 UTC (Fri) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link] (1 responses)

"Both of you" is really not a good look here, Jon. There is a right and a wrong here, and a major hint for which one is which involves which comment used a slur in its very first sentence. And while it's absolutely reasonable to say "keep it out of LWN comments", acting like both "sides" are somehow equally wrong here is not reasonable.

How many times does someone have to use slurs in LWN comments to get banned? And why is the answer not "one"?

I started to send this as an email, and you're welcome to continue this by email if you'd prefer not to continue it in the comments section of what *ought* to be an entirely unrelated news item. But this much seemed important to say publicly.

That's enough

Posted Sep 18, 2021 13:41 UTC (Sat) by fwyzard (subscriber, #90840) [Link]

Clear enough, and yet not clear at all.

As a non native English speaker myself, and not yet well acquainted with LWN forum's policy, I feel like I need some clarification.

Which comments includes "slur" ?

Which side of the debate is not acceptable in the LWN comments ?

Thank you for clarifying the issue.

Schaller: Cool happenings in Fedora Workstation land

Posted Sep 17, 2021 17:23 UTC (Fri) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link] (1 responses)

Stick your head above the trench? Wow, I wasn't expecting such a straight-forward admission that what you want to do to people who disagree with you is to shoot them in the head.

Schaller: Cool happenings in Fedora Workstation land

Posted Sep 17, 2021 20:57 UTC (Fri) by sjj (guest, #2020) [Link]

Come on. Sheesh.

Schaller: Cool happenings in Fedora Workstation land

Posted Sep 17, 2021 18:19 UTC (Fri) by amacater (subscriber, #790) [Link] (1 responses)

HelloWorld: "Retarded" is probably an inappropriate word to use here: you've no idea how many of your readers may have been erroneously and incorrectly described as "retarded" as an insult in the past. Please consider using a more appropriate descriptive adjective in the future.

/me can think of at least three developers with cerebral palsy, for example, and there may well be others.

Schaller: Cool happenings in Fedora Workstation land

Posted Sep 17, 2021 20:02 UTC (Fri) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link]

Fair enough, I should have used a different word. “Bonkers”, perhaps, or maybe “daft”.

Schaller: Cool happenings in Fedora Workstation land

Posted Sep 17, 2021 20:47 UTC (Fri) by sjj (guest, #2020) [Link]

Leading with a slur (“retarded” if unclear) is not the best way to start discussing the move from black to block.

Language is a social construct that is always changing due to social and cultural changes. Context matters. You might as well rail against the tide. Name calling people as dumb because they find something problematic that doesn’t affect you is pretty, well, dumb itself.

Black/whitelist is itself an idiom that is not at all clear to all. Block/deny/allow etc are self explanatory.

Schaller: Cool happenings in Fedora Workstation land

Posted Sep 18, 2021 6:44 UTC (Sat) by oldtomas (guest, #72579) [Link]

"...retarded"

HelloWorld charming as ever.

Schaller: Cool happenings in Fedora Workstation land

Posted Sep 17, 2021 18:03 UTC (Fri) by ocrete (subscriber, #107180) [Link] (1 responses)

Just a note, the screenshot is not of PipeWire, as PipeWire itself doesn't have a UI. It's of a 3rd party application called EasyEffects, which is really cool.

Schaller: Cool happenings in Fedora Workstation land

Posted Sep 17, 2021 21:02 UTC (Fri) by sjj (guest, #2020) [Link]

Let’s not let facts stop our non-native language policing!

Schaller: Cool happenings in Fedora Workstation land

Posted Sep 17, 2021 20:54 UTC (Fri) by sjj (guest, #2020) [Link] (29 responses)

Am I wrong to understand that in the screenshot, blocklisting would block the application from outputting sound by default? Why do you think “block” is worse than “blacklist”?

Nice bike shedding derailment.

Schaller: Cool happenings in Fedora Workstation land

Posted Sep 17, 2021 22:17 UTC (Fri) by proski (guest, #104) [Link] (25 responses)

Another non-native English speaker here. Blocklist sounds like a list of blocks to me. Probably blocks of data, something akin to blockchain. Technical terms should not have double meanings. If they do, it's better to find another term.

Schaller: Cool happenings in Fedora Workstation land

Posted Sep 17, 2021 22:25 UTC (Fri) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (1 responses)

Denylist is great.

