 Thanks for having me. Great to see everyone. My name is Alan Day. I'm a member of the workstation working group. I was chairing the group for the F-36 cycles, my first cycle as chair. So it's kind of nice to be here presenting the release. When I'm not doing working group stuff, I'm doing design work on the desktop. I work as part of the desktop team and also I'm streaming the known project. And today I'm just going to be talking about all the cool stuff that's in Fedora 36 workstation. So I'm hoping that there's people here who've already tried it. I've been using it for a while and it's a really strong release. We've had great reviews, great responses so far. And I know personally I'm really enjoying it. There's a lot of really awesome improvements in there. And really there's just too much to talk about in half an hour. So I'm just picked kind of a small number of personal highlights that I'm going to talk about. I'm going to go into a little bit of detail there, talk a bit about the features, what's involved, and how you can make the most of it when you're using Fedora workstation. So a lot of the features I'm going to be talking about are part of the GNOME 42 release. That's the most recent GNOME release. But I consider them to be Fedora features as well. A lot of these features have had members of the Fedora community participating upstream to make this happen. And they've all had to be tested and integrated and made to be part of the experience as Fedora 36. So while a lot of the material, the features are part of GNOME, these are also Fedora features in my opinion. OK, so let's get started. So Darkstyle, we have Dark Mode now. Other platforms have it. We know it's a popular feature. People often ask for it. And it took us a little while to get there, but we have it now. And the main thing is that it's been done really well. It's been implemented in a very robust way. And I'm going to talk a little bit about some of the different aspects of this seemingly simple feature. Hopefully this will work. I'm just going to show a quick screencast just to show it in action just in case no one has seen this so far. So this is something I recorded was the 12th. So was that yesterday? No, two days ago. So we can see the settings window here on the left and switching between light and dark. And in the same panel, you can also change the wallpaper. So you can see as we switch wallpapers, you get a dark or a light version. And those are available for both modes. So you get these nice transitions as you go back and forth between dark and light and between the two modes. And it's really nice and smooth and everything looks great. And this was a lot of the work that went into this was going into those kind of details. Now, there's been a lot of architectural work over the past year or so, all of which enables much more flexibility and how we render the UI and makes these kind of transformations both possible and makes them more robust. What you don't want is to switch into dark mode and lose some buttons or something because they haven't been styled to fit into the dark background and so on. The way this has been implemented, everything kind of just works. It works really well. And certainly when I've been testing this in Fedora 36, I haven't encountered any styling problems at all going between dark and light. So they did a really great job there. The other kind of details here that are worth mentioning, this has been implemented as a cross desktop standard for the setting. So that's really great. That means that for third parties wanting to target the Linux desktop, there's one setting they need to look at and one setting only. That's really great for adoption. The other really great thing about this is the background integration, which I've already mentioned, but that's a really nice aspect of the feature and the Fedora design team was involved in making sure that the Fedora backgrounds are compatible with dark mode and that's something we're looking at for the next cycle to hopefully increase the number of wallpapers that we have that work with dark. So that's really great. So yeah, dark mode, great feature to have. We've already got plans to improve and extend it for next release for Fedora 37. Scheduling is one thing that's being talked about. So having the ability to have dark mode automatically turn on and off, depending on the time of day, that's something that we'd like to see. The other thing that we'd really like to have is a quick toggle. Right now, you have to go into the settings to switch this either way. And that's obviously not particularly convenient. So for the next cycle, we'd like a button that you can get to from the settings menu and in the top bar, just to enable you to quickly switch between the modes. So look out for that. Hopefully we'll get it for next release. As always with these things, no promises. OK, let's move on. So we've got a new screenshot UI for Fedora 36. This is something that we've wanted for a while. And as part of my day job, I take a lot of screenshots. So this is something that I've been using very heavily this week. And I've been really enjoying using it. Taking screenshots is so much easier now and such a pleasant experience compared to how it was. So it's really exciting for me personally to have this in. So just to refresh our memories before we get into the new experience. Obviously, the old way to take screenshots was primarily through shortcuts. We have different keyboard shortcuts for taking an area of the screen or copying to clipboard, screenshotting a window, I think. And that was the main way that people did screenshots. The way it works within the new UI, you just need one key. And that's the print screen. And you just press it once. And the capture is taken. And then you've dropped into this UI. And I've got a screencast of this in action now just show it in use in case no one's seen it. So let's just go into that now. And hopefully this is coming through OK. So it's hard to know where the quality. You press print screen and we're in this UI. And you've got this UI here for selecting an area of the screen. If you want to select an area, you can select an entire display. Or you can select an individual window. And when you switch into this mode, you get this choose a UI to pick the window you want. And the other thing that we have here is screen recording. So you can flip into that mode. And this is your recording UI. And here you can do an area if you just want to record an area. Or you can do the full screen. And in both modes, we have this toggle for you to show the point. So that's it. It looks fairly simple. But there's quite a lot