As far as I know, it's supposed to be included. Did we goof up somewhere?

I understood Fedora Media Writer to be primarily intended for Windows and macOS users. I don't remember any discussions on whether to include it in Workstation.

My $0.02: anyone who wants to use this app should install it. The image writing functionality is redundant with GNOME Disks. The main benefit of Fedora Media Writer is to make it easier to find and download particular Fedora images, but installing operating systems (even Fedora) is not a use-case that we need to cater to since this is not something users will generally need to do. And the Workstation WG has historically promoted the x86_64 live Workstation image above all others, so that's really the only one that should be easily-accessible IMO.

Also, if we do this, it would be the only Qt app installed by default. There's something to be said for consistency.

Perhaps it could be featured in GNOME Software?

I understood Fedora Media Writer to be primarily intended for Windows and macOS users. I don't remember any discussions on whether to include it in Workstation.

Pretty much all the spins include it for the purpose of making it easy to share Fedora with other people. I'm honestly surprised that we don't include it on Workstation for that purpose.

Also, if we do this, it would be the only Qt app installed by default. There's something to be said for consistency.

We already need to have the Qt libraries and such installed so that Qt applications that are installed after the fact are correctly themed. So I don't consider this a terribly good reason.

It is not about dependencies. As Michael said: its a tool we offer to people who don't have Fedora and want an easy way to get it. If you already have Fedora, you don't need it.

I see that there is already software with redundant features in fedora workstation, like disk usage for example, one can see that on nautilus, on gparted on gnome disk... And all these are shipped as default.

Why not ship Fedora Media Writer? It would made more easy to share fedora with your FRIENDS, and that, specialy with a newcomer, is fantastic. Think of a new fedora user, who started to love the distro and the community, and use fedora workstation. That new user would be pleased to show his friends how easy to flash a usb with Fedora Media Writer (not with dd, or ventoy or balena), or to download a specific iso with that FEATURES rich piece of software. In that way it covers 2 F's from the fedora four foundations.

So I think it would be nice to ship Fedora Media Writer with Fedora Workstation by default.

We've been trying to gradually reduce the amount of software shipped by default.

I see that there is already software with redundant features in fedora workstation, like disk usage for example, one can see that on nautilus, on gparted on gnome disk... And all these are shipped as default.

Neither nautilus nor Disks are designed for easily resolving disk usage issues. We do not ship gparted.

Any other opinions here?

Any other opinions here?

I can see both sides to be honest. On the one hand, it is good to promote Fedora adoption and distribution. On the other, it's yet another app and I don't feel that the quality of media writer is all that great.

So we seem to have consensus to include fedora-media-writer after all, but we don't have agreement yet on whether we should go ahead and add it to F35 now or whether we should require particular UI improvements first. We'll discuss more at next week's meeting.

In the meantime, action item for Allan is to document UI issues here, or point us to existing documentation of the issues elsewhere.

At least it would give a reason for shipping qt5 by default in Workstation. :-)

I want to emphasise that this comment is not intended to be critical of any individuals. I'm just trying to describe the situation as I see it from a UXD perspective.

@jimmac and I did a UI review of FWM back in December, and since then a lot of the issues we identified have been addressed. That's good! However, while the app is better than it was, a lot of issues remain. From a brief test I can see...

• Awkward small border radius on lists
• Incorrect icon for "view more", with a surprising hover effect
• Awkward list spacing
• Non-standard transitions when opening list items
• Combobox lists:
  • Lack of padding around list items
  • Selection highlight exceeds the list boundaries
• Search box:
• List below is cut off without a border when it scrolls
• Pre-filled text isn't cleared when the entry is focused
• No search icon
• No clear button when text is entered
• Odd cut off scroll bar in the main view
• ...

I could go on and on.

Many of the issues relate to styling and widgetry. My understanding is that the styling is unique to FMW - it's not using the adwaita-qt theme. So any fixes there would be to FMW alone, and it would be a fairly major project.

The alternative would be to port the app to Qt 6, so that it would be possible to use adwaita-qt. The problem here is that adwaita-qt isn't in great shape either, in my view.

Part of the issue, I think, is that that the current app design is fairly complex and tries to do a lot. A less ambitious design would probably give us better quality, particularly when it comes to providing a good experience on Windows and Mac.

The other option to consider might be to use one of the standard KDE themes for Qt apps, and stop using adwaita-qt. Obviously that's a bigger discussion.

I want to emphasise that this comment is not intended to be critical of any individuals. I'm just trying to describe the situation as I see it from a UXD perspective.

