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

I know that this is very unlikely to happen, but I wish Ubuntu had rolling releases. For me it would be okay to have a new version every 10 years (for heavy migrations like UEFI, 64 Bit, systemd). I had Ubuntu on most PCs at home, but switched most of them to Arch, as I was sick of the 6-mothly horror upgrades.

- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop

- HEADLINE: Rolling Releases

- DESCRIPTION: make a distribution which does not require any 'apt-get dist-upgrade' as 'apt-get upgrade' always brings it to the latest stable software version (like Arch and Gentoo)

- AFFILIATION: just a long time linux user

@dustinkirkland great idea to ask HN :-)

Seeing as almost all of the comments are about unity not the underlying system... i'm just gona dangle this here for the enlightened :P https://i3wm.org/

I have similar experience, but with Virtualbox in UEFI mode. After any restart, UEFI will complain that it cannot find anything bootable, I will run the bootloader from UEFI shell (Virtualbox does not have BIOS menus), in booted system run the efibootmgr to register it, just to have it lost at next reboot and doing the dance again.

Only Ubuntu does that, other linux distributions don't have this problem.

In my experience it is true that Unity struggles on older computers, or perhaps where the graphics driver situation isn't great. I've had a lot of installations where the dock takes 5-10 seconds to load. Agree with you about ease of use though, people seem to pick it up quite quickly. For the basic functionality of opening and switching applications, people seem to pick it up almost immediately. Not quite the same for using the dock, but even so.

FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop

HEADLINE: Stability / UI Bug fixing / Apport UI

DESCRIPTION: Sorry, long rant :)

Have been admin at Uni for 30 Ubuntu workstations. All 16.04 so I don't know about 16.10 or 17.10 improvements but what's missing in Unity is polish.

- The "Ubuntu has experienced a problem" dialogue needs rework and needs to move to the tray or be queued - there should also at least be the name of the application on the modal. I've seen situations where there are more than 50 of these modals layered on top.

- There are already bugs in launchpads for Unity, please consider them and work on making the experience more smooth. Especially focus on making Window management sane with other Apps that are not always Qt/GTK, like emacs, xterms and stuff. There bugs in the menu bar, window position is often broken - lot's of small stuff like that. The launcher tends to misbehave. Would really love if Ubuntu just did a sabattical year of fixing all the bugs in the Unity UI and thinking about good design.

- Menu bar is subtle broken for a lot of apps.

- Nautilus and gvfs should take a long look at some things dolphin and KDE are doing right and adopt some ideas.

- Also stability, stability, stability. Nautilus eating 10gb of memory due to a large folder, or handling of large files is all kind of broken. This is stuff that happens daily for a lot of users and investing some time to implement sane behavoir should not be so hard. Basically I wish that the Ubuntu Desktop team torture their UI and take notes how it breaks. Opening a 10Gbyte .tar.gz, having 10.000 files in a folder, over nfs, over sshfs. Stuff like this. Needs to work without hassle and provide feedback, not hangs.

- The small stuff matters, polish. Often when something does not work no UI feedback is provided. Torture your desktop, do stupid things and see how it breaks in strange ways. Fix that!

ROLE/AFFILIATION: Computer science student, Linux user, Admin for Ubuntu Desktops

Other than that: Good job, I like Ubuntu and Unity. But beeing stable and rock solid would make it not only okay, it would make it great.