there once you start getting into it. So the neat thing about the way this thing works is that when you press that print screen button, all the captures are immediately taken. So it takes an image of the full display of each window. And when you're dropped into that UI, that is essentially an editing UI. You're editing the captures that have already been taken at that point. And that's really cool. The main reason I find it to be really cool is that taking the capture is instantaneous. So often when you're taking a screenshot, it's something that's transient that's there that second and you want to capture it straight away. And for that moment, you've got to pause and think about which area you want to capture or which keyboard shortcut to use. That's not what you want to be doing at that moment. You just want to capture the thing and then worry about what to do with it afterwards. And that's what this UI allows. So that's something I find really handy about this. The other really nice thing about it is it allows you to be a bit more relaxed in the way you use the thing. The old approach with the shortcuts, it's a bit like a trial and error kind of approach. You would maybe capture an area and draw the rectangle and then maybe it wouldn't be quite right. So you go back and you do it again and you keep going through this process until you've got exactly what you wanted. With this new approach, you just press the button and then you've got the time to get it just how you'd like. And since I've been using this, I don't think I'm about to go back and try and take a screenshot again. It's always been a case of editing afterwards and then getting it just right and then it's done. So it's just more relaxed, it's less stressful. There are fewer areas involved. And then the other really cool thing about this is obviously the screen recording, which we didn't really expose before and we didn't have area screen recording in the past, which is just super useful. And in the past, I would personally, I'd use like a third-party app for this, but that has never felt very convenient and you might have reliability issues sometimes those apps wouldn't work very well. So now we have this and it's all right there available from Wonky built into the system and you can just use it when you want. So that's fantastic. So yeah, the new screenshot UI, I think that's a major highlight in F36. I'd encourage everyone to try it out, to try the different modes and the different ways that you can capture images with that. That's really great. We do have a few plans to improve the shortcuts there. I know some people are looking for more shortcuts to be able to use it like the old screenshots. So we do have some kind of legacy support there if you do just want to quickly use a shortcut instead. And I think we're going to be reviewing that to maybe adding to those. But I think that'll be something for F37. All right. So the final major thing I'm going to talk about here is GTK4. I'm going to talk about a few different aspects of GTK4 because I don't think a lot of people realize how big a deal it is. And what is going to mean for the desktop platform going forward. So I just wanted to talk a few different aspects of GTK4 here. And obviously GTK4 has been around for a while. It was actually released back in December 2020. But the reason that F36 is exciting from this perspective is that this is the first time we've seen applications migrating to GTK4 on mass. So for F36, we have a whole bunch of the core apps, the pre-installed apps that are using GTK4 now. So that's quite significant. So I'll just show you a few screenshots of these. So we have the software app that's in GTK4 now and the GTK4 version is the one at the top in the foreground. And the older GTK3 version, that's in the background. And the main thing to note here is the styling is slightly different. The GTK4 version is a bit lighter and flatter. The Settings app is another app that is using GTK4 by default in F36. Again, styling differences. You can see the lists are somewhat different here. It's worth noting that the GTK4 port of the Settings app was just a massive, massive undertaking. Just a huge amount of work. And not only was the application ported to GTK4, but a huge amount of the UI was refreshed and updated at the same time. So just looking at my notes, like the list of panels that had design updates is the application settings, the appearance settings, which was previously background, the display settings, regional language, and the user settings. So five of the settings panels were revamped to varying degrees. So a major piece of work there, also in Fedora 36. Final example of a GTK4 versus GTK3 app is just a calendar. I don't calculate a story. So you're looking at this and you're thinking, well, these apps look a little bit different. But the GTK4 and the port into GTK4 is much more than that. So GTK4 was about four years of development time. And it came slightly under a decade after the previous major GTK release, which was GTK3, which was in February 2011. So this is, in terms of historical terms, this is very significant release. And there's some very significant changes under the hood, which I think are significant for users and also for developers. And I'm going to talk about three of those. Number one, GPU rendering. So GTK4 apps do a lot of their graphics rendering on the GPU. Previously, this wasn't the case with GTK3. The rendering was done on the CPU. And so the obvious impact of this, everything gets faster, smoother, more efficient. And you'll notice this when you're using these GTK4 apps, it's fast. It's like it's really fast. Particularly things like scrolling, animations, and so on. So this is just really, really cool. And it's really exciting and, you know, something that people will hopefully be appreciating when they're using these GTK4 apps. And personally, I'm really excited about, you know, the next wave of these porting effort, like getting the vast majority of the desktop using GTK4, I think will be a very significant upgrade to the experience in terms of just the rendering speed and the smoothness of rendering. So this is pretty exciting. I'm pretty cool for the platform and the product as a whole. Second thing, similarly on speed and efficiency, GTK4 has these new capabilities for presenting lists and grids. These are new widgets which are replacing the old GTK3 view, which have been around since the GTK2 days. And these, there's a couple of things about these. You know, the first, these are modern GTK widgets. So you can style them how you want. You can embed other widgets and elements in them like you want. So there's a lot