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Ask HN: What do you want to see in Ubuntu 17.10?

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Re: Ask HN: What do you want to see in Ubuntu 17.10?

#201
FLAVOR: Ubuntu Server

HEADLINE: Include a PyPy3.5 package

DESCRIPTION: Ubuntu already has a package for PyPy compatible with CPython 2.7 in the official repositories. However, a CPython 3.5 compatible version was recently released[1]. PyPy is painful to compile on your own if you don’t have enough RAM. Therefore, an official package would be welcome.

[1] https://morepypy.blogspot.com/2017/03/pypy27-and-pypy35-v57-...

ROLE/AFFILIATION: Researcher at a university

Re: Ask HN: What do you want to see in Ubuntu 17.10?

#202

Loving Ubuntu myself, I would like a system not requiring command line stuff for fixing things, so everyone could use and maintain it, not just experts (e.g. a "fix my computer" button that in worst case it could reinstall everything but the home folders).

CoreOS-like A/B system partitions would be a very useful addition to Ubuntu.

Re: Ask HN: What do you want to see in Ubuntu 17.10?

#203

- FLAVOR: Desktop - HEADLINE: Make trackpads great again! Bring on gestures by default. - DESCRIPTION: Trackpad config situation is a mess. Pretty much every Ubuntu derivative has its own simplified (reads severely lacking) interface. What's worse is the gestures configuration. It's mostly done via some dude's one off scripts found on some forum post 2 years ago. Give me a MacOS like experience on the trackpad (espec…

The default for X is now the libinput driver. It's a miracle. My guess is that even if Canonical does no work in this area, the touchpad support will be much better.

I've been using it for over a year on MBP/Pixel2 and I've literally never once had a problem with palm detection.

Gesture support though is definitely still weak. Even GNOME that has 4-finger workspace switching has no configurability or hot corners...

Re: Ask HN: What do you want to see in Ubuntu 17.10?

#204

- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop - HEADLINE: All updates reboot-free - DESCRIPTION: Short of a major-version update, the software updater should never ask me "Please restart the computer to begin using your updated software" again. I'm already using the "Canonical Livepatch Service" - but I still get asked to reboot much more often than I would like. - ROLE/AFFILIATION: Programmer

This. Please, don't ask people to reboot the computer unless it's strictly needed.

GNU/Linux is not Windows 95.

Re: Ask HN: What do you want to see in Ubuntu 17.10?

#205
- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop

- HEADLINE: Mouse Button Remapping

- DESCRIPTION: I'm a disabled user and "left-click" with my thumb. At the moment, there's no visual way to do that in Ubuntu's settings.

I have to run something like `xinput set-button-map "Evoluent VerticalMouse 4" 0 3 0 4 5 6 7 0 2 1 2` whenever I login, or connect my mouse, or if the phases of the moon changes.

Please - all I want is a GUI where I can say "For this mouse hardware, use this button map."

Thanks :-)

Re: Ask HN: What do you want to see in Ubuntu 17.10?

#206
post #14

- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop: 1. HEADLINE: A way to have different scaling for external monitors hooked up to my HiDPI laptop. Currently I need can only set a single scaling factor, so I need to ajust my laptop screen resolution to match scaling of the external monitor. If that's not possible, a way to automatically set resolution and scale for both screens once you hook one up would already save me a lot of manual switc…

> 1. HEADLINE: A way to have different scaling for external monitors hooked up to my HiDPI laptop. This would be awesome. Even when both the laptop and the external screen are 1080p, different scaling could be helpful if you want to use a dual monitor setup effectively. Unfortunately, it's a tough nut to crack given current desktop behavior. For example, you can have a window that straddles both monitors. What should…

macOS handles that edge case. It just displays the window in only one screen. The one with the biggest area of the window shown. There is no need to be held back by cases like this.

Re: Ask HN: What do you want to see in Ubuntu 17.10?

#207

- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop - HEADLINE: 1st party hardware - DESCRIPTION: I'd love to buy hardware from Canonical that will just work, just like I do with Apple. Dell comes close, but not close enough that I will recommend it to people. System76 build quality is something I hear people complain about, so I can't recommend them either. - ROLE/AFFILIATION: Software Developer, Ubuntu Member and Ask Ubuntu moderator.

Also see Linus' comments if it wasn't obvious enough that this is really important [0]

  [0]: https://youtu.be/MShbP3OpASA?t=24m8s

Re: Ask HN: What do you want to see in Ubuntu 17.10?

#208
post #100
post #53

- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop - HEADLINE: Automated night mode so I can sleep well after work - DESCRIPTION: Reducing the amount of blue light during the night is proven to help people finding sleep after having used their computer at night. So during the night, the desktop automatedly reduce the amount of blue light emitted on the screen by shifting the color balance. - ROLE/AFFILIATION: Dev/Machine learner

Back when I was using Ubuntu, I could install an app called Redshift, which is basically the Linux equivalent for f.lux.

Redshift is great. I have a systemd user unit for it, and I actually prefer it to Flux on OS X.

Re: Ask HN: What do you want to see in Ubuntu 17.10?

#209

- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop - HEADLINE: Please, please, please fix space issues with /boot. - DESCRIPTION: I'm constantly running out of space in /boot, due to kernel updates. It drives me so incredibly batty. If I had to guess, this is due to poor defaults in the installer for folks that opt to encrypt their whole disk. Even still, this system was setup back on 14.04 (don't think it started on 12.04), and I have no int…

+1 as well. This made me brick my entire installation (entirely my own fault: trying to fix it with insufficient knowledge). It made me switch to another distribution.

Despite having cleaned out old kernels before, I spaced one day and accidentally removed the kernel I was running. This is fixable if you boot a live distro you can mount the relevant volumes (like your root disk to /mnt/foo, and your boot partition to /mnt/boot), then, after a chroot to /mnt/foo you can re-install the kernel. Here is an article describing it (but it misses mounting the boot partition) http://askubuntu.com/questions/28099/how-to-restore-a-system...

Re: Ask HN: What do you want to see in Ubuntu 17.10?

#210
FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop

- HEADLINE: Replace X11 with Mir or Wayland

- DESCRIPTION: X11 is old, slow, and full of security issues. Mir, even in alpha, is much more responsive and provies important 21st centry feature set. Wayland is already used by a major distro. X11 is that cobweb that's gone uncleaned in our closet for too long.

- HEADLINE: Improve UI.

- DESCRIPTION: When I use Ubuntu it's often easier to use the terminal then to learn the 10 different UIs to configure everything. This makes it impossible to convert specific people to using Ubuntu because they just don't have the time to learn all of the terminal-spells I know. Ideally there'd be a single place that could detect most configs for standard packages and a way to add hooks to that to get your package to show up in that menu. I don't know if this exists but if it does it's definetly not used.

- ROLE/AFFILIATION: "Undergraduate Research Associate", I program and do sysadmin stuff for a department at my college.

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