Fedora 20 Alpha "Heisenbug" Is Now Out For Testing

[AdamW]

Yeah, sorry. Fedora is an independent community whose leaders just by shear coincidence are mostly employed by Red Hat, just like Gnome.

I don't think anyone ever said Fedora was independent or that the fact that several Fedora people work for RH was a 'coincidence'; you are putting words in people's mouths, here. What Rahul said was that RH does not make those decisions, and that is entirely correct.

You can, in fact, watch that particular decision being made in glorious technicolor with stereo sound, if you like. Go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6MJ5wqVvBc . That's the meeting where we decided what the blocking desktops for Fedora ARM would be. Some of the people there work for Red Hat, some don't. Amazingly we all seem to get along just fine.

edit: and btw, there are people from rather a lot of different companies working on GNOME. There used to be even more people from Sun and Novell working on it, but those companies cut their GNOME teams quite heavily. What would you have liked Red Hat to do? Fire a bunch of engineers and hurt the project quite badly (not to mention those engineers...) just so the numbers would look even?

[AdamW]

As if I'd ever use a desktop with the development speed of a glacier (only one release per year and no bugfix releases in between)?
Considering the fact that ARM hardware is usually either used for either small servers (i.e. no UI at all) or mobile computers like tablets (where Plasma Active shines), I strongly doubt that Xfce is widely used there.

Well you can doubt all you like, but the Fedora ARM list members mostly run dev systems like the Pandaboard, Beagleboard, and Trimslice, and quite often run a desktop: this is useful for building packages, testing multiple uses on a single system, and actually just using an ARM box as a desktop system, which several of our users do. I'm not just talking out of my ass, here, you understand, there are actual real Fedora people using ARM and I asked them what they used and they told me.

[RahulSundaram]

Yeah, sorry. Fedora is an independent community whose leaders just by shear coincidence are mostly employed by Red Hat, just like Gnome.

There are lot more volunteer contributors leading major aspects of Fedora that you seem to be aware of. Regardless of that, the fact is that Red Hat doesn't direct the defaults for Fedora ARM even if some contributors work for them.

[Awesomeness]

Red Hat doesn't choose the defaults for the Fedora ARM project.

Yeah, sorry. Fedora is an independent community whose leaders just by shear coincidence are mostly employed by Red Hat, just like Gnome.

[RahulSundaram]

Well, thanks to Gnome Project?s shortsightedness (tying the DE to a GL-exclusive composited WM), Red Hat accidentally did the right thing. :-)

Red Hat doesn't choose the defaults for the Fedora ARM project.

[Awesomeness]

Yes. The logic was this: GNOME and KDE are already release-blocking desktops. We can't really call GNOME release-blocking for ARM, due to the driver situation. Xfce is probably actually more widely used on ARM than KDE, in all likelihood, but since KDE already has release-blocking status for Fedora and so we have reasonable confidence that we have the people and processes in place to get issues in it fixed quickly if necessary, we decided to make KDE the sole release-blocking desktop for ARM rather than giving Xfce that status as well/instead.

In practice, both KDE and Xfce are likely to be quite well tested and working on ARM systems, and you might prefer Xfce as being a bit lighter and faster.

As if I'd ever use a desktop with the development speed of a glacier (only one release per year and no bugfix releases in between)?
Considering the fact that ARM hardware is usually either used for either small servers (i.e. no UI at all) or mobile computers like tablets (where Plasma Active shines), I strongly doubt that Xfce is widely used there.

Well, thanks to Gnome Project?s shortsightedness (tying the DE to a GL-exclusive composited WM), Red Hat accidentally did the right thing. :-)

[cl91]

Unfortunately doesn't work right now. You can try it from a console, the devs warn it's still in somewhat rough shape right now. Should be smoothed out for Beta and Final somewhat, but it is still a tech preview for F20, not really ready for day-to-day use.

I can't run it from console either. Perhaps related to this bug? https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=705506

From the stack backtrace I can see that mutter is trying to load xwayland but xwayland is not built on fedore 20. So it aborts.

[AdamW]

Probably has more to do with KWin's ability to run without compositing (not so many FOSS drivers for GPUs in ARM systems).

Yes. The logic was this: GNOME and KDE are already release-blocking desktops. We can't really call GNOME release-blocking for ARM, due to the driver situation. Xfce is probably actually more widely used on ARM than KDE, in all likelihood, but since KDE already has release-blocking status for Fedora and so we have reasonable confidence that we have the people and processes in place to get issues in it fixed quickly if necessary, we decided to make KDE the sole release-blocking desktop for ARM rather than giving Xfce that status as well/instead.

In practice, both KDE and Xfce are likely to be quite well tested and working on ARM systems, and you might prefer Xfce as being a bit lighter and faster.

[AdamW]

On login screen after pressing the username, select the gear beside the blue enter button and choose "Gnome in Wayland".

Unfortunately doesn't work right now. You can try it from a console, the devs warn it's still in somewhat rough shape right now. Should be smoothed out for Beta and Final somewhat, but it is still a tech preview for F20, not really ready for day-to-day use.

[cl91]

Turns out for it to appear in GDM you have to update first.
For some reason the Wayland version fails to start for me.

A quick GDB backtrace reveals that the crash is due to this bug: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=705506

The cause of the crash: mutter-wayland tries to load XWayland but Xorg is not built with xwayland support, so it decides to bail out. I'm not sure why it behaves like this --- after all weston has a flag for xwayland and runs just fine even if you turn it off.