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A Thank-You Note to the Hacker News Community from Ubuntu

786 points by dustinkirkland 10y ago

padraic7a 10y ago
There's something very HN about the fact that the author of one of the most discussed posts in the site's history can issue a follow up post, dealing with that discussion, to such little notice.
- cbhl 10y ago
  It was very interesting to see the summary view of the comments, but frankly, the real follow-up was the announcement that Ubuntu is moving back to GNOME in 18.04: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14043631 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14043631 That action was, IMHO, one of the biggest thank yous they could have given us.
  - adelarsq 10y ago
    I agree. I did stop using Ubuntu when Unity was introduced. May be time to be back
    - reitanqild 10y ago
      Same here. Was a huge fan before. Disliked Unity so much. Seems some people honestly like the look of it, how it works etc. I however strongly dislike DEs that: 1. messing with alt-tab 2. mess with menus (I liked the idea but found the implementation to be painful)
      - slitaz 10y ago
        This dislike should be mostly psychological. There are people that got primed to dislike Unity and when they attempted to use it, they struggled because of the 'old dog learning new tricks'. We saw this with the intro of Gnome Shell, which fractured the community between the old Gnome UI and new UI. If we continue to split up when something new is introduced, we are doing it wrong.
        reitanqild 10y ago
        I am not against new. I'm almost embarrassingly simple to get enthusiastic about new tech. The things I mention however are things I have found to be actual problems in my workflow. They obviously work well for others and I respect that. I hope others can respect my observation that with Mac/Unity alt-tab more keystrokes or waiting might be necessary. It is also an objective observation that with Mac style shared menu on top of the screen in a dual monitor setup you will sometimes have to move the pointer across two screens to reach the menu, then back again to continie working.
        braveo 10y ago
        To this day I still get frustrated on Windows because they broke Alt+Tab. Used to Alt+tab would simply cycle through in order of most recently used. Now they've got some functionality where shit can inject itself into that list so alt+tab and then alt+tab back and then alt+tab back to bounce between two different programs doesn't work consistently anymore. I'm sure I just don't understand the use case for the new behavior, but it drives me bonkers. I also hate, and I mean HAAAAAAATE when text editors autocomplete matching brackets, single/double quotes, etc. It completely fucks with my flow. so maybe I'm just an old control freak.
- saghm 10y ago
  Obviously this wasn't the case when you commented, but this is now on the front page (ranked sixth). I guess people noticed after all!
gingerbread-man 10y ago
Link to the original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14002821 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14002821 "Ask HN: What do you want to see in Ubuntu 17.10?"
apexalpha 10y ago
A sincere thank you to Ubuntu from someone who didn't study anything remotely close to IT but is now a software engineer anyway. I've always been interested in software and computers in general and, besides with the raspberry pi, I think Ubuntu has been the biggest influence on my interest in software and decision to learn programming. A few months back I looked up my first ever forum post. https://gathering.tweakers.net/forum/list_message/28824598#28824598 https://gathering.tweakers.net/forum/list_message/28824598#2... Asking why my PC wouldn't boot after 14 year old me stuck some components, including the HDD, in another pc. Turned out you needed something called 'drivers' to run a motherboard. Shortly after this I ordered my first red Ubuntu live CD that you guys shipped and that was my first experience with Linux. Anyway, open source projects that allow you to thinker with software and even break it played an important role in my life, and Ubuntu was my doorway to a decade of learning, playing and wonder about software and technology. Running 1604 LTS now. Sad that you guys are dropping Unity for GNome but still happy with Ubuntu. I'm sure it'll work out. Thanks, and good luck.
- josteink 10y ago
  They're not dropping Gnome. They're dropping Unity and Mir for Gnome and Wayland. And that's just awesome. A few years late, but still awesome. Linux needs more Wayland-love than just Red hat/Fedora.
