- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop
- HEADLINE: Better support for peripherals
- DESCRIPTION: Drivers suck
If you buy a wrong printer brand or model you may end up returning it. Simply because it happened not to be supported by the manufacturer and/or Ubuntu
Overall, the desktop needs more radical refreshes, bash replaced with OhMyZh, no more Unity and a batter package manager, too.
Ask HN: What do you want to see in Ubuntu 17.10?
551–560 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What do you want to see in Ubuntu 17.10?
#552- FLAVOR: [Ubuntu Desktop]
- HEADLINE: Improve Desktop Apps Ecosystem. Make it easy for Ubuntu App Developers to Make Money $$$
- DESCRIPTION: I recently moved from Mac OS X to an Ubuntu desktop machine for day to day development. All my comments are relative to Mac OS X (I apologize cause I'm still a Mac fan boy). The only thing I really miss is the massive number of high quality apps available to me on Mac OS X. I wish Ubuntu could support Mac Apps in some sort of Mac sandbox (ala Wine for OS X). I know this is a pipe dream cause of the complexity of it but putting it out there.
A more realistic request is that you create/encourage tool makers to create Snaps. Snap packages must become compatible with flatpack to have any chance of becoming ubuitquitous. Fragmentation in Linux desktop apps will only continue hurting Linux adoption. I think the Ubuntu App directory feels too basic with too few options. Encouraging developers with better tools, better discovery and making it simple to port Mac/Windows apps to Ubuntu is the only way Ubuntu can begin to gain marketshare. I love Ubuntu but I still go back to my Mac Book PRO when I need to edit audio or have to login to many sites since I use 1Password and they have no Ubuntu app.
Ubuntu could work with the top 500 Mac App developers and help/advise them on how to easily port their Apps to Ubuntu. I'd happily pay double the price of the Mac App store Apps to have them on Ubuntu but their is no way for me to give them money. Get money to the developers and they'll come. This is missing from Ubuntu Apps.
I apologize for the long rant. I would've written a shorter comment but I didn't have the time.
- ROLE/AFFILIATION: Developer at Startup
Re: Ask HN: What do you want to see in Ubuntu 17.10?
#553FLAVOR: Desktop HEADLINE: Make Wi-fi less aggressive about switching bands, and prefer 5ghz DESCRIPTION: For access points with 2 and 5ghz bands which are both weak my laptop will continually jump between them every few seconds. This makes for very poor connectivity, and if it just stuck with the 5ghz it would do fine. If it preferred a 5ghz signal that would do wonders for connectivity too.
> For access points with 2 and 5ghz bands which are both weak my laptop will continually jump between them
Wait, what? I wish my laptops did that at all. I always wondered why nobody ever figured "oh gee we have like 15% signal, do you think we should connect to this other 70% signal hotspot now that no TCP connections are open / no network traffic is active? Nah, let's just stick with the 15%, wouldn't want to drop the connection for a second."
Re: Ask HN: What do you want to see in Ubuntu 17.10?
#554- 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…
> 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.
Actually, this is especially true when both are 1080p, because laptop screens are never as big as desktop monitors, and we also tend to use them closer. I have this exact problem right now but I think I've just adjusted my eyes over time to squinting at 1080p at 14", or perhaps I turned on some display scaling and forgot about it.
> For example, you can have a window that straddles both monitors. What should the scaling be?
Intuitively, I feel like you should use the physical DPI of both screens to make sure that the window has the same physical dimensions on both. But that'd probably lead to weird scaling factors like 1.17 instead of nice round ones, and thus fuzzy scaling, so it probably couldn't quite work. I guess perhaps you'd just snap each display's DPI to the closest predefined value (eg. .25 increments which I think most systems use these days). Then you'd get a similar-sized part on both sides of the boundary.
But yeah, I think overall if you actually use physical DPI for scaling everything should work out close to nicely.
Re: Ask HN: What do you want to see in Ubuntu 17.10?
