Yet another init system
In seriousness, I'd like to see Ubuntu standardize on an init -- don't care what it is, as long as I don't have to understand three.
Ask HN: What do you want to see in Ubuntu 17.10?
351–360 of 1001 posts
Re: Ask HN: What do you want to see in Ubuntu 17.10?
#352- FLAVOR: Desktop
- HEADLINE: Bring back the ability to have icons in menus
- DESCRIPTION: I very much got used to quickly navigating menus by icon - right click in nautilus and open in terminal had an icon next to it etc. I had to turn this on via a gconf setting or something, I forget, but now that possibility is gone, and I'm left with hundreds of moments of tiny frustration not being able to find what I'm looking for quite as quickly.
- FLAVOR: Desktop
- HEADLINE: Better DisplayPort Multi Stream Transport support
- DESCRIPTION: This is related to others' comments about better external monitor support in general. I had an MST hub that worked in 16.04 but doesn't in 16.10. I don't know what happened. But even when it did work (and I've tried three different ones, so it's not just this one that's flaky), I had to say the right incantations and hotplug things in the right order, and make sure I'd rebooted since last using only a single external monitor, etc, in order to avoid hard crashes or blank screens. And I'm faced with having to wait multiple cycles thirty seconds long while the monitors, the hub, and the computer seemingly can't coordinate with each other and switch on and off repeatedly. I'm on a dell xps 13 (intel graphics). Yes, this belongs in a bug report and I'll do that too, but I wanted to draw attention to it anyway. I've struggled with flaky MST support regardless and am pretty sure it's not limited to my hardware.
- ROLE/AFFILIATION: Research scientist and open source developer
Re: Ask HN: What do you want to see in Ubuntu 17.10?
#353- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop - HEADLINE: 1st party hardware - DESCRIPTION: I'd love to buy hardware from Canonical that will just work, just like I do with Apple. Dell comes close, but not close enough that I will recommend it to people. System76 build quality is something I hear people complain about, so I can't recommend them either. - ROLE/AFFILIATION: Software Developer, Ubuntu Member and Ask Ubuntu moderator.
Also see Linus' comments if it wasn't obvious enough that this is really important [0] [0]: https://youtu.be/MShbP3OpASA?t=24m8s
Super important, but when I posted this nobody had stated the obvious, so I did. :-)
Re: Ask HN: What do you want to see in Ubuntu 17.10?
#354- 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 cyc…
-FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop -HEADLINE: Network manager that works -DESCRIPTION: The single thing that would make Ubuntu seem 10x more polished than it now is the horrible state of the network manager. The little wifi bar in the top right. Sometimes, randomly, after dropping a wifi connection, or going to sleep and waking it will: 1) Stop listing SSIDs except the one I've already configured and want to connect to. (But I…
A big +1 from me. Network Manager is so bad I wonder how it ever got adopted by the main distros.
Re: Ask HN: What do you want to see in Ubuntu 17.10?
#355- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop
- HEADLINE: optimize Ubuntu for people who suffer migraines/headaches and other health issues when working with displays.
- DESCRIPTION: There's a small niche of users who suffer badly when working with displays. There are all sorts of things to optimize(mostly to kill various flickers and too much brightness) - no backlight refresh by putting backlight at 100% and using some screen filter app , 16-bit resolution(32-bit in some display types is causing some flicker), up-convertion of videos to the highest frame-rate possible(if it's possible to do so for web videos - would be amazing!!!), various night modes and brightness controls, maybe recommending screens and devices that would help(selection is a huge issue).
btw, if you manage to really help here, this user niche will be very loyal, and will suffer a lot on other areas. Also - a well optimized machine, might be liked by regular users in a subtle way(less tired, etc).
- ROLE: desktop user with migraine.
Re: Ask HN: What do you want to see in Ubuntu 17.10?
#356- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop
- HEADLINE: WINE
- DESCRIPTION: Windows 10 will soon be able to run Ubuntu Xenial as a subsystem, I would like to see Ubuntu response with a superb wine integration.