  - apexalpha 10y ago
    Hit refresh. I noticed :)
mschuster91 10y ago
Ad "LDAP/AD integration": > This is actually a regular request of Canonical's corporate Ubuntu Desktop customers. We're generally able to meet the needs of our enterprise customers around LDAP and ActiveDirectory authentication. We'll look at what else we can do natively in the distro to improve this. OK I get the need that some may have to integrate an UI but please don't ship a full-blown Samba/winbindd plus config generator as default. Here's the why: Everyone has different LDAP setups. Some use a homegrown LDAP, some use MS AD in varying versions, some use Samba as AD in varying versions - and then everyone uses a different LDAP/AD scheme (e.g. is the username attribute lowercase-able, which attribute is it mapped to, are all PCs/users in a single OU, do you want to restrict logins to specific groups, does the organization need "full" AD setup or will a plain ldap_bind be sufficient ...) and you almost always need to hand-tune the configuration for your specific setup. A GUI configurator will most likely only work OOTB for people sticking with a standard MS AD, and make problems with non-standard setups, multi-domain memberships or similar. And: Non-enterprise users will most likely not need AD/LDAP support. Those who do should have competent admins anyhow, but what I can certainly say is that the documentation could be updated (e.g. https://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/Samba_Winbind/ https://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/Samba_Winbind/ only works for 12.04/14.04). I'd rather like if the documentation were improved than yet another shoddy Samba config generator that's falling out of sync with Samba more sooner than later... (source: lost more than a few hairs wrestling with AD and LDAP)
- ansible 10y ago
  And: Non-enterprise users will most likely not need AD/LDAP support. I strongly disagree with this. Everyone with more than 2 users in their organization can benefit from AD/LDAP support, if it is easy to set up and administer. Because... what else is viable for managing multiple user accounts across several machines? Twenty years ago, I would have said NIS (from Sun, originally called YP for 'yellowpages'). But that was horribly insecure. NIS+ was supposed to fix that, but support was never there in Linux land. Kerberos? That seems too difficult for most small networks. Don't get me wrong, I don't like LDAP, but there isn't anything better that I'm aware of. LDAP has some support for other applications (for example, we use it for Redmine user accounts), I don't know of anything else besides LDAP that has widespread support. But the initial configuration was a bit of a mess, where I was going back and forth among the official docs, the Ubuntu docs, and other guides. I should write my own guide so that I can add to the confusion.
josteink 10y ago
Awesome to see our response followed with such attention, not to mention feedback with concrete promises about what (and what not) to expect dealt with. Good job, Canonical! Happy to be a user! (And good job finally ditching Mir. You could have kept Unity for all I care. Linux can handle a few dozen DEs. But having more than one display server, now that was just nuts.) Edit: while the feedback post here may have been the most discussed post on HN ever, the announcement of dropping Mir clearly made rumbles too, with a record 10,000+ upvotes in a "niche" subreddit like /r/linux. When a player like Ubuntu does the right thing, people clearly care.
icc97 10y ago
> Official hardware that just-works, Nexus-of-Ubuntu (130 weight) I really like this one. I'd made comments of wanting pre-installed Linux, but the Nexus concept is a much better idea. It's following a model that seems to have worked well for Google. It's a fantastic way to break the chicken and egg situation of getting pre-installed Linux available.
- Paul-ish 10y ago
  I hope down the road, if the program is successful, they can increasingly push for open hardware in the machine.
  - ethbro 10y ago
    I also like the Dell XPS 13 model. Offer a pre-installed Linux version of a machine at higher cost, but do your best to upstream patches and homogenize hardware with the Windows pre-installed version. Seems to split the difference between "a Linux laptop is economically unfeasible" and "with a little care in component selection and upstreaming drivers / fixes, compatibility can be assured."
    - AdmiralAsshat 10y ago
      Offer a pre-installed Linux version of a machine at higher cost, but do your best to upstream patches and homogenize hardware with the Windows pre-installed version. I actually find the fact that the Linux version is more expensive to be insulting. If anything, it should be cheaper, given that you're paying the "Windows Tax" on the W10 version of the laptop. Now if they cost the same price, with the caveat that the $80 or so that would normally go to the W10 license is instead going to Dell's Linux team to ensure hardware compatibility and/or submit upstream changes to Canonical / Red Hat, then I'd be all for it.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      - shock 10y ago
DoofusOfDeath 10y ago
Hey Dustin, thanks for the follow-up! In your original story, I posted a request for Canonical to come up with some viable strategy to get Adobe CS (and related color-calibration HW/SW) usable on Ubuntu. I expected a lot of traction for that suggestion, because AFAICT a lot of creative professionals are looking for a way to escape the Windows/Mac duopoly. However, it looks like my suggestion didn't make the cut for the list you just posted. Can you share any thoughts on why getting Adobe CS usable on Ubuntu is / isn't a strategic priority for Canonical?