@jimmac and I did a UI review of FWM back in December, and since then a lot of the issues we identified have been addressed. That's good! However, while the app is better than it was, a lot of issues remain. From a brief test I can see...

• Awkward small border radius on lists
• Incorrect icon for "view more", with a surprising hover effect
• Awkward list spacing
• Non-standard transitions when opening list items
• Combobox lists:
• Lack of padding around list items
• Selection highlight exceeds the list boundaries
• Search box:
• List below is cut off without a border when it scrolls
• Pre-filled text isn't cleared when the entry is focused
• No search icon
• No clear button when text is entered
• Odd cut off scroll bar in the main view
• ...

I could go on and on.

Many issues can be fixed, some of them were designed by someone, no idea who, maybe @jimmac? But it was meant to look like that (transitions, view more button, etc.).

Many of the issues relate to styling and widgetry. My understanding is that the styling is unique to FMW - it's not using the adwaita-qt theme. So any fixes there would be to FMW alone, and it would be a fairly major project.

The alternative would be to port the app to Qt 6, so that it would be possible to use adwaita-qt. The problem here is that adwaita-qt isn't in great shape either, in my view.

No, Qt 6 won't allow us to use Adwaita-qt. FMW is written in QML and Adwaita-qt doesn't have a QML style. The style used in FMW is based on Adwaita-qt, it uses colors, sizing etc. from it. So if there are some sizing wrong, we can fix it in Adwaita-qt and it should be fixed also in FMW.

Part of the issue, I think, is that that the current app design is fairly complex and tries to do a lot. A less ambitious design would probably give us better quality, particularly when it comes to providing a good experience on Windows and Mac.

The other option to consider might be to use one of the standard KDE themes for Qt apps, and stop using adwaita-qt. Obviously that's a bigger discussion.

I don't think that's a good idea, first of all it brings KDE dependencies and I'm still conviced that people appreciate if their Qt apps look similar to Gtk apps. You say Adwaita-qt is not in good shape, yet many people use it without complaining. It is not perfect, I agree with that, but it is not meant to be. It's a one man show, there is no other contributor and I don't have only Adwaita-qt to take care of so while there is a room for improvements, I'm proud of the result.

You can compare old Adwaita-qt with current version. I think for 99% of usecases it's just okay.

Old one (light): https://jgrulich.fedorapeople.org/adwaita/adwaita-light-old-version.png
New one (light): https://jgrulich.fedorapeople.org/adwaita/adwaita-light.png
Old one (dark): https://jgrulich.fedorapeople.org/adwaita/adwaita-dark-old-version.png
New one (dark): https://jgrulich.fedorapeople.org/adwaita/adwaita-dark.png

@jgrulich, just to repeat what I said previously - my intention here isn't to criticise anyone, particularly you. There's responsibility all round and I'm sure you're doing a great job. This is just an attempt to work through the issues I see and figure out the best way forward.

I certainly could provide a list of all the small issues in FMW, and we could work through them, but it's going to be a fair task and I can't help but wonder if that's the right approach.

This is especially the case since the styling situation is challenging from a maintenance perspective.

It was incorrect of me to say that adwaita-qt is in bad shape: I'm sorry for that. But I think we can say that there are noticeable visual issues when using KDE apps with that theme. (When we assess adwaita-qt I think it's important to look at how it performs with actual apps and not the widget factory.)

We discussed this at two different meetings and wound up with scattered opinions, so we decided to just vote on it.

Agreed: ship Fedora Media Writer as-is in F35: +5:3:-2

Action: Michael to add it to comps.

Uhh looks like user reviews are pretty negative, lots of users complaining that the app does not launch:

@jgrulich have you tested the Fedora flatpak? That's what users would get by default if installing via GNOME Software. (Of course, we won't preinstall the flatpak version. We'll preinstall the RPM version.)

Comps PR: https://pagure.io/fedora-comps/pull-request/644

I have tested it now and it works for me. I don't know if it was broken in the past as I haven't received any bug for it.

@kalev can we add the FMW Flatpak to the list of Flatpak that are preinstalled on Silverblue?

Sure, let me do that.

@jgrulich have you tested the Fedora flatpak? That's what users would get by default if installing via GNOME Software. (Of course, we won't preinstall the flatpak version. We'll preinstall the RPM version.)

I've tested now the Fedora and Flathub version and both worked for me (was trying F34 beta and F33 ISOs)

https://pagure.io/pungi-fedora/pull-request/1028 to pre-install mediawriter flatpak on Silverblue

I've usually used the Flatpak version which worked well.

Comps PR got merged so maybe we can close this one now.

Thanks, let's close it then.