Status for the release

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

I've been playing around a bit with boxes as a user, trying to see how
well it works in day-to-day use and if there is anything we need to
focus on for the 3.6 release. Here is a list of the primary concerns I
have with the current status.


One issue is that you can't change the ram/disk size during the install.
I ran into issues where the default size of ram was to small to be able
to install, and it doesn't always pick a disk size that is what I wanted
either. This really needs to be implemented, and we even have a design
for it:

https://github.com/gnome-design-team/gnome-mockups/raw/master/boxes/boxes-install5.png https://github.com/gnome-design-team/gnome-mockups/raw/master/boxes/boxes-install5.5.png 



There are some issues with the scaling of the VM display. The long term
goal is that any boxes-installed vm should have the right guest drivers
to allow guest resize in a way that the guest always have the same
resolution as the boxes window. This doesn't seem to work quite
right at the moment (at least with a rawhide guest). It resizes when i
resize the window, but to a somewhat smaller resolution, and then
scaling it up a bit, making things slightly fuzzy.

Even worse is when the guest does *not* have the right drivers/guest to
allow resizing. Then it essentially picks a random resolution (whatever
the window size is when the vm boots or installs or something) and then
we always stretch the display. This makes it impossible to resize the
window to get 1:1 pixel size, or even just the right aspect ratio. IMHO
we should *never* magnify the VM output, only ever scale it down if it
doesn't fit the current window (as scrolling a VM is a total pain).



I feel that I don't really have enough control over the virtual boxes.
This has several aspects:

* Its very hard to read out the state of the boxes in the icon view. Is
  the machine turned off, or is it in some hibernated mode? If its
  turned off the screenshot still may display a desktop with running
  apps yet when you click it you start at the bios boot. We really need
  to better convey the different non-running states.

* When I click a non-running box it may take quite some time to start
  it, but there is no information about what is happening (restoring 
  from hibernation, starting vm, authentication or whatnot). 
  The design mockups in:
   http://fedorapeople.org/~jimmac/gnome3/Boxes-login.webm
  Shows a label in the toolbar during these phases which sounds like
  a good way to give more feedback here.

* Sometimes my boxes freeze or get into some weird state where I can't
  do anything with them. In this case I would like to just force a
  reboot or a power off, but there is nowhere in boxes where I can
  currently do this. Instead I have to start virt-manager in order to
  get control back over my vm.



Its too easy to accidentally get the top-of-screen toolbar when in
fullscreen mode. A lot of OSes have things at the top, like the
gnome-shell hot corner or the unity menu-at-top. We need to make it
harder to trigger this during normal VM use.