Schaller: Cool happenings in Fedora Workstation land

Posted Sep 17, 2021 23:30 UTC (Fri) by jafd (subscriber, #129642) [Link]

Both "denylist" and "allowlist" reminisce strongly of what a native Newspeak speaker would come up with. Which is very symbolic in and of itself.

Schaller: Cool happenings in Fedora Workstation land

Posted Sep 17, 2021 23:46 UTC (Fri) by sjj (guest, #2020) [Link] (22 responses)

Words like switch, shell, boot, hang, master, firewall etc?

Schaller: Cool happenings in Fedora Workstation land

Posted Sep 18, 2021 0:43 UTC (Sat) by proski (guest, #104) [Link]

Indeed, each of those words has multiple meanings. However, it's a job of developers and UI designers to put those words in a context where their meaning is clear. That wasn't done to "Blocklist", as others have noticed.

Schaller: Cool happenings in Fedora Workstation land

Posted Sep 18, 2021 3:48 UTC (Sat) by pbonzini (subscriber, #60935) [Link] (20 responses)

As a non-native speaker, my brain doesn't even register those words' other meaning when I read them in IT context. I learnt that "a shell" is the exoskeleton of an animal long after I learnt that it's where you type commands; for the same reason, when writing English the verb "to shell" probably wouldn't come to me as a natural choice. The first time I thought of a firewall as a literal wall was when drawing the concept to an 8 year old.

In fact all those terms are usually left untranslated in my language, except for hang (for which we have a completely different metaphor, literally "to plant itself", which refers to making roots). Languages that do not translate technical words actually cause issues when translators are faced with blocklist/denylist/allowlist. An Italian speaker will probably be more familiar with the words "blacklist" and "whitelist" (which most speakers of English as a second language wouldn't even associate it to colors in their mind) than with "allowlist" or "denylist", and therefore the translator would have to adjust the text. The lazy way in this case would be to go back to "whitelist" or "blacklist". The good way would be to use (list of) "accepted/enabled/disabled/skipped/ignored/denied/forbidden X". The even better way would be if the English text avoided blocklist/denylist/allowlist to begin with.

Schaller: Cool happenings in Fedora Workstation land

Posted Sep 18, 2021 7:03 UTC (Sat) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link] (19 responses)

English is not French. It does not have a central authority to decide which words are "right" or "wrong." The cold, hard reality is that English is ultimately whatever the ~400 million native speakers all mutually understand on any given day. This is surely inconvenient to speakers of other languages which want to borrow words from the English language, without having English suddenly change out from under them, but nobody is empowered to do anything about it. A certain amount of linguistic drift is completely inevitable, and it will naturally tend to be strongly biased towards the preferences and needs of the native-speaking community. That's what happens when you loan a word from another language - the source language may not want it back.

Of the native-speaking community, the largest single dialect is certainly American English, and the United States has a long and sordid history of racism. The country implemented some very basic reforms in the 60's, but frankly, the White population has for decades been extremely reluctant to seriously engage with the problem on a deeper level than "Jim Crow laws were wrong" - which is true, but woefully incomplete. The "white/black = good/evil" reasoning may seem absurd to someone who grew up in another society, with a different racial makeup, and a different set of societal tensions, but the on-the-ground reality in (parts of) the United States is very different to that of Europe (or even other parts of the US). Regardless of how the etymology of the words was intended to work (again: English is not French, our etymologies do not have intent), the frequent use of these terms may still cause offense in some subcultures. Given the long history of nonsense which the White population has forced the Black population to put up with, this strikes me as a relatively small accommodation in comparison.

Schaller: Cool happenings in Fedora Workstation land

Posted Sep 18, 2021 7:40 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (2 responses)

< Given the long history of nonsense which the White population has forced the Black population to put up with, this strikes me as a relatively small accommodation in comparison.

WHICH white population?

Taking your figures as given Americans make up about half native English speakers. From what you say it sounds like the White population you are talking about is a minority of Americans (I'll guess it's the Deep South). So you're expecting a LARGE MAJORITY of native English speakers to adjust their language - for no purpose other than to appease those "woke" activists.

And to make matters even worse, the Black population you're talking don't give a monkeys. They want REAL change, and deleting a few words from the English language is a meaningless token - those Whites who are the real cause of the problem will just appropriate other words and abuse them instead - that language drift you were talking about!

