 Thanks for coming everyone. My name is Alan Day. I'm a designer in the desktop team of Red Hat. I'm a member of the Fedora Workstation Working Group, and I'm also active upstream in the Nome Projects, where I'm a UX designer and formerly a member of the Board of Directors of the Nome Foundation. I'm here today to talk about F35, Fedora 35 Workstation. This is a release party, so I'm going to keep it pretty light. I'm just going to talk about all the cool stuff in the new release. I think we had a really great release for F35, lots of nice new features. We had some really good feedback, positive publicity and so on. I'm just going to talk through some of the features that we landed, talk a little bit about how they work, who worked on them, what's involved, and hopefully you'll be able to get a bit of insight into what went into making F35 Workstation, but also how you can get the most out of it as a user. There's plenty to talk about and I've only got half an hour, so I'm going to go pretty quick. Once I've finished going through the slide deck and I can actually see something else, I'll tune into the Q&A, so if you've got any questions, feel free to pop them in there. I should say, I am a UX person, I'm a designer, so there's going to be that kind of slant of the talk. I will mention some of the under the hood kind of technical details, but that's not my specialism, so there's a bit of a kind of UX focus here, but I'll try and do a bit of the technical stuff as well. Don't ask me too many questions because I'm labelled to get that wrong. All my slides are screen shots because that's just the way we're running today. So power modes, this was one of the headline features I think for F35 Workstation, and you've got here a screenshot of the power settings as they appeared now in the new version, and you can get a sense of how this works, this feature works. We've got three settings, performance, balanced and power saver, the same three modes, they're accessible in the system status menu, in the top right, you can go in there and see which one is active and you can change between them. And you know, these do kind of like what it looks like they do, like performance mode makes your computer run faster, it also makes it use more electricity, and it makes it hotter and in my case noisier, I can tell when this is on because my fans start spinning. But this is useful if you're doing anything that's resource intensive like playing games or if you're kind of compiling software or something of that nature, this will make the performance faster or snappier and it's useful for that. Balanced is pretty much your standard performance, it's what you would expect your machine to run like if you weren't using any of these settings. And then power saver, you know, again it's somewhat obvious this will make your machine run a little bit slower, but it will save you power. If you're running on battery and you want to get the most out of your battery, if you put on power saver, it will run a bit slower. And you know, each of these three settings that the origin for this is more or less the capabilities of modern hardware, you know. These three modes are often available in laptops. Through the firmware is something that's made available to us by the vendors, by the hardware manufacturers. And this feature is hooking into that, is making that available, is making that pre-existing feature accessible and integrated into the rest of the experience. And if you're running Windows, you would already have this. So a lot of the work that went into this, it came about from the hardware enablement team, Red Hat, who, you know, that aiming to make sure that we have feature parity with Windows. So if you're using the same device with Windows and with Fedora, you all get access to all the capabilities of that device. And you know, we're working with partnerships with hardware vendors to make this happen, and you know, particularly working closely with Lenovo. That's something we're really positive about and is working really well. And this feature is an example of the kind of results of those kind of partnerships. So this is working with the firmware, working with the hardware. And what it's essentially doing is, you know, it's changing your punk speed. It makes the CPU run faster or slower. Power saver does a few extra things. We're not just relying on the firmware for this. We're trying to do the right thing in the rest of the system. So when power saver is active, we will not download software updates in the background because, you know, that uses power, so we won't do that. We'll be a bit more aggressive in dimming the screen and also blanking the screen and making it go to sleep because, again, you know, the screen is one of the main things that uses power in the device. So we're trying to do the right thing. And the other thing to say on that note is, you know, although these three settings are available and you can switch through them as you'd like, this is expected to work automatically as much as possible because, you know, while somebody might want to manage this themselves, often you're going to forget and we want this to work by itself as you would want it to. So for performance mode, what that means is automatically enabling that when you start to do a resource-intensive activity. So, like saying the gaming example, when you launch your game, you want performance mode to automatically enable. And then when you finish playing your game, we want the performance mode to go back down to balanced. And we have some initial support for this in F-35, but it's going to need building out. It's going to need a bit more work. So that's very much the ambition. And the same is true with PowerSaver. So