- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop
- HEADLINE: Better palm detection for trackpads
- DESCRIPTION: With the caveat that I realize that you need to support many brands of laptop with different trackpad drivers, this is one of my major pains when using a linux (Ubuntu) laptop vs anything else: after hours and hours (and hours) of googling and struggling, I can still not manage to get reasonable palm detection going on my work laptop (Dell XPS 15). When coding, probably once every 10 minutes my palm is mis-interpreted as a finger swipe and my cursor jumps into some unrelated code.
ROLE/AFFILIATION: linux software dev, federal gov't
Ask HN: What do you want to see in Ubuntu 17.10?
511–520 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What do you want to see in Ubuntu 17.10?
#512Remove the update notification from the motd: https://imgur.com/a/6SD97 This message breaks boxes. I'd also like to see MariaDB in main, not universe.
I know there's few better subjects for bikeshedding after vim vs emacs than "what should be in /etc/motd, /etc/issue and how should they interact with logins (ssh, console and xorg/gui)" - but how does this "break boxes"?
I guess for consistency, as update-motd seems to be installed by default(?) and the motd is called in /etc/pam.d/login by default - xmotd or something similar should also be installed to make sure that everyone is pestered by the message of the day...?
Re: Ask HN: What do you want to see in Ubuntu 17.10?
#513- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop, Ubuntu Server, Ubuntu Core
- HEADLINE: Build from source, minimize deltas from upstream, and quit poisoning the Debian ecosystem.
- DESCRIPTION: I have repeatedly hit issues with core packages and applications that are solved by simply doing:
apt-get build-dep; apt-get source package; cd package* ; fakeroot debian/rules
Sometimes the packages fail to build. This tells me that you do not have an automated build regression system, even though Debian has gone to great pains to make this easy to automate.
I have hit bugs in packages because there is a large stack of diffs that have been applied to the package (logrotate is one example), but never upstreamed. The logrotate diffs include a "security patch" that is not well thought out, does not actually close a real bug, and causes logrotate to silently fail, filling /var.
This would not happen if you actively upstreamed patches, and reverted changes that are not approved by upstream, or addressed in other ways by upstream developers.
These two systematic issues have caused me to move away from Ubuntu for server and desktop use.
Finally, I've heard stories about Ubuntu devs forcing through controversial votes in the Debian project, and noticed an uptick in user-hostile decisions by the Debian project (like the forced systemd migration).
As a major contributor to Debian, Ubuntu should do whatever it can to improve the health of the Debian community, and generally improve the code quality + stability of upstream debian projects (without just killing off stuff that Ubuntu has decided not to ship).
- ROLE/AFFILIATION: Engineer/Researcher At work, we ship a hardware appliance based on Ubuntu. I've been using Ubuntu / Debian as my primary development environment for almost two decades, and am saddened by the level of bitrot I've encountered over the last 2-3 years.
Re: Ask HN: What do you want to see in Ubuntu 17.10?
#514FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop
HEADLINE: Tiling window manager that just works
DESCRIPTION: Tiling wms are great. However most have regressions compared to Unity; e.g. need to wrestle with systemd to get screen locking on suspend working, weird interaction issues between gnome daemons, etc. Easy enough to get a nicely functioning system with some googling, but it'd be great to have a tiling wm with no integration issues out of the box. Perhaps fork i3 and add what's needed to make it work seamlessly after install. Call it unity-tiling?
Re: Ask HN: What do you want to see in Ubuntu 17.10?
#515- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Server - HEADLINE: All configuration change managed & automated - DESCRIPTION: All configuration management in Ubuntu Server should be managed. For example, editing apache configuration raw on the FS should be strongly discouraged and logged as an error to reconcile with a legitimate configuration change. I should instead create my own configuration package that adds files, edits exiting files, etc.…
Maybe just move etckeeper into the base install, as a middleground?
Re: Ask HN: What do you want to see in Ubuntu 17.10?
#516- 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…
OSX handles this by upsampling/downsampling the parts of windows that are drawn on the other screen.
Re: Ask HN: What do you want to see in Ubuntu 17.10?
#517Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
If you zoom in, you can sort of force parts of one monitor to be shown on the other monitor. You can see how everything's upscaled/downscaled from there.
Re: Ask HN: What do you want to see in Ubuntu 17.10?
#518- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop
- HEADLINE: Stabilize wifi
- DESCRIPTION: I use 16.04 on three generations of Thinkpad (x1 carbon, x220, x230), and the wifi on all of them is always dropping off without warning. I have to rmmod/modprobe the wifi driver to get it working again. The flakiness is especially bad with wake from suspend. Wifi has been a pain point with Linux forever and I would sooooo love for it to just work.
- ROLE/AFFILIATION: Software Developer
Re: Ask HN: What do you want to see in Ubuntu 17.10?
#519FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop HEADLINE: Dump Mir!!!!! DESCRIPTION: I know Canonical has put a lot of effort into Mir and at this stage it is probably "too big to fail". But for various reasons my bet is that it will fail. I think this is Canonical repeating Microsoft's Metro mistake. I have a $12K dollar desktop and I don't want an OS optimized for phones !!! I will be able to avoid it but I would rather your engineering ef…
Ok, I'll bite, how do you spend 12,000$ on a desktop? Just keep throwing videocards at it?
Pretty much. It's probably worth $6K at replacement cost today. It's for deep learning and I included what I spent on it and I've refreshed the 4 GPUs once. The current config is probably still good for a couple of years. Now if I need more GPUs I'll just get a second box. The irony is that I graphics power coming out of my ears yet I spend most of my time in vim and tmux.
Re: Ask HN: What do you want to see in Ubuntu 17.10?
#520- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop - HEADLINE: include f.lux or redshift as a default installed package. - DESCRIPTION: by including f.lux / redshift , Ubuntu will be helping users to get better sleep . I know it's very difficult to accommodate requests for default apps, but macOS and iOS has Night Shift, Android has Night Mode. Thanks !
AFAI(Nexus 5x user)K Android removed Night Mode.