So all this woke actuvusm is actually doing, is driving language change for the sake of a power trip. Worse, it's probably HINDERING real change, because by censoring the language, you are preventing people from talking about the problem.

In short, the number of people hindered/confused/inconvenienced by the change is MUCH larger than the number of people who benefit from it (and the ones who DO benefit, aren't the ones who are MEANT to benefit).

Anyway, I think we are getting dangerously off-topic ...

Cheers,
Wol

Schaller: Cool happenings in Fedora Workstation land

Posted Sep 18, 2021 7:59 UTC (Sat) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link]

> So you're expecting a LARGE MAJORITY of native English speakers to adjust their language

No. Nobody is expected to adjust their language. Some people are choosing to use different terms. This does not oblige anyone else to use the same terminology.

Schaller: Cool happenings in Fedora Workstation land

Posted Sep 18, 2021 8:47 UTC (Sat) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link]

> Worse, it's probably HINDERING real change, because by censoring the language, you are preventing people from talking about the problem.

I do not understand how one could possibly use the words "whitelist" and "blacklist" to talk about race relations, except in the specific context of "those words are hurtful, so please stop using them."

Schaller: Cool happenings in Fedora Workstation land

Posted Sep 18, 2021 7:50 UTC (Sat) by intelfx (subscriber, #130118) [Link] (1 responses)

> English is not French. It does not have a central authority to decide which words are "right" or "wrong." <...>

Isn't this exactly what Americans are trying to do — across the whole world and all other nations, peoples and (sub)cultures who happen to also use English?

Schaller: Cool happenings in Fedora Workstation land

Posted Sep 18, 2021 8:48 UTC (Sat) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link]

If you want to use "whitelist" and "blacklist," nobody is going to put you on a denylist for doing so.

Schaller: Cool happenings in Fedora Workstation land

Posted Sep 18, 2021 7:52 UTC (Sat) by birdie (guest, #114905) [Link] (12 responses)

This sounds almost asinine because the words "blacklist" and "whitelist" have never had anything to do with the black or white.

In fact in my native language, which is Russian, we have "Чёрный список" and "Белый список" and Russia through its history has never had any black population in any meaningful numbers, let alone any issues related to racism.

I absolutely hate the fact that some idiot SJWs have infected the software industry with things which have _never_ caused any issues neither for programmers or software users. I don't think a single afro-american has ever been inconvenienced or offended by encountering these particular words in the applications he/she uses.

And seeing how many GIT repos have been renamed from "master" to "main" makes my blood boil.

"Master" as a word has a TON more context to it than having anything to do with slavery. What about abandoning master degrees as well? What about a situation when someone teaches someone else?

This world has gone insane. We pay too much attention to the crap which has _zero_ effing meaning in our lives at the moment _even_ in the US.

Schaller: Cool happenings in Fedora Workstation land

Posted Sep 18, 2021 10:21 UTC (Sat) by benjamir (guest, #133607) [Link] (7 responses)

Agree. White as representation for light = good, black = absence of light, night = bad is present in a lot of cultures. Whatever that has to do with skin colour.

I always wondered when there will be no more "master classes", because stupidity got another foothold.

The new ultima ratio: "I feel offended".

Schaller: Cool happenings in Fedora Workstation land

Posted Sep 18, 2021 10:33 UTC (Sat) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link] (4 responses)

White = good comes from the Bible. So, discriminatory against non-christian cultures, not against black people (but then humans are pretty good at finding offense against pretty much anything, and will turn neutral terms into insults when nothing else is available).

https://www.biblestudy.org/bible-study-by-topic/meaning-o...

Schaller: Cool happenings in Fedora Workstation land

Posted Sep 18, 2021 10:48 UTC (Sat) by benjamir (guest, #133607) [Link]

That logic ... I'm not christian and
in chinese culture, as old as the bible, white is equally "clean".

And according to your logic every cultures analogies are automatically offensive to everybody not part of it?

*You* are dividing into in- and out groups and full of bias.

Schaller: Cool happenings in Fedora Workstation land

Posted Sep 18, 2021 10:59 UTC (Sat) by birdie (guest, #114905) [Link]

The Bible ... what? Grasping at straws much?

I don't give a damn about fairy tales no matter how many frothing idiots choose to believe in them.

Also, white being pure and black being stained predate the Bible by thousands of years.