what we will do is when, if you're running low on battery, then PowerSaver will automatically turn on. And then when you plug in the AC, it will go back to balanced. So, you know, one headline feature of F-35 is that it is more, you will get more life out of your battery. It performs better in low-power situations, which I think is a great improvement as the kind of thing that people want to see from their machines. They just want it to work. They want to get the most from their hardware. And, you know, I think kind of PowerSaving is definitely something where there's more games to be made. And having this in place, this is something that we can build on and make more and more of the experience respond to dynamically to the battery charge level. Okay. So that was PowerMokes, the first of quite a few new features that we had in F-35. The other, one of the other big things that landed for F-35 was a revamped software application. So this is like the app store where you can go and browse apps and install them and install your updates and all that kind of thing. And, you know, a lot of work went into this for the latest release. You know, pretty much every part of the UI was improved in some way. So what you can see here in this screenshot, you've got the landing page. This is the first screen you see when you start the app. And this got an update. So you can see we have these six new categories there, like create, work, play, so on. They replaced a previous longer set of categories, which were a bit more functional and planar and appearance. So this is much more engaging. It looks nicer. And it's easier to use because you have fewer categories to search through. It's less digging. And it's, you know, it's more engaging. The other thing you can see that we did here, we changed the presentation of the app tiles down at the bottom there. So they now include a description of each app, which previously we just had an icon and a name, which made it, it wasn't always easy to know which app, what an app did. So now you can easily see that with this information. Another major area of the UI that got updated were these application detail pages. Now I know this screenshot is big and it's a bit hard to make out the detail, but hopefully it will give you a bit of an overview. So this was completely transformed again. You know, we've got a bigger icon, bigger title, bigger screenshots that you can easily pick through. Then when you get down, you get to this kind of tile-based layouts, which what that's doing is it's trying to present each app in a way that's kind of engaging. It's meaningful. It's turning all the metadata that we have about that app into something that you can easily scan and get a sense of what that app is like. So we've got tiles for the size of the download, for the commissions that the app has, what kind of form factors it's appropriate for and the age rating. Each of these you can click on and get more details if you want to dig into the metadata. We've also got tiles to show you the release history so you can see what was new in the latest version. You can get information about whether the app is a free open-source app or whether it's proprietary and what the license is. And then handy links to get to the websites or to nades or get involved. And altogether, I think this just gives you a much more engaging presentation of each app. It's easier to scan. It's easier to read. It's overall just a nicer way to learn about the apps that are available to install. And I think this turned out really well. There was a lot of work. There's a lot going on here, but I think it's a really nice way to find out about the apps. I don't have screenshots of everything that was changed for F35 here, but the repository settings window, that was completely revamped. All the other bits of UI like the installed list and the updates, that was all completely revamped. And under the hood, there were efficiency improvements and some stability work that went on as well. So altogether, this was a big effort and I think this experience is better than it ever has been before. As we've been testing this, we've seen that there are some issues outstanding and there are a few kind of reliability problems there. Those are going to be looked at. There's a plan in place for that and we're hoping that with F36, those will be ironed out, fingers crossed. So I think we're on a really good path with this and obviously it's a really important part of the experience. So it's good that this is getting the attention that it deserves. There's a solid release for F35. Speaking of software install, something that we did a lot of work on in the Workstation Working Group was the third-party repositories. And in case you're not aware of what this is, these are some extra repositories that we make available for users to enable. And it's to cover those cases where there are common things that people really need to install or often need to install, which for one reason or another, Fedora isn't able to provide themselves. So it's things like Google Chrome or the NVIDIA driver, the proprietary NVIDIA driver. And all of this is optional. It's all opt-in, but particularly I think for new users who may be aren't aware of all the third-party repositories that are able to go out and manually install, this is really good, right? Because it means that you can start using Fedora, you can enable these repositories, and you can get access to pretty much everything that you might need. There's none of those missing pieces, and it just makes Workstation much more accessible to a wider audience. So for F35, we've improved this feature. We changed the way that it works. We've changed the way that the repositories