- GuiA 10y ago
  How much of that work would fall on the shoulders of Adobe, rather than Canonical?
- rlpb 10y ago
  Adobe CS is proprietary software owned by Adobe. What do you propose Canonical do? What makes you think there exists any viable strategy that Canonical could follow?
  - alkonaut 10y ago
    As I have said before - the second there is even a rumor that Adobe would allow (license wise) for their products to run outside Win/Mac, the correct business decision for apple would be to buy Adobe and ensure that hole is closed very quickly.
- dustinkirkland 10y ago
  Hey there! Thanks for the suggestion. We're engaging with dozens of major vendors of traditional/proprietary software about delivering their software onto Ubuntu via Snaps -- which is a new packaging format that solves many of the traditional problems associated with proprietary software working well on Linux. I'm going to ask Evan Dandrea and Michael Hall from Canonical to engage with Adobe around CS and anything else in their suite that might make sense to Snap. Cheers! @dustinkirkland
  - 10y ago
hatsunearu 10y ago
Why is dropping Unity lumped with dropping MIR? Unity is great and I love it, I don't want to lose it.
- reitanqild 10y ago
  Sorry for the loss. Honestly. I for one however had a really strong dislike for the alt-tab behaviour as well as the shared menu.
  - bigpeopleareold 10y ago
    This is possibly configurable, I don't know and didn't care. In GNOME, this is configurable behaviour. I liked this default and kept me on Unity because of that. This comes down to personal workflows. I got very frustrated dealing with the alt-tab behaviour of only showing windows when my focus is what application I need to use when I do the alt-tab. This is also the one holdover from using OS X daily, the one feature I felt was right (really, for me and probably a lot of people.)
- josteink 10y ago
  If I remember correctly Unity was a fork of Gnome with lots of patches applied to the point of having both Gnome and Unity on the same system taking effort and being risky w.r.t. stability. My guess is that they've invested entire Unity vNext on Mir, and if they're dropping Mir, they'll might as well drop Unity 8. That leaves them with Unity 7, and to unfuck a decade worth of changes they've done to make it work with mainline Gnome source. Basically lots of work to have a 6 year old product back to square one, before they can, once again, attempt to further develop it. I'm guessing they've decided that's not worth the effort and that their time is better spent helping improve something already mature (Gnome 3). Touché, but they could have listened to the community back when they announced Mir and Unity 8 too ;)
  - slitaz 10y ago
    Unity 7 is a computer plugin.
  - 10y ago
zserge 10y ago
I believe that the major pitfall here is that the feedback you've received is mostly about the changes that people want to see. However if we consider the number of people who want Gnome vs the number of those who want Unity 8 vs the number of conservative users who like Unity 7 as it is now - the results might be different. I personally am very happy with the current Unity. I find it intuitive and more aesthetically pleasant/polished than Gnome Shell (I've only used that as it comes with Ubuntu Gnome). So please, don't drop current Unity. Or if you have to switch to Gnome Shell - please keep the user experience as close as possible to the current Unity to help users migrate.
- kleiba 10y ago
  In other words: people who like the current status quo are less likely to make themselves heard than those who want something changed. So the trends you tried to extrapolate from the HN discussion may be biased.
  - emodendroket 10y ago
    I also wonder how representative HN users really are, but maybe that's less of a concern with a product like desktop Linux which hardly has any nontechnical users in the first place.
  - Old_Thrashbarg 10y ago
    As an anecdote, that was exactly my experience. I'm one of those light-weight desktop Linux users. I've only experienced Windwos, OSx and Ubuntu. I can say that I really enjoy the current Ubuntu UI, but due to lack of knowledge of Wayland and whatevery, I'm disinclined to speak up.
  - srrr 10y ago
    To get more unbiased input one might try something like http://www.allourideas.org/ http://www.allourideas.org/ . This method of priorisation and feedback gathering is much better than "more votes = higher priority". The downside is lack of comments/discussion.
