Fedora Wish List

Linux Discussion Linux Desktop
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To start I believe that Fedora is the flagship Linux desktop experience.
Now I love using arch and being able to say I use arch as much as the next guy on here and I have a lot of respect and praise for PopOS and System76, but the best experience for me on Linux has been Fedora and it only seems to get better and better with each new release. It seems to me like they are really ahead of the curb with things like Pipewire, Wayland, BTRFS, and Flatpaks. All of that among other things that make it the most solid Linux desktop experience, now that is to say It can and is improving and I just wanted a place to vent a little about the things I really want to see in Fedora in future releases some of which is already being implemented.

  • Built in Dark mode

  • Accent colors

  • Optional system tray icons and the ability to hide them in a sub menu built in

  • Optional panel mode or classic mode built in for those people I cannot convince to use gnome the gnome way.

  • Free sync / variable refresh rate

  • BTRFS snapshot management from settings app or GUI

  • Fully functional fractional scaling in wayland

  • nautilus context menu option to enable opening folders in nautilus as root without the need of the terminal

  • uninstall option in context menu when you right click on application in the show applications view

  • accessibility support for remaping midi, gamepad or other controllers for use in games or to control the desktop

  • Option in installer for enabling the full flathub store

  • prompts for flatpak permisions for apps and a way to manage said permissions in a integrated way maybe in settings app

  • basic appimage integration in gnome built in

  • Michael AI BOT integration option for accessibility voice support and home automation integration with home assistant

I think I will leave it at that for now, thanks for reading my post.

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Wouldn’t mind some of those myself.

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Since Fedora Workstation is a distro I continue to love and appreciate, I would like to add one to the list. I’m not sure if this is something the Fedora community could accomplish on their own or if it is really more of a Gnome community issue.

  • Add GUI support in the Gnome Network Manager interface for setting up Wireguard VPN’s. There is support for importing an OpenVPN configuration file, but no support for importing a Wireguard configuration file through the GUI. Network Manager already supports importing Wireguard configuration files, and I currently do this through the CLI interface for Network Manager nmcli. You can check out the most recent articles on my blog for more information about this if you are interested.

As you can see below, the Gnome 41 GUI in Network settings doesn’t even show that I have a VPN configured even though I do and it is currently active and working.

gnomeNetworkSettings
gnomeNetworkSettings720Ă—516 28.9 KB

Just a little thing that would keep Fedora on the edge of innovation.

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GNOME Classic mode has been shipped in Fedora Workstation for a long time. It’s accessible from the login screen (go the gear and select “GNOME Classic”).

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Most of these issues are more GNOME issues than Fedora ones, so I’ll go with all of the GNOME stuff first.

The first one is already there with GNOME 42 in Fedora 36, the other one is a prospect for the future, but most of these you’d have to ask the GNOME team instead of Fedora, since it only ships the DEs as they come by default (mostly).

Again, GNOME team (but the start to this discussion came from the Fedora team so props to them), but they already started discussing an updated appindicator protocol with other DEs, in order to make something that works with sandboxing properly and works everywhere consistently. Not sure if there’s already code related to it tho.

That’ll literally never happen. GNOME team sticks to their way to do things due to having limited manpower, so they support the features they can support and implement properly, so why would they spend more manpower supporting a feature that goes against the workflow they are developing and perfecting? For classic mode, it already exists and comes shipped by default IIRC

AFAIK you can just double click to enter a root folder and it’ll prompt you for a password? I tried doing it on my system and it just worked. The only thing is that it doesn’t work as root like that, so you can’t just copy, paste and move stuff around there without the terminal. I’m not really sure if enabling users to mess around with that easily is a good idea.

Now, for the Fedora stuff.

That would indeed be a godsent, but it’s complicated. The current way they implement BTRFS subvolumes doesn’t work with Timeshift (the package itself is still broken on Fedora, I think, I use a custom install with the COPR version of it) and snapper doesn’t have a proper GUI outside of openSUSE, so someone would have to create one (I know snapper GUI exists, but oh boy, does it look old and clunky).

That’s literally a no-go due to Fedora’s licensing limitations. They can only ship FOSS by default, and the third-party repos it gives you an option for are limited because that’s what they can ship without getting into possible legal trouble. It’s sad, but it has to be a user thing to do, because they can’t even promote stuff like RPMFusion without risk.

Flatseal already exists, but I agree that it would be great to see it implemented into Settings somehow.

First thing they could do is package appimagelauncher in the repos, it already has a rpm file distributed by the creator. It isn’t that far fetched tbh

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But for my wish list: MOAR SECURITY FEATURES!!!11!1!

I’ve been making some PSAs in their subreddit about stuff it took me months to figure out I could do in Fedora and didn’t know how before, because they use different tools in some places, like dracut for initramfs.

This first one is coming to F36 IIRC, but I’m not sure, so it goes in the list:

  • Using the patched kmodtool and akmods version for secure boot in their repos. It’s terrible that if you want to use NVIDIA drivers or Virtualbox drivers you have to disable it, while Ubuntu does provide a way to deal with it by creating and enrolling your own keys directly in the installer. Having those with a way to do the same in the installation process like Ubuntu does would make the experience completely seamless, and it is amazing;

  • Again, in the installation, providing an option to use your TPM2 chip (if you have one) to automatically decrypt your LUKS partition on boot. I know a lot of people get turned off of full disk encryption due to the inconvenience of having to type a second password on boot, and that would be the perfect middle ground for those people. 99% of the benefits of LUKS with literally no downsides.

Those two would bring Fedora on par if not better than Ubuntu and Windows when it comes to these stuff, without making it forced down the users throats like Windows 11 does.

But for other minor gripes I have with it:

  • I need an akmod for the ashmem driver, just like there is one for the NVIDIA driver. I get why they don’t ship it in the default kernel, but it is needed for those that want to use waydroid, and using a custom kernel screws up everything I just said about secure boot, so I’d love for an automated way to install the ashmem kernel module;

  • I love their docs as they currently are, but it needs much, much more to be part of public consciousness like the Arch Wiki is. It holds a lot of information for troubleshooting, but not a lot of people use it and it’s not usually found in searches if you don’t directly look for it;

  • I’ll have to add to the integrated snapshotting tool. Seriously, it’s past the time already that every Linux distro implements Timeshift or create a better alternative, even those that don’t use BTRFS. It’s basically as good as Time Machine on macOS but so few distros actually have it installed by default.