Interested in helping improve the Fedora desktop experience?

[Adam Williamson]

On Wed, 2009-10-21 at 12:57 -0400, Máirín Duffy wrote:
> On 10/21/2009 12:17 PM, Colin Walters wrote:
> > Well...it's tricky because this stuff changes so rapidly, and we may
> > simply not know how well a particular card works with a particular
> > version of the driver.  Then of course multiply that matrix by
> > configuration like multihead...
> > 
> > I guess a lot comes down to the details.  Are we just special casing
> > PCI vendor == nvidia?  Or something more elaborate?
> 
> Nvidia has sucked for a really long time though. 

But we've only started fixing it recently. We only went to the new
nouveau driver for F11, and it has received a huge load of fixes for
F12. Prior to F11, we were using the entirely different nv driver. This
is the kind of thing Colin means when he says 'this stuff changes so
rapidly'. Probably for F12 and almost certainly for F13, I'd by no means
agree with the proposition that there's a significantly higher chance
Fedora will fail on NVIDIA graphics than any other type.

Popping up some kind of warning for anyone with an NVIDIA card would be
a bad idea, I think - I can't give you really concrete numbers but I'd
expect we're only completely failing on a single-digit percentage of all
the NVIDIA adapters out there, probably under 5%. We completely fail on
some Intel and AMD adapters too - probably in the same percentage range
- so do we just pop up a warning for everyone? We'd be popping up
warnings around the clock.

As Colin says, Fedora's general philosophy is and has historically been
that it's more important to fix the bugs than to worry about temporary
bodges and workarounds for the immediate experience. This is something
of a function of Fedora's identity, and I'm not sure whether we want to
change it significantly. When I was at Mandriva I was much more to the
'let's bodge around this to create the best possible user experience for
this particular release' side of things, but that approach does have its
penalties: the bodges pile up on top of each other like there's no
tomorrow (ldetect-lst...grrk) and the person-hours that go into writing
and maintaining and checking the bodges are time that could have gone
elsewhere.

> I bet if you ask around
> we could come up with a decent set of heuristics for which hardware
> devices cause the most angst, maybe maintain some sort of list and if
> one of them is detected we give the users a fair warning. 

Well, yeah, we could. It would be very icky and give a lot of false
positives. It would take constant ongoing maintenance. As I said, I'm
not sure it's the kind of direction we want to move Fedora development
in.

> > Graphics is especially tricky, because linking to a wiki page is
> > obviously problematic if the driver is failing entirely, since you
> > wouldn't be able to see our error page...
> 
> Right, so in that case the implication might be we add some kind of
> warning to the webpage so the user sees it even before starting the
> install process. For other issues it might be more visible to place it
> in the installer itself maybe. (These are just off-the-cuff ideas though!)

On this specific issue I think it's something we can improve. The
'common issues' page is sort of my baby now (it was around for F10 and
earlier releases but I substantially expanded and revised the format and
content for F11 and am working on it for F12 too). I maintained a
similar page at Mandriva for each release (called the 'Errata' there)
and found that by consistently documenting issues there and referring to
it in public discussion and release documentation it became a well-known
reference source which most users would refer to habitually. That's kind
of my endgame for the common issues page. I'm already trying to ensure
it's mentioned in release announcements - it was in the Fedora 12 Beta
release announcement, for instance - and encourage people to add issues
to it and refer to it when doing forum support, IRC support and so on.
It would certainly be nice to have it referenced in the install process
too.

-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net