  - 10y ago
Arizhel 10y ago
Instead of adopting Gnome3, they should adopt KDE. It's far more customizable (so "Easily customize, relocate the Unity launcher (53 weight)" would be already done) and much better architected than Gnome. And for people lamenting the loss of Unity, it wouldn't be that hard to make a custom theme for KDE which largely replicates the look-n-feel of Unity. Gnome simply is not set up to allow any kind of customization, and the devs actively discourage it. The opposite is true for KDE, and a distro that wants to stand out with its UI would be better served with a DE that allows them the freedom of customization.
dankohn1 10y ago
Congrats to Dustin not just for some amazing crowdsourcing with the original post, but then for an extremely concise, thoughtful and humble followup for those of us who couldn't wade through all of those suggestions ourselves.
- dustinkirkland 10y ago
  You're welcome Dan! It was a lot of work, but so, so, so worth it. I'd do it again in a heartbeat. Or rather, maybe in 6 months :-)
trololo12345 10y ago
Will this mean, that the integrated Amazon search in the desktop is also gone forever? I'd like to see Canonical making money with support instead of that Amazon thing or selling "Apps" to the user. That is the number one reason, why I do not recommend Ubuntu. Other than that, I'm amazed how much the community was heard! Also thanks for the in-depth analysis blog post :)
- slitaz 10y ago
  The Amazon thing was gone in 2016. Having an option for integrated payments in the software store is a nice thing, isn't it? You get the donations feature in the store instead of going elsewhere.
MrTonyD 10y ago
Back in the days there were backroom deals to get Adobe on Apple platform. Steve would meet with Adobe executives and trade them cash and offshore stock (untraceable, of course) so that they would port to Apple. All the development for Apple was fully funded for Adobe. In case it isn't obvious, Adobe could choose to support only Windows and do just fine - eliminating development and support costs for the Apple platform. Thus, bribing the rich and greedy became the effective technique.
- no_wizard 10y ago
  Source? This seems incredibly unsubstantiated. There were public efforts Steve made to keep Adobe on the platform and I know there were developer meetings to ensure the transition to Carbon and Cocoa went fine. I have seen no evidence of illicit stock grants or Apple giving direct cash to executives at adobe. I hate to be that guy but I would like more information on this, otherwise it feels rather unsubstantiated and just paints both Apple and Adobe in a bad light for no reason.
  - MrTonyD 10y ago
    I worked on projects for Steve and reported to his direct reports. One would have to be very naive to think that this isn't just typical business practice. Or do people really fall for that "free market" stuff that we are being sold?
    - no_wizard 10y ago
      Well, I'm not naive. I'm sure there is a lot of things that the public would find unsavory that happens all the time at the upper echelons of companies like this, sure. I'm willing to believe that. I just have never seen any substantiation between Adobe and Apple doing this sort of thing, even when Steve was alive. This is the first time someone has even confirmed it yet alone alleged this happened. I know both companies had done things in the past that were less than savory (see that whole lawsuit about suppressing wages. Very disgraceful!) Never this. It's been alleged for years, but never once was there evidence. I'm sure you could make a mint here if you wanted to, if you could substantiate any of it.
sunstone 10y ago
While it's true that Ubuntu still has a few inconveniences, from my perspective it's still much better than the alternatives. The mere thought of having to use Windows or IOS for development make me want to curl up in the corner with my blanket. Daily I use ubuntu for my desktop, laptop, TV streamer and cloud servers. Overall my satisfaction level across all devices is at least 9/10. Great job team Ubuntu!
tie_ 10y ago
I have a strong dislike for systemd, so while I'm really sorry that upstart "lost" the fight, Ubuntu gained a lot of respect in my eyes with the decision to go with the rest and avoid unnecessary fragmentation. This could have easily ended up another as another community rift, slowing down everybody along the way. Now they do it again with Wayland/Mir! It actually takes a significant amount of both balls and goodwill to give up on the product that you invested so much into for the sake of aligning better with your open source community. Bravo! FWIW, I too would like to keep the DE experience of Unity, and especially the Dash panel and shortcuts. If that expose-text-search could scan non-focused browser tabs that would be a killer feature, but that's for the other thread. The idea of "Let's simply ask HN users what they think" is a gem, that I suspect will now make it into many PMs' playbooks ;)
- kuschku 10y ago
  > FWIW, I too would like to keep the DE experience of Unity, and especially the Dash panel and shortcuts. If that expose-text-search could scan non-focused browser tabs that would be a killer feature, but that's for the other thread. Maybe switch to KDE’s KRunner? It’s the most functional and extensive search framework yet.
