Fast user switching from Davyd's GNOME 2.14 preview

[Chris Tyler]

Bill Nottingham <notting at redhat.com> wrote:
> Subject: Re: Fast user switching from Davyd's GNOME 2.14 preview
> To: For testers of Fedora Core development releases
> 	<fedora-test-list at redhat.com>
> Message-ID: <20060220164325.GA17008 at devserv.devel.redhat.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
> 
> Michel Salim (michel.salim at gmail.com) said: 
> > Davyd Madeley has released his latest GNOME preview:
> > http://www.gnome.org/~davyd/gnome-2-14/
> > 
> > and it has some interesting features, such as the new fast-user
> > switching interface resembling OS X's. I recall previous incarnations
> > of this feature being explicitly removed from Fedora's GNOME; would
> > that explain why as of now this feature is absent from the RPMs in
> > -devel ?
> 
> Yes - basically, without finding a good, solid solution to device
> ownership (groups aren't it), having fast user switching on is
> very problematic.
> 
> Bill

An argument in favor of including fast user switching in Fedora:

I do a fair bit of work with multiseat systems, and I'm composing this
on a 3-seat FC4 box (one CPU, 3 video cards/sound cards/keyboards/mice).
I think we're going to see a lot more multiseat systems in the future,
because X11R7 has made it much easier to set them up and because they
make a lot of sense in certain contexts - including libraries,
classrooms, kiosks, developing nations, even home offices.

There are a lot of design decisions currently being made on the desktop
which reflect a single-user paradigm, and which do not work well with
any multiuser graphical setup, whether multiseat, LTSP, fast user
switching (FUS), or some other scheme (such as browser-based VNC
access).

One simple example: when an audio CD is inserted into an FC4 multiseat
system, gnome-cd starts by default on _all_ of the user's desktops. One
of the processes is able to grab the drive and play the tunes, but all
of the other gnome-cd processes start consuming 100% CPU. This is an
obvious problem and there's probably a simple fix - at least for the CPU
usage spike - but the gnome-cd developers may never have considered this
use case nor encountered the problem in testing.

FUS is by far the simplest and least expensive (effort, hardware) way to
test out simultaneous desktop users (true, they're not using the desktop
simultaneously, but the desktops are running simultaneously). By
including FUS capability in Fedora Core, we could expose more people to
the issues affecting multiple desktops and hopefully get some light
shining on what are presently viewed as corner cases.

In other words, we'll see FUS working well sooner if we turn it on now
when it mostly-works rather than waiting for it to get fixed first; all
multiuser configurations will benefit from the wider exposure of the
community to multiple simultaneous desktops, not just FUS; and we'll
reduce the number of single-user design and coding decisions that will
later have to be retrofitted for multiuser operation.

--
Chris Tyler