themselves are enabled. And that means that we can have this screenshot, which is the page in the initial setup. That's the thing that you go through after you've installed Workstation. And that makes it much easier to enable these repositories. You don't have to go and dig for it after installation. It's right there. One click and move on and you're done. So that's really nice. The other thing we've done is we've expanded the set of apps that are available through the third-party repos. We now bring in a small selection of apps from FlatHub. That includes things like, I think, Google Teams, Microsoft Teams, sorry, and Skype, and I can't remember the others, but there's a handful of common apps there that people often need to install, which now, if people want, again, this is opt-in. You don't have to use it, and it's disabled by default, but if people want it there, one click, and they can have access to those apps. And now that we've got the framework for this installed, I think in future releases, we'll start to add more apps to that list. So you'll get access to more and more apps that are not in the main Fedora repos. And I should add, these aren't just proprietary apps. A good number of them are, but there are some open source ones in there as well, which for one reason or another, we're not able to have in the main Fedora repositories. Okay, time check. Okay, I need to move a bit quicker. Multitasking. Another new feature for F35. Nice one. People seem to really like this. This is a new settings panel. You can see the screenshot of it here. And this contains common settings for, to do with launching apps, working with Windows, and working with WorkSpaces. And all of the settings that are included in the settings panel are settings that previously existed. And we're actually supposed to, they had a settings key. They were expected to work. And if they weren't working correctly, then that would be considered a bug and someone would look at those and resolve that issue. The only thing was, we didn't expose these settings in the settings app by default. So by introducing the settings panel, all we're doing is, we're making it easier for people that were already using these settings. It means that they don't have to go and use a third-party app, or they don't have to use the command line. So it's just less work. The other thing we're doing is, we're making, we're advertising the fact that these settings exist because people might not be aware of all of them. And these are the things that are useful. It's going to say the hot corner example. Some people have issues with accidentally triggering that, depending on what kind of input device you're using or your motor control, that can be an issue. So it makes sense to allow people to disable that. Or the same with this active screen edges setting. This is the thing where if you drag a window to the side of the screen or to the top, it'll resize it, which is a great feature, something that most people use, but with some multi-monitor configurations that can become an issue. So here you can easily disable that if it's getting in your way for some reason. So this is just a way of, packaging up and presenting features that we already had in a nice way. People seem to really appreciate that. It's just a nice enhancement. And on the development side, not a massive amount of work to do, all the plumbing already existed for this. Okay, what's next? Mobile network, yes. So this is a new settings panel for mobile networks. This is, you've got 3G or 4G or 2G modem. There was previously, we previously had settings for this to enable you to use that feature. It was kind of old and a bit clunky, and it didn't have some of the standard features that people tend to expect from this, like particularly based on what you have on your phone. So that old settings panel has been completely replaced by this new one, which is, it's more featureful, it's got the kind of settings that you'd expect, and it's just much easier to use altogether, just a nice enhancement. This will only appear if you have the necessary hardware, if there is this kind of modem present in the device. That could either be integrated, you know, you've got laptops with, you know, then you can put a SIM card into, it will show up then. But it also will show up if you have a dongle, which is good to know that, you know, we've got you covered in this kind of situation. If you don't ordinarily use this kind of network, but, you know, it's an option for that, you know, for you if you need it. And, you know, personally, I find myself in this situation. I don't use a mobile network on my laptop. Today, I haven't used it for years, but there was one occasion where I was stuck, I was in a bind, I didn't have Wi-Fi, and I had to get online. And so, you know, I went out when I was able to purchase a dongle and make it work. So even if you don't use this every day, it's great to know that it's there for your work and, you know, you've got easy toggles there just to turn the data on and off or to control data roaming or to change the network and so on. And that's an important capability to have, and that has now been enhanced for F35. So that's great. Okay, I know I'm running out of time here. I will try and leave time for questions. I think this might be my last screen shot. This is a new app for F35. We pre-install it by default. It's, I think it goes in the utilities folder if you want to look for it, I'll point it out. And this is connections. This is a new remote desktop client. And, you know, the main idea behind this is that it's really easy to use. So, you know, the idea is that you can just put in an address and click connect and it will work. It supports the main, the main