We had a good call with Alejandro and Javier from Slimbook yesterday. The proposal is to have a Fedora-branded laptop, available to purchase from Slimbook. The WG has given initial approval for this to go forward. @mattdm is going to follow-up on the specific trademark arrangements.

Some potentially important points that came up during the discussion:

• @mattdm expressed a desire for the preinstalled version of Fedora Workstation to be the same as the official ISO - no changes, additional apps, etc
• Slimbook provides some 3rd party kernel modules - used for some additional utilities that can be installed, howdy (facial recognition). We'd ideally like those to be upstreamed, but if they aren't, the preference would be to have them available to install as opposed to preinstalled.
• Slimbook do test their hardware with stable Fedora releases, but not unstable development versions.
• The device has NVIDIA graphics. Nouveau works with it.
• Secure boot can be enabled/disabled, based on our preference.

Working group actions:

• Decide who the best team or person is to receive testing hardware from Slimbook
• Write up our expectations for Slimbook
• Follow up on howday integration - #272

Some points to cover in the working group summary:

• We're happy for Fedora platforms to be used to promote these hardware devices, if they fulfill our requirements
• Hardware support must be good (applies to the current Fedora version, plus the previous version)
• If Fedora workstation is preinstalled, it should be the same as the official ISO. Third party kernel modules should be available to install, but not preinstalled.
• We will help with QA where we can, but Slimbook need to take responsibility for this.
• Development versions of Fedora should receive testing prior to release.
• Secure boot should be enabled by default.

Anything else?

Should we consider adding Slimbook's repos to the 3rd party repos?

Secure boot should be enabled by default.

I think we can't mandate this until we have the NVIDIA driver situation in hand. That said, for systems supporting secure boot, we should endeavor to have our UEFI certificates enrolled in the UEFI firmware out of the box, in addition to the Microsoft 3rd party UEFI certificate.

Microsoft is starting to ask OEMs/ODMs/board makers to disable their 3rd party certificate by default on Secure Boot supporting systems. This obviously creates problems for loading Fedora on said machines if our certificate isn't already enrolled/trusted/etc.

Should we consider adding Slimbook's repos to the 3rd party repos?

We might need a fedora-oem-repositories package that would contain these things. It'd have subpackages for OEMs we're working with to provide extra stuff. For example, fedora-oem-slimbook-repositories would be a subpackage that would be available, and fedora-third-party would detect we're running on a Slimbook device and install that package to enable those repositories.

• Hardware support must be good (applies to the current Fedora version, plus the previous version)

Why do we care about the previous Fedora version, if the device will ship the current version?

• Hardware support must be good (applies to the current Fedora version, plus the previous version)

Why do we care about the previous Fedora version, if the device will ship the current version?

This was a straw man proposal and I haven't thought about it all that much, but the idea was that when the next Fedora release comes around, that should be known to be good. By always having two versions that are QA'd, there's a rolling window in which people can upgrade from one version to the other.

• @mattdm expressed a desire for the preinstalled version of Fedora Workstation to be the same as the official ISO - no changes, additional apps, etc

Yeah, specifically:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Legal:Trademark_guidelines#OEM_pre-loads_of_unmodified_Fedora_software

Note that we do have a carve-out for documentation, which can be added to (in this case) /opt/slimbook.

If this is exactly as shipped in a default Fedora Workstation, this doesn't even need Council approval for the trademark. Modifying the installed set is possible with approval (https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Legal:Trademark_guidelines#New_combinations_of_unmodified_Fedora_software).

I think we want formal approval in any case here, for logo use on the websites (both ours and Slimbook's), and just to make it official.

This was a straw man proposal and I haven't thought about it all that much, but the idea was that when the next Fedora release comes around, that should be known to be good. By always having two versions that are QA'd, there's a rolling window in which people can upgrade from one version to the other.

So you really want hardware support for the current and next Fedora version, not the previous version. I agree that would be a desirable goal. Anyway, hopefully things do not break very often.

I've asked @adamwill , and unfortunately it doesn't seem like we have existing documentation on what "hardware support" actually means in practice.

Testing hardware should be sent to the QA team in Brno. @frantisekz , are you a good contact for that?

@frantisekz , are you a good contact for that?

The answer to this is yes!

I've emailed Alejandro from Slimbook today, with a summary of the working group's requirements and recommendations. With that, I think we can call this issue done (at least for now).

FWIW, in the past Slimbook shipped proprietary "source-available" applications in their default installations:
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/hadess/power-profiles-daemon#slimbookbattery

I think there should be considerations about any configuration changes they use to get to a certain level of hardware support to be upstreamed so a stock Fedora works just as well.

Looks like there are responsiveness problems on our end, see: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org/message/PMUYOUSLBG4AOXG5SDUOXGKIQCWFHQWO/

Looks like there are responsiveness problems on our end, see: https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/pull/4531.

What does this have to do with Slimbook? I'm not sure how that connects.

Sigh, that's a copy/paste error. Correct link is: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org/message/PMUYOUSLBG4AOXG5SDUOXGKIQCWFHQWO/

Looks like there are responsiveness problems on our end, see: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/desktop@lists.fedoraproject.org/message/PMUYOUSLBG4AOXG5SDUOXGKIQCWFHQWO/

This was resolved and things are moving ahead

I don't think we need this issue open. There isn't anything waiting on the WG and I think the Slimbooks are moving ahead without the need for our involvement.

We're going to need to promote it once it's available, right? And we need to know when that's happening too?

We're going to need to promote it once it's available, right? And we need to know when that's happening too?

Yes and yes.

Probably doesn't require keeping a ticket open when there's no action item for the WG, though.

This issue has been migrated to Fedora Forge:
https://forge.fedoraproject.org/workstation/tickets/issues/317

Please continue any further discussion there.