Workstation/Technical Specification

Core Services and Features

This section should describe the core services of the platform and their intended use. The items here should refer back to the PRD for a functional justification.

Service management

Systemd provides ways to control and monitor the activity and status of system services, resources they require, etc. System services are expected to provide systemd units.

Logging

The systemd journal will be used as the local storage backend for system logs. For 'managed' scenarios (e.g the 'developer in a large organization' use case of the PRD), it will be possible to collect the logs in a centralized location, off the local machine.

Applications and services can either use the syslog API or the journal APIs for their logging.

Session tracking

Logind will be used as the session tracking facility.

Account handling

SSSD is providing the backing storage for identity management. For 'managed' scenarios (e.g. the 'developer in a large organization' use case of the PRD), it will be possible to configure it to rely on a directory service for this information. The accountsservice is providing a D-Bus interface for user account information; this may be integrated into SSSD at some point.

Depending on their needs, application and services can either use the POSIX APIs (getpwent(), etc) or the accountsservice D-Bus interface to obtain user information.

Miscellaneous system information

System locale, timezone, hostname, etc. will be managed through the services provided by systemd for this purpose.

Display manager

gdm will be used as the display manager. It is responsible for showing a login screen on each seat. It will be able to launch both X-based sessions and Wayland sessions.

Desktop environments are expected to make themselves known as an available session option on the login screen by dropping a .desktop file into /usr/share/xsessions (or its wayland equivalent).

Other facilities provided by the display manager include screen unlock authentication and user switching.

Accessibility

The accessibility support in the workstation includes a screen reader, a high-contrast theme and a zoom capability, amongst others. The screen reading is provided through orca, which runs as a session service and requires the at-spi infrastructure. Applications are expected to provide suitable information to the screen reader via the toolkit's accessibility support. Applications are also expected to work acceptably in the high-contrast theme. The zoom is implemented in the desktop shell and does not need any application support.

Appearance

The workstation will ship with a single theme, which will have support for the included toolkits: gtk3, qt and gtk2. Applications are expected to work well with this theme, as well as with the high-contrast theme that is used for accessibility. The theme will include a dark variant that applications can opt into using (this is most suitable for certain content-focused applications). The theme also includes an icon theme that provides named icons according to the icon-naming spec, plus symbolic variants.

Firewall

TBD

Core Package list

List the core packages of the product. This list includes all packages that will be shipping on the core media. This is the mandatory minimal list of packages that needs to be installed on a system at all times for it to qualify as a Fedora workstation install. This package list will be the priority focus for QA and bug fixing.

Package list

systemd, gdm, gnome-shell, gtk3, qt plus their dependencies

Policies for software add-ons

General rules and policies for how extra software is installed and what requirements are put on that software.

Engineering Roadmap

Not sure if we want this section here or if we should just make this a pure description document and put the implementation roadmap in a separate document.