- dustinkirkland 10y ago
  Thank you!
- yuhong 10y ago
  I have a thread on when Pottering was hired at Red Hat: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14044287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14044287 I think there was a lot of hate for PulseAudio too. I wonder what about Kay Sievers now, which was even hated by Linus Torvalds at one point.
  - AsyncAwait 10y ago
    The 'haters' are the vocal minority. Lots of people I know, (myself included), actually prefer systemd as it greatly simplifies system management and writing of service files and is a lot more dynamic than upstart was. Maybe it's just my bubble, but systemd tends to be accepted as the right move now. I am sure the people who hate it have good reasons, but all I've heard is 'doesn't follow UNIX philoshophy', (guess what, the whole Linux ecosystem doesn't really, even Stallamn isn't a fan), 'centralized', (somewhat valid, but there's still Gentoo and Void Linux), binary text files, (installing a 'text logger' over journalctl takes 5s and the filtering capabilities of journalctl are awesome). Also, the hate for PulseAudio largely died years ago. I for one am glad for people like Pottering, who are willing to think longer term and produce great* software. Yes, maybe more buggy at the start, (but not really the case with systemd), but great eventually. Also, let's be honest, the reason you see more bugs in i.e. PulseAudio is because it is being developed in the open from its inception.
Johnny_Brahms 10y ago
Not related to Ubuntu, but maybe someone here knows a good way to kill the swipe left/right to navigate in blogs. I accidentally left the page about 5 times, which is rather annoying. Using ff mobile if that helps. Edit: hallelujah! Set dom.w3c_touch_events.enabled to 0 in about:config
- lucb1e 10y ago
  Yeah this is a real pain in the ass of the Blogger® platform. Not sure there is anything Dustin can do about this, other than move the whole blog over... Nice find of the about:config setting though!
  - dustinkirkland 10y ago
    Whoa, good to know, I've never hit that before!
  - reitanqild 10y ago
    Googlers around here: any idea when you'll start fixing/resetting blogger to how it was?
mi100hael 10y ago
> Add night mode, redshift, f.lux (42 weight) This request is one of the real gems of this whole exercise! This seems like a nice, little, bite-sized feature, that we may be able include with minimal additional effort. Great find. This one should come for free with the switch to Gnome, since it's now present in 3.24. https://www.gnome.org/news/2017/03/gnome-3-24-released/attachment/night-light/ https://www.gnome.org/news/2017/03/gnome-3-24-released/attac...
- bkor 10y ago
  I'm using 3.24. There's still a few improvements to be made. People want the change to be a little bit less sudden (never noticed the transition, but apparently it's like an on/off thing). And personally I'd like the thing to turn off while you're watching a movie. You can temporarily turn it off, which is pretty cool. Once you do the real colours seem super bright.
mwcampbell 10y ago
I'm impressed with your thoroughness in processing the responses. But I'm just curious: Why did you lump usability for children and accessibility for users with disabilities into one suggestion? Anyway, returning to GNOME should help with the latter.
- bkor 10y ago
  The accessibility of GNOME under X11 should be really good. Not so sure about Wayland though. E.g. not sure how dasher would work, nor orca. Secondly, some of the things (IIRC pointer highlighting) actually is done using some X11 application. That needs to be moved (e.g. mutter).
Jerry2 10y ago
I currently use Ubuntu on one of my laptops precisely because it's not GNOME. I can't stand GNOME3's hamburger menu UIs, giant title bars, lack of real menus, inability to make changes without digging into their version of dreaded "registry" and that pointless menu bar at the top. If I'm being forced to move to GNOME, I'll be switching to Fedora instead since they have a solid track record of GNOME and Wayland support. My desktop will always be Arch, however with Cinnamon and, occasionally, i3 for development.
- gurkendoktor 10y ago
  Even if Canonical only keeps a fraction of its desktop staff, they could easily improve on GNOME's default settings and theme, something that Fedora won't do.