Schaller: Cool happenings in Fedora Workstation land

Posted Sep 18, 2021 11:34 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

Given that biblical peoples weren't white (or black), but brown, the colours weren't associated with peoples so weren't racist.

Things may have changed since then, but yet again we have an innocent origin being abused by later changes ...

Cheers,
Wol

Schaller: Cool happenings in Fedora Workstation land

Posted Sep 18, 2021 12:57 UTC (Sat) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

> White = good comes from the Bible

Nope. That's just ignoring a lot of history before. Cultures and religions that have existed thousands of years before the Bible have very similar notions on what white means. Here is a quick sample,

http://www.people.vcu.edu/~djbromle/color-theory/color03/...
https://www.newsgram.com/spiritual-significance-colors-hi...
https://wiccaliving.com/magical-properties-colors/

Schaller: Cool happenings in Fedora Workstation land

Posted Sep 18, 2021 11:01 UTC (Sat) by birdie (guest, #114905) [Link]

"Master class" must surely mean a class in slavery in the modern language.

Schaller: Cool happenings in Fedora Workstation land

Posted Sep 18, 2021 11:14 UTC (Sat) by dvdeug (guest, #10998) [Link]

What <i>does</i> that have to do with skin color? I've never seen a white person in my life. I've seen a lot of pink people, quite a few tan or brown people, but never a white person, or really a black person. So maybe the fact a certain group of people was self-labeled "white" and they defined a lot of other people as not white, even when they were quite pale, and some of those people black, may be that use of white and black does mean something more than skin color.

Offending the wrong people in the wrong way is and probably always has earn someone a beatdown. The fact that it's no longer just certain people who can take offense, and we can talk about it should mean something.

I've never met someone who doesn't find certain things offensive, but if they're railing about others being offended, well, their issues are totally different. Santa Claus just is white.

Schaller: Cool happenings in Fedora Workstation land

Posted Sep 18, 2021 10:42 UTC (Sat) by dvdeug (guest, #10998) [Link] (3 responses)

Of course blacklist and whitelist have to do with black and white. It's not coincidental that a bunch of tan-pink people decided to dub themselves with a color connected to purity and innocence and goodness, and then decided to give a color connected to evil to a group of dark brown people, and also decided to use white for acceptance and black for exclusion.

Russia throughout its history has never had any issue related to racism, as the Crimean Tatars and Russian Jews can well attest. Even if Russia didn't have its own problems, "Чёрный список" doesn't say anything about the connotations of the original in English. Moreover, if Russia has never had any issues related to racism, why would you expect that you can instantly understand what problems it causes in the US?

Seeing how many Git repos have been renamed from "master" to "main" makes your blood boil? Why? Who cares? It seems bizarre to complain about other people caring about words and then let words make your blood boil. Worry about stuff you think matters, and don't complain about stuff you don't think matters.

You can try listening to these people you label SJWs. Or you can try ignoring them; much of life is spent inefficiently, sometimes doing things that other people want for no good reason as far as you can tell. Letting name changes you feel irrelevant get on your nerves is a waste of your nerves.

(Oh, and someone who teaches someone else is a teacher, not a master. Wikipedia says the use of the term schoolmaster remains in British independent schools, but not elsewhere.)

Schaller: Cool happenings in Fedora Workstation land

Posted Sep 18, 2021 11:25 UTC (Sat) by birdie (guest, #114905) [Link] (2 responses)

> the original in English

The original Great Britain had very few black people until the 17th century and didn't have major issues related to racism, but they surely had slaves of all colors. Some people desperately want these words to mean what they don't mean _even_ for native English speakers: https://www.etymonline.com/word/blacklist https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacklisting

> Why?

Let programmers program.

> Who cares?

SJWs who want to receive all the spotlight while otherwise contributing nothing to the society.

> It seems bizarre to complain about other people caring about words and then let words make your blood boil. Worry about stuff you think matters, and don't complain about stuff you don't think matters.

I worry because the racism issue has suddenly been blown out of proportions and started affecting the things it has zero relationship to. It has already led to a number of heated debates in programming communities and a loss of time which could otherwise have been dedicated to solving actual real life issues ... including racism in the US.

"Blocklist" is a list of blocks. This word is asinine, broken, can and will be misunderstood and even mistranslated.

Tell me, why until 2019 or something, not a single black person on the planet had had zero issues with "blacklist/whitelist" and all of a sudden it was ... the white who started this whole controversy. You don't have to be Einstein to realize this "controversy" has nothing to do with racism and everything with trying to defame and ostracize otherwise innocent and more importantly smart software engineers.

