Plans for the desktop beyond Fedora 7

[Matthias Clasen]

On Tue, 2007-05-08 at 08:44 +0200, Robert M. Albrecht wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> some things I would love to see improved:

Thanks for jumping right into this discussion. Your contribution is very
appreciated. Even cooler than a long list of things you would like to
see improved would be a shorter list of things you can imagine improving
yourself. With the new merged and more open Fedora, there is ample
opportunity for people outside of the desktop team to contribute.

> Network related
> 
> - vpn and dialup integration for network manager

We are going to post our plans for NM work for Fedora 8 shortly. 
 
> - a gui for pairing with bluetooth devices
> - a gui for setting up bluetooth and usb dialup devices (mobile phones)
> for connecting to the internet
> - a gui for setting up 3g networks (umts, ...) for internet access. This
> could be an extension to system-config-network

Bastian already send a pointer to his Bluetooth writeup. A lot of
this depends on how well the SoC project for Bluetooth goes.

> 
> - faster boot when not connected to a network; many services are
> starting really slow, if the network is down
> - faster boot times at all

We are also going to post our plans for startup modernization in a bit.

> Security
> 
> - disabling root (like ubuntu), thus forcing the user to work as a
> non-root user

This is a really easy fix, just toggling a gdm setting. We might do this
by default for Fedora 8.

> - some kind of backup tool, for the whole system or the users profile
> and data
> - Integration of clamav in Evolution and Thunderbird
> - support for encryption of user data ( /home/...)

Some of these things should probably be discussed in the wider context
of fedora-devel, since they are not really desktop specific.


> Configuration
> 
> - Ubuntu has two software installation tools. One shows the complete
> repository, the other is intented for endusers. Listed are only
> applications, with a rating, how well it integrates into the used gui,
> ... I think this is really cool. Many users are overwhelmed by that many
> choices Pirut offers. Perhaps this could simply by a button in Pirut to
> suppress libs or
> - GUI for adding third party repositories
> - GUI for managing raid configurations, Anacondo can to this, but only
> at installation time. If you add a hdd after installation, you have to
> use mdadm manually.

These sound all like good things. For improved software installation, I
hope that bigboards application browser can make a difference there.

> GUI
> 
> - enable Gnomes NFS browsing (network places), in F7 only smb-browsing
> seems to be enabled.
> - enable more than three mouse-buttons
> - enhancing the gui for extended keyboards
> - a GUI for laptop-related things: laptop-mode, configuration
> suspend2ram or suspend2disk, power-management, ...


Can you be more specific what you are missing here ? 

- How do you envision the user interface to use a fourth mouse button  
  (apart from special applications that may need the extra button) ?
- What keyboard configuration are you missing (other than keyboard 
  layouts that actually match your keyboard) ?