protocols for remote desktops. So I'll do IDP and it has VNC. So you can use it to connect to the Linux desktops. You can use it to connect to Windows desktops. And, you know, simple, easy to use, straightforward, included in the box ready to go. You know, there are other remote desktop clients and popular ones out there. You might be using one, you know, that's fine. That's great. You know, that's good things I have. The main difference with connections is just that easy to use. You don't have to go through and fill in a load of configuration options before you use a connection. And I think that's good and that is what makes it appropriate to be in the default app set. Connections was actually previously, well, this functionality was previously part of Boxes, which is principally for virtual machines. And Boxes takes that similar approach, where you can just give it an ISO or tell it which OS you want to use and it will just create a VM for you. And this is the same for remote desktop. The reason this was split out into a separate app is that people weren't quite finding this in Boxes. People were thinking of Boxes as being just for VMs. So we had some great functionality there that people weren't aware of. We're hoping that by splitting this out into a separate app, more people will become aware of it, more people will use it and we can also develop this feature sets independently and a little bit more. So watch this space for this because I'm sure it will improve in future releases. Phew, okay. I've got a few minutes left. I've must have been talking about your exchanges. I'm a UX person. Sorry, not sorry. I'll mention some of the other technical changes that I went into Workstation for F35. And the pipe wire and wire plumber were a big focus for this release. Now pipe wire first introduced into Fedora for F34. And we all know that the multimedia stack, the audio stack, it can be a little bit fickle and there's been a few issues there that has really come on very well and a very impressive development effort there just to resolve those little niggles that were there early on. I think pipe wire had a really strong release for F35. And of course we added wire plumber. So for those who don't know, pipe wire is the server, it's the multimedia framework and wire plumber is the session manager. So this is what interprets the policy for what happens when you have different multimedia streams and different devices coming and going. And this is kind of exciting for Workstation. We're not really making use of it yet, but I'm sure we will in future releases and it will enable us to have much smarter handling of multimedia devices and streams and so on. So you can imagine, the kind of behaviors that you have on your phone, right? Like an alarm goes off and maybe you want to drop the volume of the music you're listening to, for example, those kind of smarter behaviors, which wire plumber promises to make pretty much easier to implement. Another big piece of news was the improved wiring support that's come in with the Nvidia driver. This has been a long time coming. Those of us at Red Hat, we've been talking to Nvidia about this for a long time. We have a strong working relationship. That's bearing fruit now. So for F35, I hope I'm getting this right. I believe there is now a Waylon session available when using the Nvidia driver for the first time. I think that's off by default. You have to opt into it, but it is there and we're hoping that this will grow and give the start of something really good because it's really important to be able to use Waylon, which is our default display server with the proprietary on the Nvidia driver. Final thing I'll mention very briefly is high resolution scroll wheel support. So this is kind of scroll wheels that we're scrolling now. I have lots of stops on them and we've got some initial support for that into the input and I'm out of time. So I'm now going to stop. I've been talking very quickly. I apologize. I see I'm on half an hour. There is one question. Do I have time to answer that? Or do I need to vacate the room and I can talk to Richard afterwards? Okay. Okay. We've got one question. Power save mode. Is it possible to develop the tweaking of power settings even more? I guess that depends what kind of tweaking you mean. Maybe we could just have a conversation about that. There is a lot of discussion going on in the moment about battery charge levels. One of the things that we want to do is give people the ability to increase the longevity of their batteries by changing the threshold to which you charge it. So right now we just charge up to 100% all the time. We want to introduce settings for that and behaviors for that to have a lower threshold. And again, that is similar to the power modes in that it's a firmware setting. It's something that's provided to us by the hardware vendors. And it's often something that is available on Windows, often through software that the vendor provides themselves and we're aiming to make sure that we have feature parity with that. So I don't know for certain, but there's a lot of design work, conversation and conversation with the developers happening with that. And I'm hopeful that we'll get there to the next release or two, but no promises. I don't know if that's the kind of tweaking immune records. We can talk about that long article. Okay, I'm over time. Sorry if that was a lot of talking and I went very quickly. We hope that you really love F35 Workstation. A lot of work went into it. I'm really happy with it. We'd love to hear feedback. We're already planning F36 Workstation. So if there's anything that anyone would like to see, let us know. Thank you very much. Enjoy the rest of the party.