And then the whole imbecilic racial quota issue began when people were hired _not_ based on skills but because companies needed to employ a certain amount of people of color to look good for SJWs. This world has gone insane.

Schaller: Cool happenings in Fedora Workstation land

Posted Sep 18, 2021 11:39 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

> And then the whole imbecilic racial quota issue began when people were hired _not_ based on skills but because companies needed to employ a certain amount of people of color to look good for SJWs. This world has gone insane.

No. Actually, this is a real problem. But again it's nothing to do with racism. "Like likes like" - as a white middle class middle aged man, given the choice I will hire white, middle class, middle aged men. But that's not racism, that's just "bias to people like me". Something to counter THAT should be perfectly acceptable ...

Cheers,
Wol

Schaller: Cool happenings in Fedora Workstation land

Posted Sep 18, 2021 11:52 UTC (Sat) by birdie (guest, #114905) [Link]

The amount of white educated smart people in the US trumps any other color by a wide margin.

US companies are interested in the most talented people. They have more white candidates to choose from.

Why would they hire less-educated, not as smart people of other colors instead?

Google and Microsoft already have CEOs of Indian origin, so let's stop here.

We've been talking about "blocklist" or was it "blockchain? Or blackchain? Ah, idiocy prevails.

Schaller: Cool happenings in Fedora Workstation land

Posted Sep 18, 2021 9:15 UTC (Sat) by pbonzini (subscriber, #60935) [Link]

I don't know why you're writing this to me. In my first message I wrote "I understand why the change was made and I'm not going to debate that".

What I'm saying is that, compared to just using an adjective or the -ed form of a verb, blocklist/allowlist/denylist have significant disadvantages:

* from a global perspective, due to localization issues;

* from a purely English perspective, due to non-specificity (and these are *shared* with blacklist/whitelist).

Therefore, using blocklist/allowlist/denylist is a lazy and suboptimal choice, when you're given the occasion to improve your language use at the benefit of both native and non-native speakers.

Schaller: Cool happenings in Fedora Workstation land

Posted Sep 18, 2021 3:21 UTC (Sat) by pbonzini (subscriber, #60935) [Link] (1 responses)

> Am I wrong to understand that in the screenshot, blocklisting would block the application from outputting sound by default?

Well... seems like you are. Now that I know the name of the application, I googled the documentation and it prevents the application from being applied any effects.

> Why do you think “block” is worse than “blacklist”?

It is of course better for native speakers and is more exclusive language. It is worse in that it is an unfamiliar term for non-native speakers, and one that does not have an accepted translation. It is also lazy since better alternatives exist, even if you dismissed them as bikeshedding.

Schaller: Cool happenings in Fedora Workstation land

Posted Sep 18, 2021 3:22 UTC (Sat) by pbonzini (subscriber, #60935) [Link]

> more exclusive language

Doh. "Not exclusive" or "more inclusive" of course.

Schaller: Cool happenings in Fedora Workstation land

Posted Sep 18, 2021 10:25 UTC (Sat) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]

Just write mute, that’s what it does, language is precise enough there is not need for overreaching abstractions like deny, block, blacklist or whatever.

Schaller: Cool happenings in Fedora Workstation land

Posted Sep 18, 2021 4:30 UTC (Sat) by ttuttle (subscriber, #51118) [Link]

"Blocklist" is about as meaningful as "blacklist", which is to say "not very meaningful at all".

"Blocklist" only makes sense if there is a clear concept of what "blocking" an item on the list would mean.

When I've made similar changes, I've tried to *clarify* the meaning of the variable or whatever -- something like "hide", "ignore", "mute", "ban", or "disable".

Schaller: Cool happenings in Fedora Workstation land

Posted Sep 17, 2021 19:28 UTC (Fri) by jebba (guest, #4439) [Link] (2 responses)

Fedora's original mission:

> "To work with the Linux community to build a complete, general purpose operating system exclusively from open source software."

Now:

> "Fedora creates an innovative platform for hardware, clouds, and containers that enables software developers and community members to build tailored solutions for their users."

Schaller: Cool happenings in Fedora Workstation land

Posted Sep 17, 2021 19:50 UTC (Fri) by Uraeus (guest, #33755) [Link] (1 responses)

A little out of context though considering the vision statement now is: "The Fedora Project envisions a world where everyone benefits from free and open source software built by inclusive, welcoming, and open-minded communities."

