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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?

#711

Post by kps »

tracker1 wrote: post #615
egnehots wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

User: I want hi-res apps! Dev: Sure, here you go. User: But why is it so small on my new shiny tablet high density screen? Dev: (SHit it worked okay for me) Okay now it detects the density and scale.. User: But when I move the window to my old good lcd screen it becomes way too big! Dev: Okay let's see if I can dynamically adapt to a new monitor density, it's just one scale factor. User: But when I put it on my big t…

If the OS (not an app) could allow you to tweak the native pixel resolution, scale, size of each display, even under "advanced settings" that would go a long way towards helping. This is at the Operating System level, not like some random one-off application. For me, the one feature I miss the most is a checkbox option for "Native Scrolling"; Did this really need to be removed?

X11 did — run xdpyinfo and you'll see its idea of screen dimensions and resolution. (It's unlikely they'll have been configured correctly, of course.) If you look hard enough, you can find some ‘outdated’ plain-X software from the workstation era that respects it. It was the ‘Linux desktop’ crowd that threw that away, since they couldn't think beyond building Windows clones for PC clones.

And the vector-based competition to X (e.g. NeWS, Display Postscript) would have done better.

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

#712

Post by WheelsAtLarge »

I want easy upgrades. The last time I upgraded it took hours. I gave up Ubuntu(and Linux on desktop after that). It's not worth the time. At work yes, at home no. I'm back to Windows.

My dream would be to have it as easy as Apple's upgrades. Better yet, incremental updates like Chrome and Firefox.

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

#713

Post by ambrop7 »

skamoen wrote: 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…

One way to solve the scaling issue is to set the external monitor to a virtual higher resolution while still driving it at its native resolution (with scaling down done in GPU).

Actually Linux/Xorg generally support this out of the box, it is just the higher-level software that would need to make use of it. You can try it youself:

xrandr --output --scale 2x2

the result should be the given monitor will appear to have twice the resolution, so if applications believe they are running on a high-DPI display, they will look fine on the external monitor as well.

However due to lack of support and awareness in desktops doing just this might leave you with an unsatisfactory configuration, e.g. part of the desktop erroneously shown on both monitors - you might need to use further xrandr commands to setup the regions that each monitor displays.

I use the same approach to solve this issue on a Windows 7 system I am using, it is just slightly more involved (I need to setup a custom resolution in the Nvidia control panel).

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

#714

Post by pizza234 »

bjt2n3904 wrote: post #393
gbog wrote: post #131

FLAVOUR: Ubuntu Desktop HEADLINE: Bluetooh that works DESCRIPTION: I never managed to have my PC playing music through blutooth to a bluetooth loudspeaker. (I'm using Xbuntu, playing mp3s with mpv.) I think it could be because the audio system seems messy: should I have jackd enabled? What is it? So maybe the headline should be to cleanup audio system, specially its routes.

Bluetooth not working isn't necessarily Ubuntu's fault. Bluetooth is a complicated, broken, cluttered, crumby protocol.

According to this article:

http://www.bennybottema.com/2010/08/08/how-ubuntus-broken-bl...

the guilt is both in Ubuntu (which updated the bluez version and broke things which were previously working) and the bluez programmer[s], which are described as "cowboy coders".

I personally believe both are accurate accusations.

I wonder if Ubuntu felt pressured for some reason[s] to upgrade to v5 (eg. support for v4 was going to cease), or if it was just "upgrading for the sake of upgrading". I have the suspect it's been the latter, since it's not that v4 had insufficient features or that the BT protocol would change in the meanwhile - not to mention that they actually did the exact same thing long ago when moving to v4.

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

#716

Post by noobermin »

FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop

HEADLINE: Better QA

DESCRIPTION: You have no idea how upset I am the top comment is more "fancy, flashy" stuff instead of what Ubuntu really needs:

Stability. Better QA, not having my family and friends see another "$x had an issue" every time they boot into their accounts and being embarrassed that I recommended Ubuntu to them.

Seriously, I use gentoo, and my gf uses GNOME Ubuntu, and she has issues with the same services that I don't have a single issue with. Forget about multitouch or external monitors, no one other than fanboys and enthusiasts use that. Provide a stable experience first then move the boundary.

ROLE/AFFILIATION: Computational scientist, but also a Linux enthusiast for personal use.

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

#718

Post by tedivm »

- FLAVOR: [Ubuntu Server, Ubuntu Cloud]

- HEADLINE: Follow standards and respond to bug requests.

- DESCRIPTION: The cloud team is responsible for making machines available to cloud users, including making vagrant boxes. The problem is this team refuses to follow standards. For example, vagrant boxes should have the main user named "vagrant" but instead forces the user to be named "ubuntu"- and there's been a ticket open about this that's been open for a year now[1]. There have also been network bugs[2] that have been ignored for almost as long.

This is a big deal for people who use vagrant for testing. We essentially can't use the Canonical provided boxes, and this issue having been ignored for so long is not confidence inspiring.

1. https://bugs.launchpad.net/cloud-images/+bug/1569237 2. https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant/issues/7288

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

#720

Post by hello_there »

FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop

HEADLINE: Ability to completely disable all dpi scaling

DESCRIPTION: I've bought a high-res screen with the intention to get more screen real-estate, but it seems that every modern app is working against me by scaling up the GUI. I wish this could all be easily disabled in one place.

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