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

#1

Post by dustinkirkland » Fri, Mar 31, 2017, 11:50 AM UTC

Howdy HackerNews!

Dustin Kirkland here, Product Manager for Ubuntu as an OS platform (long time listener, first time caller).

I'm interested in HackerNews feedback and feature requests for the Ubuntu 17.10 development cycle, which opens up at the end of April, and culminates in the 17.10 release in October 2017. This is the first time we've ever posed this question to the garrulous HN crowd, so I'm excited about it, and I'm sure this will be interesting!

Please include in your replies the following bullets:

- FLAVOR: [Ubuntu Desktop, Ubuntu Server, Ubuntu Core]

- HEADLINE: 1-line description of the request

- DESCRIPTION: A lengthier description of the feature. Bonus points for constructive criticism ;-)

- ROLE/AFFILIATION: (Optional, your job role and affiliation)

We're super interested in your feedback! Everything is fair game -- Kernel, Security, Desktop apps, Unity/Mir/Wayland/Gnome, Snap packages, Kubernetes, Docker, OpenStack, Juju, MAAS, Landscape, default installed packages (add or remove), cloud images, and many more I'm sure I've forgotten...

17.10 will be our 3rd and final "developer" release, before we open the 18.04 LTS (long term support, enterprise release) after October 2017 (and release in April 2018), so this is our last chance to pull in any big, substantive changes.

Thanks, HN!

:-Dustin

https://twitter.com/dustinkirkland

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

#2

Post by vinnes » Fri, Mar 31, 2017, 12:06 PM UTC

Hi Dustin! - Ubuntu Desktop - Ubuntu Subsystem for Windows :) - An integrated system (Wine is not user friendly imho) to launch windows programs. - linux (and windows) user and developer. @vinnes

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

#3

Post by lnx01 » Fri, Mar 31, 2017, 12:27 PM UTC

- FLAVOR: Desktop

- HEADLINE: An advanced mode for the file manager

- DESCRIPTION: I find that the default file manager is a bit dumb. There should be a mode to enable advanced features; like 'connect to server' when one can pick sftp. ftp, smb, nfs, vboxsf etc. It's fine if it's hidden in a configuration modal but 'advanced mode' should be an option.

- ROLE/AFFILIATION: user

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

#4

Post by azeirah » Fri, Mar 31, 2017, 12:28 PM UTC

If anything, increased stability for general-purpose usage would be very nice. Increased hardware support, especially drivers for some wi-fi cards need a lot of work.

I really love Linux desktops, but they have too many stability issues/crashes to completely switch from Windows to Ubuntu or any other linux distribution.

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

#5

Post by ploggingdev » Fri, Mar 31, 2017, 12:29 PM UTC

vinnes wrote: post #2

Hi Dustin! - Ubuntu Desktop - Ubuntu Subsystem for Windows :) - An integrated system (Wine is not user friendly imho) to launch windows programs. - linux (and windows) user and developer. @vinnes

I may be wrong, but I don't think Canonical has the engineering resources to pull it off. Even if they did, the main issue is that Microsoft does not publish their API spec which is why Wine and ReactOS devs bend over backwards to be compatible with Windows binaries. It also does not make sense from a business perspective. Considering there is no demand for such a system outside of the very, very small number of hobbyists who run Windows games and software on Wine.

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

#6

Post by evolvedlight » Fri, Mar 31, 2017, 12:30 PM UTC

- FLAVOR: [Ubuntu Desktop]

- HEADLINE: Mouse to work

- DESCRIPTION: I'd like my mouse to work properly in Ubuntu (or any of my mice). When I start my laptop, my USB wireless mouse scrolls super fast. When I take it out and plug it in again, it scrolls super slow. I'd like that not to happen, and also some way of configuring the scroll speed.

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

#7

Post by sneak » Fri, Mar 31, 2017, 12:32 PM UTC

Excellent support for Apple laptops.

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

#8

Post by s_kilk » Fri, Mar 31, 2017, 12:32 PM UTC

- FLAVOR: Desktop

- HEADLINE: More stable and polished desktop

- DESCRIPTION: This one is hard to pin down, but I'd like to see more general polish and stability in the Unity desktop. One example would be around multi-monitor support, it's pretty good, but a bit funky in some places.

For example, if I have a monitor plugged in and I let the laptop screen lock come on, I can sit there and watch while both displays cycle through an On -> Off -> On -> Off loop. I think when one display goes to sleep it sends a signal which wakes the machine back up, or something.

I'd also like to see more options for configuring multiple mice/trackpads/trackballs in the Settings app, general improvements to quality-of-life issues which are very noticable when transitioning from, say, macOs to Ubuntu.

One more polish issue: I'd like to see more attention paid to power-drain regressions in the OS. I had an issue recently where a process related to automatic updates was spinning in the background and consuming 100% of a CPU core, and cutting my battery time in half compared to what it should have been. I looked into it and found it was a known issue that wasn't fixed yet, but could be solved by deleting one of the default apps. If I were a less sophisticated user I would have just concluded that battery-life simply sucked on Ubuntu, and frankly I would have been right.

[EDIT: all these issues were encountered on a Thinkpad T460, which should really be one of the best supported machines in the world for this OS. If things are flaky under the best of circumstances, I dread to think what it's like on some weirdo Siemens laptop some user might have] - ROLE/AFFILIATION: Software Developer

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

#9

Post by StavrosK » Fri, Mar 31, 2017, 12:32 PM UTC

azeirah wrote: post #4

If anything, increased stability for general-purpose usage would be very nice. Increased hardware support, especially drivers for some wi-fi cards need a lot of work. I really love Linux desktops, but they have too many stability issues/crashes to completely switch from Windows to Ubuntu or any other linux distribution.

I've been using Ubuntu as my main OS for a decade now, and I agree. Especially the UI crashes much more often than I'd like, and I always get a "there has been an error" error message at startup. Please make things more stable.

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

#10

Post by chimeracoder » Fri, Mar 31, 2017, 12:32 PM UTC

- FLAVOR: Desktop

- HEADLINE: Bring back gaming support for AMD graphics cards.

-DESCRIPTION: Pipe dream, but: the ability to run games with an AMD graphics card, the way we could with 15.10. Google "Steam AMD Xenial" and you'll see how big of a mess this is.

As of a year ago, gaming on Linux was pretty viable with an AMD graphics card, using fglrx. However, because that was deprecated, it was removed in 16.04, and the open-source drivers can't handle 3D games, at all. Most 2D games are non-starters as well, literally: the graphics freeze before I even get to the opening screen and I have to REISUB. I'm running an R9 390, but this is widespread among basically all AMD cards.

AMDGPU is an option, but only for some cards, and thats only for 16.04 - it won't run on 16.10.

I could go more into the history and the compatibility, but suffice to say, the intersection of the different versions of {the kernel, mesa, opengl, fglrx, open-source drivers} on Ubuntu now means that I have no choice but to boot into Windows to run games.