Both vision and mission statements are found here:
https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/

Schaller: Cool happenings in Fedora Workstation land

Posted Sep 18, 2021 0:32 UTC (Sat) by mattdm (subscriber, #18) [Link]

Yeah ... more context. The original mission wasn't sufficient, since we already did that, so now what? And, that statement really came from the "Red Hat Linux Project", after the RHEL split, and not truly from the project itself. So, in the following years (I'd have to dig to find the exact timeline) it was kind of dropped in favor of a list of "core principles". In 2010 or so, there was work in the Fedora Board (the predecessor to the current Fedora Council) to work on this intentionally, and the Fedora Foundations (Freedom, Friends, Features, First, of course -- the four Fs) came from that, as well as a new mission statement, "The Fedora Project's mission is to lead the advancement of free and open source software and content as a collaborative community. "

I like that mission statement, but... it's hard to use as a guiding tool for what we actually do. It went too far from the very concrete "we produce an operating system" to open sky, and was hard to connect to the things contributors actually wanted to work on in the project. If you start from that statement and nothing in place, it's hard to argue that making Fedora Linux is the best way to achieve it. But, y'know, we really do want to be making Fedora Linux, packaging stuff, working on the distro level of the ecosystem.

So, a few years ago, we came up with the current mission and vision. Are they perfect? Certainly not. But I hope they serve us well for another few years, until it feels like the project and the world have changed to the point where we need an update.

Schaller: Cool happenings in Fedora Workstation land

Posted Sep 17, 2021 23:54 UTC (Fri) by jafd (subscriber, #129642) [Link] (12 responses)

While it's all good and dandy, one area where all those Linux desktop efforts fail miserably is making some grunt work at least a little bit more rewarding, so at least someone can work on the existing bugs and regressions, and someone else in charge can accept changes that, while not enabling the slew of new features (many of which are like those old features but new), can make life and work more bearable for those who don't have the newest hardware of them all.

Here are two cases in point. Buy AMD, they said. Great open source support, they said. Will be fun, they said. So I did, and my machine has two AMD GPUs inside: one WX4100 and one WX5100.

And monitors plugged into either won't go to sleep. They will stay blank, but with full backlight on. There is a bug report where people at the end are sharing hacky workarounds that don't resolve the main problem. There are multiple very thourough and technical explanations on why things work the way they do, almost as if I, the end user, should just suck it up. I won't, because, say, on macOS this problem doesn't exist at all, with this exact GPU. Since macOS can do it, so can Linux. But Linux chooses instead to punt the problem from kernel to X11, but X11 is deprecated, so let's punt it to Wayland, so let's punt it to the multitude of compositors, so let's punt it back to the kernel. Have fun indeed!

Oh, and since I mentioned having two GPUs, actually using them both in X11 makes all graphics sluggish even if one of the GPUs doesn't have outputs connected. Probably the same problem as my laptop has when I plug in an AMD eGPU to it (it has a dGPU inside, also from AMD, because they said that the life was way better with fully open-source drivers): all graphics becomes slow as molasses.

It's just two problems. There are more. But nobody really cares about fixing existing problems. Better ship new features which have even more bugs in them.

Sorry for the rant, but what counts for me as really cool is that bugs/regressions get fixed rigorously, instead of waiting for a decade more so that the hardware in question becomes obsolete and scarce.

Schaller: Cool happenings in Fedora Workstation land

Posted Sep 18, 2021 0:14 UTC (Sat) by stumbles (guest, #8796) [Link] (7 responses)

Thanks for that as I have been considering AMD GPUs for a new machine. Was considering getting away from Nvidia. I see amd sucks just as bad as it always has under Linux.

Schaller: Cool happenings in Fedora Workstation land

Posted Sep 18, 2021 0:38 UTC (Sat) by mattdm (subscriber, #18) [Link] (3 responses)

I mean... I wouldn't put all the weight on one random blog comment complaint that's only tangentially related to the article it's a comment to? For what it's worth, I've had AMD GPUs in my desktop gaming systems running Fedora Workstation (Vega 56 and now Navi 10 / Radeon Pro W5700) and they've been lovely in performance and just work, with no problems similar to those described.

