I’ve tried Fedora 33 in a VM recently. Gnome 3 has been updated to 3.38 there.
I was hoping to test the Parental Controls feature which is announced in 3.38 release notes. However, I was unable to find anything related to that fuctionality.
Steps:
Create the first admin user.
Create a second regular user.
Open users settings under admin user.
The announcement says, there should be a new UI for the Parental Controls.
So, my question is whether it’s not in Fedora (yet?) or it’s not im Gnome at the moment?
Hello @lig and welcome to the Community. Please read the stuff in #start-here category when you have the time.
Well. I think you are fine with the fact that Fedora 33 is still pre-beta, so it is difficult to find support here. In addition, bugs are expected.
As a rule of thumb, you should install Rawhide, pre-beta and beta releases only if you want to participate in bug hunting
However, GNOME is composed by different pieces. Each piece could be a different package (i.e. the new GNOME Tour app, GNOME Maps, GNOME Web aka Epiphany, etc.) developed under the GNOME umbrella, but not a core part of the desktop environment. Like any package, a software could be installed by default or not in the distribution. In the same way, the distribution maintainers can decide as well to include or not some GNOME functionality.
In this case, if I’m not wrong, the parental control package is called malcontent.
However, as far as I can see, it is not packaged for Fedora 33. And as far as I can understand, probably, correct me if I’m wrong, GNOME 3.38 includes the initial support to this feature, but probably we need to wait the next release of Fedora (34) to see it enabled.
Even 3.36 included that feature but parental control support is contingent upon the malcontent library being present, which we learned isn’t included in Fedora yet.
Thanksfully, the discussion having the right direction in my opinion pretty unanimously:)
Honestly, I don’t see a reason to wait. From an end user logic it looks like it has been announced as part of the Gnome 3.36 and 3.38. Gnome announcements say the functionality is in early stages but they don’t say it’s unstable.
As a user I see that Fedora ships Gnome. Thus, I expect all the main parts be available in Fedora.
Also, It looks like the target audience of this functionality could be on a less experienced side of the
overall user base which makes it more important to have this feature included out of the box.
I’m looking forward to test the feature after it’s packaged.
It was added to Fedora Rawhide (i.e. the future Fedora 34) repositories a couple of days ago, I’d assume that the packager will also add them to the other Fedora versions after some more testing.
In the meantime, if you want to already try it out, you could make a Fedora Rawhide VM using e.g. Gnome Boxes - then you can simply install it from the repositories in there without messing with your system.
Or, if you’re feeling slightly adventurous, you can try installing it by downloading the Rawhide packages directly from here - the only runtime dependency is polkit, so you have a good chance of them working on your system. No guarantees though …