#555- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop - HEADLINE: Hide/Move/Replace the Unity Menubar - DESCRIPTION: Please have an auto-hide function at minimum? Better would be to move the time/settings to the "dock" when you set the "move the menus to the app windows" option, and then removing menubar entirely. - RATIONALE: It was awful the last time I used Ubuntu on a multi-monitor setup, wasting space on all displays. And having to click an…
And having to click an app and window to give it focus, then swinging the cursor up to select a menu, then back to the app...
I think it is copied from Mac.
Re: Ask HN: What do you want to see in Ubuntu 17.10?
#556- FLAVOR: [Ubuntu Server] - HEADLINE: CPanel like UI for server management - DESCRIPTION: Any reason why this is not already done? Or is this outside the scope of ubuntu? There are millions of control panel but one that is supported properly by ubuntu would be awesome.
Have you tried plesk or Vespa? Not sure why you want to kill those businesses by having them I provided for free by canonical... There is also cloudron for web apps.
Re: Ask HN: What do you want to see in Ubuntu 17.10?
#557- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Server
- HEADLINE: Built-in support for installing up-to-date packages
- DESCRIPTION: Currently, `apt install [package]` on LTS Ubuntu will install a package that is up to 24 months out of date (or more if you're not on the latest LTS).
Literally one month ago, using the latest version of Windows 10, I installed Ubuntu for Windows (which installed Ubuntu 14.04 LTS), and `apt-get install nodejs` installed Node 0.10 (from 2013! in 2017!).
I understand users want stability in the core OS, but there's no reason it should be made so difficult to install up-to-date software from elsewhere. `apt` is useless for installing things like `youtube-dl` because old versions of youtube-dl quickly stop being compatible with YouTube.
Ubuntu's current solution to this problem is PPAs, which are very non-ideal because they only work if someone maintains a PPA, but this involves:
1. googling for the software's PPA, 2. finding the PPA, 3. possibly trusting a third-party PPA maintainer, 4. running at least three different commands, which you have to either memorize or re-google
Basically all software's Ubuntu installation instructions are something like "curl this script and pipe to bash" or "build from source" or "install this other package manager, then use the other package manager to install our software", just because it's impossible to install the latest version using Ubuntu's built-in package manager out-of-the-box.
For instance, here's Redis: "Installing it using the package manager of your Linux distribution is somewhat discouraged as usually the available version is not the latest."
I want to be able to do something like `apt install-latest youtube-dl` to get a usable version of youtube-dl, and considering the number of workarounds for this issue I find online, I think a lot of other people have the same want.
- ROLE/AFFILIATION: owner of a top-2000 US website
Re: Ask HN: What do you want to see in Ubuntu 17.10?
#558FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop HEADLINE: Better (more polished) HiDPI support (also for legacy apps) DESCRIPTION: I am running on 16.04 so I might be missing same latest fixes. But, some applications (especially Qt application like VLC player) have the issue with HiDPI monitor. Moving app between HiDPI and non-HiDPI monitor required restart in order to get correct sizing.
Intel VTune has this problem as well. Even their 2017 edition appears to use Gtk2, which AFAICT makes it partially resistant to the usual workarounds for HiDPI scaling.
Re: Ask HN: What do you want to see in Ubuntu 17.10?
#559- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop
- HEADLINE: Better touchpad gestures out of the box
- DESCRIPTION: I recently got my first ultrabook. I used Windows on it for the first few weeks before installing Ubuntu. The touchpad gestures were very useful for certain activities such as minimizing/maximizing and switching between windows. It seems that Ubuntu has a very limited set of gestures, and after a couple months I still feel like my productivity is held back due to the relative difficulty of switching among windows.
- ROLE: Full-time student
Re: Ask HN: What do you want to see in Ubuntu 17.10?
#560FLAVOR: All
HEADLINE: only 1 init system
DESCRIPTION:
Having Sysvinit, upstart, and systemd all supported is confusing and difficult to manage. Given the controversy of systemd I can see being able to choose between Sysvinit and systemd for a system, but having both at the same time is problematic.