Schaller: Cool happenings in Fedora Workstation land

Posted Sep 18, 2021 5:12 UTC (Sat) by jaymell (guest, #106443) [Link]

Well, it's only a second anecdote, but I gave up on AMD recently as well. With AMD I could never get dual monitor support to work without strange bugs, most notably the system completely seizing if I ever allowed the OS to 1) turn them off via power management or 2) lock the desktop. I gradually gave up trying to solve the problem and just learned to work around it.

Granted, I was using a fairly old Radeon card, but when I finally decided to upgrade, these problems plus the superior Nvidia performance/support for ML development made going w/ Nvidia seem like a no-brainer.

Schaller: Cool happenings in Fedora Workstation land

Posted Sep 18, 2021 9:11 UTC (Sat) by jafd (subscriber, #129642) [Link]

Ever plugged in more than one monitor?

Schaller: Cool happenings in Fedora Workstation land

Posted Sep 18, 2021 12:19 UTC (Sat) by jafd (subscriber, #129642) [Link]

Schaller: Cool happenings in Fedora Workstation land

Posted Sep 18, 2021 7:38 UTC (Sat) by tlamp (subscriber, #108540) [Link]

FWIW: I do not use workstation AMD GPU's but consumer ones and those work perfectly out of the box for me, at least when used with a recent kernel and mesa version.

Schaller: Cool happenings in Fedora Workstation land

Posted Sep 18, 2021 8:30 UTC (Sat) by rbtree (guest, #129790) [Link]

I have used three consumer AMD GPUs since they mainlined their drivers back in 4.4 (I think?). They have all been wonderful, zero problems at all in my personal experience. On the other hand, I had nothing but problems with two nvidia GPUs (and an integrated Intel graphics) before that. So if I were in your place I wouldn't put too much weight into a single random comment.

Schaller: Cool happenings in Fedora Workstation land

Posted Sep 18, 2021 12:04 UTC (Sat) by anton (subscriber, #25547) [Link]

I have experience with AMD GPUs under Linux since 2004:

On an iBook G4 the built-in Radeon 9200 worked, with some workaroundable problems with external displays (a projector) at the start, fixed in a later release of Debian. A collegue who got a PowerBook G4 with Nvidia graphics around the same time never got the external display to work.

Staying with laptops, the next one was a Lenovo X121e with an AMD E-450 CPU with integrated graphics (Radeon HD 6320), which worked without problems (including the external display). Later laptops have had Intel graphics, and the external display works, too (although I don't get 2160x1600@60Hz on a Tiger Lake, and have to hand-massage it to get 2160x1600@30Hz).

On desktops, my ATI/AMD carreer started with a Radeon 9250 in 2005 or so and I have stuck to ATI/AMD ever since. For some years I used to use two monitors, and IIRC this just worked (but I used one big monitor since 2009). In the ATI years ATI made R200 information available to X developers under NDA, but not R300 and R400 GPU information (nor did they provide R200 information to additional developers in later years). After acquiring ATI, AMD decided to provide much information openly, which led to free drivers, which I used. I have used the Radeon 9250, 9600Pro, Radeon X1650Pro, HD4670, HD5770 and HD6770 (and have stuck with the latter because no affordable fanless designs have come out later that offered a performance improvement).

If you want to tell AMD and Intel to stop supporting free software, buy Nvidia.

Schaller: Cool happenings in Fedora Workstation land

Posted Sep 18, 2021 1:09 UTC (Sat) by dowdle (subscriber, #659) [Link] (3 responses)

It doesn't happen in macOS? You mean the operating system that supports only a few dozen hardware configurations? And it does happen in Linux, an OS that supports billions? With Linux you get to pick what video card you want. With macOS, not so much.

Schaller: Cool happenings in Fedora Workstation land

Posted Sep 18, 2021 12:17 UTC (Sat) by jafd (subscriber, #129642) [Link] (2 responses)

So what of it that in Linux, I can pick and choose video cards which don't work in many different ways?

Schaller: Cool happenings in Fedora Workstation land

Posted Sep 18, 2021 12:30 UTC (Sat) by tlamp (subscriber, #108540) [Link] (1 responses)

No, rather it's:

Linux: there are hundreds+ of models that work and some that do not in various degrees.

