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

- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop

- HEADLINE: Improved Unity launcher usability

- DESCRIPTION: As far as I can tell, you can drag/drop items to the launcher, and rearrange the buttons on the launcher, but changing the icon (or setting one at all) and getting the launcher to actually launch the thing you want is unnecessarily difficult, requiring .desktop file edits that I can never seem to get to work anyway. I still have to run /home/myname/eclipse/eclipse from a terminal on one of my machines because the launcher is not working/non-intuitive and I don't have the time/desire to stop what I'm doing and figure it out.

Also, expandable/group launchers (many apps under one launcher square/icon spreading into multiple items) would be nice.

Otherwise, great work! Love ubuntu and Unity.

Just saw the video and must say that it has really sparked my interest in Devuan. I heard of Devuan when the fork was first announced but never gave it much notice, now is the first time I try to understand what it really is. It seems like Devuan is much more organized and well-thought than I imagined. This is music to my ears:

Devuan will do its best to stay minimal and abide to the UNIX philosophy of "doing one thing and doing it well". It will foster diversity and freedom of choice among all its components and will perceive itself not as an end product, but as a a process, a starting point for developers, a viable base for sysadmins and a stable tool for people who have enough experience with computers. Devuan will never compromise for more efficiency at the cost of the freedom of its users, rather than leave that and the responsibility for a secure setup to downstream developers.

I need to do much more research and of course testing, but Devuan could be light at the end of the tunnel.

On windows I can chance the scroll speed so its one line per tick, on ubuntu its stuck at 3 lines per tick. I have a logitech 'spinny wheel' and this makes it very frustrating as the screen zooms by and I lose precision.

FLAVOR Ubuntu Desktop

HEADLINE Switching to as main desktop environment

DESCRIPTION Unity is the number one reason I hear people turning away from GNU/Linux in general: Ubuntu is more or less the de facto first install, and invariably the ones that go through with a standard Ubuntu install turn back to Windows because they could not get used to the UI. Not that the conversion rate is 100% for when I do manage to convince someone to use Linux Mint with Cinnamon, but I don't hear UI complaints.

Lots of people I talk to use Cinnamon or a tiling window manager, and nobody I ever talk to prefers Unity (even if they are okay with using it).

The "X11 is full of security issues" is full if FUD, IME. Like, they say true-but-irrelevant-and-misleading statements like "any program running in an X11 server can view/alter any other program in the same X11 server, and Wayland fixes this" - this irrelevant because common security of practice, IIRC, is to run nested X11 servers and give each program its own.

X11 also has a whole lot of commonly-used security/sandboxing extensions, but these are ignored in lieu of comparing vanilla X11 with vanilla Wayland, and pointing out that only the latter does security properly.

Meanwhile, Wayland forces monolithic design, in requiring the panel, hotkey daemon, WM, etc to be built into the compositor. Essentially, each Wayland compositor is its own DE (not its own WM, despite common misconception).

I want to see X11 die, but Wayland has some serious failures as an X11 replacement.