Re: Ask HN: What do you want to see in Ubuntu 17.10?
#357FLAVOR: Desktop HEADLINE: Pick an official laptop for the release. ROLE: End-user, Sysadmin, Developer I would love for Ubuntu to, with each release, pick a laptop vendor and a laptop and just Make It Work. All the components. Out of the box. As near perfect as one can get it. So when I'm in the market for a new laptop, I can just buy that one. And I'm not talking about a pro gear like the XPS. Just simple, cheap con…
What's wrong with using XPS? I picked one up for $1200 last time I bought one, that's not too high of a price. You'd typically want the flagship device to be at least mid-tier to show off the best features and support for new mainstream technology, like the HiDPI stuff other people are talking about.
I would think with a team as large as Ubuntu, they already have their "favorite developer laptop," and it just might be the XPS. (Disclaimer: I honestly don't know what it is.)
But his suggestion has merit: in addition to the high-end dev laptop that their team will just fix because they use it, it would be good to _publicly_ announce a mid-level consumer laptop at the time of release. It doesn't have to be a sponsorship. They can put disclaimers all over the announcement. etc. etc.
Re: Ask HN: What do you want to see in Ubuntu 17.10?
#358I want to see the Amazon link icon. Not there at all. I don't know how plausible this is, it's just a wish.
Re: Ask HN: What do you want to see in Ubuntu 17.10?
#359- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop - HEADLINE: text antialiasing options - DESCRIPTION: I'm not a Linux guy, but when I've tried it I'm always annoyed at how ugly text looks compared to macOS. It would be great if we could pick different text renderers or have a new one with an easy GUI for adjusting parameters.
Hasn't GNOME has something similar for years? A whole bunch of different text aliasing examples, you pick the one that looks right?
Yes, GNOME has this feature - but it doesn't make the fonts look good enough, unfortunately.
Ubuntu's solution for beautiful fonts uses non-free software I believe, and the results IMO are as good as or better than Windows or Mac.
When I switched from Ubuntu to mainline Debian, I started having to install Infinality to get beautiful fonts as good as or better than Ubuntu's.
It's a general pain point with desktop Linux, but an area where Ubuntu leads.
Re: Ask HN: What do you want to see in Ubuntu 17.10?
#360FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop
HEADLINE: Productivity & Bugs relating to being a 'Switcher'
DESCRIPTION:
- Enhance Auto-Hotkey to import/work with TextExpander key macroing. Not only is auto-hotkey mostly static (yes you can add python snippets), TextExpander on the Mac is so much easier to use (especially when you also use Brevvy on PC to keep your snippets consistent). Would love to see this on Ubuntu or even just any Linux distro in general.
- Add ECC key support to gnome-keyring (SSH agent has to be manually managed when using ECDSA or ED25519 ssh keys). Right now I have a shell alias to run the ssh-agent which is fugly and high friction to working quickly.
- Make network manager more reliable (sleep/wake laptop will not re-establish a network sessions and requires restarting the entire service).
Having ' echo "alias reset-wifi='sudo /etc/init.d/network-manager restart'" >> ~/.bash_aliases' and running it every wake is kinda nutty.
- Convince someone to write a LittleSnitch like UI to the system (something I very much miss from the Mac). - Make it easy to manage system wide configuration preferences across systems (just syncing random 'dot folders' from the user home directory not sufficient).
- High DPI by connection type would be nice (ie. my Lenovo X2#0 is not High DPI but it is when connected to my BL3201PH), not as annoying to me as some but having scaling on at 13XX by 768 is kind of fugly.
- Allow me to disable virtual desktop functionality when plugged into a big external display (similar to previous point) when mobile virtual desktops are helpful with the low screen real estate but when connected to a 4K monitor well... I don't need virtual desktops anymore so they should collapse into 1 or 2 or whatever. That would be pretty cool to 'just have work.'