MacOS: there's only one that works on a specific machine and all other do not

Schaller: Cool happenings in Fedora Workstation land

Posted Sep 18, 2021 13:23 UTC (Sat) by jafd (subscriber, #129642) [Link]

But when a GPU works on macOS, boy, it _works_. When the display goes to sleep, to sleep it goes and no question. Not for me to go to my work room in the morning and find out that a couple angry hornets were lured into it in the night because the backlight stayed on, even with screens being blank.

There's a lot of drawbacks that macOS has as an OS, being a very crappy Unix with a lot of corner case to chew through if you're porting anything advanced to it or are a power user, but they've got the basics of desktop usage right, I have to give them that.

If the AMD CPU+GPU stacks in Linux are this lousy and have bugs unfixed for years, the closed-source NVidia world must be a dumpster fire.

Schaller: Cool happenings in Fedora Workstation land

Posted Sep 18, 2021 1:09 UTC (Sat) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link] (2 responses)

Notwithstanding any software problems with NVIDIA and AMD drivers as they are now, it would be interesting to know how much revenue/profit AMD lost on the account of open sourcing their drivers.

Yeah, I'm thinking of Linus flipping off NVIDIA here...

Schaller: Cool happenings in Fedora Workstation land

Posted Sep 18, 2021 12:37 UTC (Sat) by tlamp (subscriber, #108540) [Link] (1 responses)

> it would be interesting to know how much revenue/profit AMD lost on the account of open sourcing their drivers.

Why should they lose anything at all?

1. open sourcing the driver and user space integration does not mean that the firmware gets open-sourced, the fines IP juice bits are mostly there and in the silicon, not in the register definitions and DMA buffer setup code of the driver. There may be a little bit of stuff that'll get exposed, but most is already known or open standards (vulkan/gl/...) and the rest is hardly any bleeding edge IP stuff; GPU development has a lead time of a few months to years, so what's released is already "old stuff" regarding R&D.

2. nvidia has excellent engineers, surely better suited to reverse engineer their concurrence products and proprietary drivers than some enthusiast, and the enthusiasts are already quite good. So if they want to know something they'll do (but certainly need to keep watching out to not infringe any IP by using that knowledge)

Schaller: Cool happenings in Fedora Workstation land

Posted Sep 18, 2021 13:27 UTC (Sat) by bojan (subscriber, #14302) [Link]

I asked that question sarcastically. Of course they didn't lose anything.

NVIDIA should just open source their drivers already and remove the need for the silly dance one can see on Fedora lists/bodhi pretty regularly. New kernel gets released and someone's NVIDIA installation gets broken. They complain to Fedora developers, which point them to NVIDIA, of course. Essentially, as is NVIDIA driver is unsupportable by open source developers.

Another place that is full of proprietary junk is Android, where this kind of nonsense is so entrenched, it will probably be there forever.

Schaller: Cool happenings in Fedora Workstation land

Posted Sep 18, 2021 12:21 UTC (Sat) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]

I don't use Fedora, but I have recently been using wayland (sway, switched from i3). The i3->sway switch is indeed seamless, and I like waybar better than alternatives in i3-land, but there are a lot of rough edges on the wayland side. It took a while to get screensharing in video calls to work (and it doesn't work with zoom, though it apparently works on zoom+wayland+gnome). Sharing a single window doesn't work (on either gnome or sway), you can only share the full screen.

The other annoyance is getting the compose key to work. My wayland session, with ibus-daemon running, seems to ignore my ~/.XCompose file, though the exact same programs (firefox, terminal) with ibus-daemon respect my .XCompose under i3/X. Oddly, in sway, google chrome does respect .XCompose.

Apparently it's far worse for users of east Asian languages. fcitx5 is recommended over ibus, but I couldn't recommend that to work either.

Even on a newish, high-spec laptop like mine, the performance difference between i3/X and sway/wayland is noticeable. But screen-sharing is an essential feature since the pandemic started, and unicode/multi-char input is an essential feature to the majority of the world. I really hope they are prioritising these things.

Wow

Posted Sep 18, 2021 14:12 UTC (Sat) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

So I have just forced myself to read through all of the comments posted overnight on this article.

Folks, this was an article about the Fedora desktop. Did we really have to turn it into such a nasty cesspool of anger and hate? Honestly, I think that LWN's readers are rather better than this.

I have disabled comment posting on this article; apologies to the people who actually wanted to talk about the Fedora desktop. A couple of accounts have been placed on permanent moderation. All the rest of you, please take a moment to calm down. Seriously.


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