of flexibility there and you can make it look really nice. But the other thing is that these are super, super efficient. Like this is a screenshot of GTK4 demo. And you can see this grid has over 16 million cells in it. And you can just interact with it like normal. You don't notice. And the reason GTK4 can do this is that it's only creating widgets for what's actually being displayed on screen. So there's a data model which contains a record of all the items. And then GTK4 will work out what to actually build in terms of UI input on the screen and that enables it to be very, very efficient. So this isn't being used in many places at the moment. There's a few places. But the big thing about this is this is what's going to be used. And the file browser in Nautilus, when it puts GTK4, so we'll get, you know, pretty lists and grids that will be super, super fast. And, you know, this is an important capability. It is something that's going to enable us to see some pretty cool developments in future releases. OK. Third and final thing about GTK and also from the talk, I think, you know, GTK4 is very much kind of batteries included. It has this companion library called Libertator, which kind of brings with it like everything that an application developer might need to create. Really awesome apps really easily following the known design patterns and the design guidelines. So if you're writing an app in GTK3, you might be, you know, doing a lot of layout work yourself, you know, nesting all your boxes and widgets in them. And you might be able to do some custom widgets and custom styling to get things to look just the way you want. So with GTK4, a lot of that just goes away, right? Like everything is there out of the box with quite high level components that you can reuse very easily. So you want to do a preferences window. Well, there's a class for that. And it almost becomes just an exercise in declaring which preferences you want to expose and all the layouts and the widgets and everything. It's just done for you. So the applications that have been ported to GTK4, which are now included at a footer of 36, just a huge amount of components have just been deleted. It just isn't needed. All that custom code has just gone now. The other thing that we've got is we've got a lot of new widgets for the coming in for the first time, like, you know, modern design conventions, like we've got the toasts and different style buttons and progress indicators and so on. So as a user, what you will see is you'll see much more polished applications because there's less custom code, there's greater quality. And you'll also see more modern design conventions. So just the apps are better. It's essentially what I'm saying here. And the other thing is, you know, it makes it easier to make the app. So we're already seeing this having a big impact on the ecosystem, lots more desktop applications coming through, lots more of a community around these applications and, you know, go out and browse FlatHub or, you know, browse NomeCircle, for example, and just see the apps that are available there. It's really exciting time. There's never been a better time to be creating desktop apps for Linux, I don't think. Alan, we're three minutes left here in a few questions. You want to take a few of them? Yeah, why not? I'm going to end on this slide and I will just leave this here. So if you want to read the list of all the things that I would have liked to have talked about, but couldn't, you can. There's a lot there in the release, which it's a really strong release. It looks like a nice long list there. Yeah. All right. So the first question here actually is, is there going to be a contest for supplemental wallpapers again in the future? And I think there was to talk about that on the Fedora design list, too, is where that has been traditionally run. So if you're interested in that, I think Fedora design list is the place to go. Alan, do you know any more about that? Yeah, I mean, Mo had a call this week to talk about wallpaper planning. There's definitely plans to refresh the supplemental wallpapers this cycle. And I think there's definitely interest in running the competition again. I think the main thing is there needs to be a volunteer to take that on. I think everyone would love that to happen and will facilitate that, which is looking for a volunteer at the moment. It could be the person who asked this question. Good. That's how you get a volunteer to do things. So they've got a couple of screenshot questions here. The first one is how to change the storage location. Good question. I don't know, but I can find that out. All right. Well, the second one is, is there a lightweight editor to draw arrows, boxes around things? They're using Pinta instead of the built-in thing because of that. Are there other plans for that? There are designs. We would really like to have those capabilities built into the image viewer. And there is a new image viewer being worked on upstream. It's still very early days. But yeah, I agree. It would be great to have those capabilities out of the box. And we do have design work for that. And then someone also asks if video recording for windows rather than just area is planned or that works? Yeah. I don't know how you would do that. I suspect there are some technical limitations there, but I don't know if it says anything. And then someone asks the main differences between the console and the new terminal. I forget which one is new now and console is new. What advantages does the new one bring? So it has some new features, fairly small things, but nice or the same. It's supposed to start work properly. It has the header bar changes depending on the privilege level or whether it's a remote connection. Oh, that's kind of cool. There's a slightly nicer find UI in there, I think. So a lot of kind of UI polish, essentially. I think the other thing about console would be, it would perhaps give us a bit more flexibility in the future to add more, I suppose, kind of future-facing kind of features. We're very interested in integration with Git and with containers and those kind of things, which I suspect wouldn't be such a good fit for the existing terminal, but I think the new one might be a good space to explore those. I personally really liked, a long time ago, Owen presented a great thing called Purple Egg, which goes nicely with Silver Blue, I think, which is basically a console-integrated thing for managing containers, managing Toolbox, basically. I think for Silver Blue and those kind of things, having Toolbox integration into the console is going to be a huge thing. And I scared Alan away with that.