  - bkor 10y ago
    It should be much easier since GTK+ "4" (not too many changes in GTK+3.x) combined with finally having a theme API, though the intention is to have some bits of GNOME run these development GTK+ versions at some point in future. They're redoing how widgets work in GTK+ "4". That's basically like changing HTML and having slightly different elements. Though there's a theme API, I wouldn't be surprised if some theme work is needed as a result. See the last bits at https://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2017/03/31/gtk-happenings-3/ https://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2017/03/31/gtk-happenings-3/ for why I think above things.
BudFox 10y ago
It is sad to see the modern and reliable Unity 7 put out to pasture. GTK was not used for Unity 7. Canonical chooses QT for Unity 8. KDE can easily replicate Unity 7 look/feel. QT no longer has an objectionable license. It is not clear why Gnome is the choice over basing on KDE?
drej 10y ago
Just an irrelevant side note: When you do a requests.get(url), you can use the .json() method on it instead of all the json.loads([...].text). I remember doing the same for years and only discovering .json() recently, I love it.
- dustinkirkland 10y ago
  :-) Awesome. Thanks for the hint!
analognoise 10y ago
I stopped using Ubuntu after it came with Amazon shit installed.
- cdelsolar 10y ago
  ok
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
PleaseHelpMe 10y ago
I am slightly sad by the fact that rarely anyone mentioned about the battery life of ubuntu, but got excited with the "Nexus-of-Ubuntu" thing. I wish the best to ubuntu.
- dustinkirkland 10y ago
  Power/battery management definitely made the list. See the blog post ;-)
_jordan 10y ago
I would have really liked to see gnome2-esq style DE - bare bones, focus on a great windows like task bar / windows management. I really hated the unity dock thing and I especially hated the color scheme.
- noisy_boy 10y ago
  I think the Mate desktop aims to deliver just that.
  - _jordan 10y ago
    Indeed, but it's just missing a lot of the polish and modern features
hysan 10y ago
I was really happy when that Ask HN thread was first posted and even happier now knowing that all of the comments were read and thoroughly considered. That said, what this blog post and the general feeling I get from Ubuntu as a whole is that: 1. There is too much of a focus on how far Ubuntu has come and not enough focus on how far things still need to progress. I too remember the days when sleep/hibernate were a crap shot, but that was when I viewed Ubuntu as an open source alternative without much expectation. Nowadays, I see Ubuntu as a mature desktop and as such, I judge it much more harshly. Anything that doesn't work or isn't 99.99% stable is a red flag for me. So I do hope that the Ubuntu team puts more focus on making things up to date, rock solid, and super stable rather than go chase after new features. Just like a building, you need a stable foundation before building upwards. 2. There isn't a clear target audience for Ubuntu Desktop. What does Ubuntu Desktop want to be? Before it was convergence and while a very neat idea, I was never clear on who was supposed to use it. The requirements screamed high income, tech savvy end users. However, development focused on Unity, Mir, etc. with work going into features that didn't fit the target audience. For example, like the post says, HiDPI & 4K were a surprise. Why was this surprising? The group that would most likely be your early adopters and trend setters are the same exact group that would have this type of hardware. Same with trackpad, gestures, customizability, flux, root on ZFS, security, etc. All of those are used heavily by the demographic most likely to follow the news on Unity and convergence. It baffles my mind that Ubuntu's Product Management couldn't make this connection and understand what core features to build out first in Unity/Mir. Yes, these are on the sidelines now, but I really hope the Product Management team takes the time to figure out some direction. 3. At the moment, Ubuntu is at a major crossroad. Even after Mark Shuttleworth's post, this post, and all of my usual Linux news following, I don't really know where Ubuntu Desktop is going to go. Tell us what we can expect as users. Tell us when we can expect it to come. Tell us how you intend on getting there. And most importantly, tell us how we can help! Either though regular posts to various communities like the Ask HN one, or ways we can contribute actual work. Not everyone is a dev, but as an example, I used to do professional QA and yet I found it extremely difficult to find out how I can help QA things and submit useful bug reports (this isn't just Ubuntu but most open source projects). The usual "check the docs/wiki" or "submit something on the issue tracker" are not helpful. In all of my years using Linux, that Ask HN thread + this blog post was the first time I ever felt like I was heard and managed to contribute to Ubuntu. Even something as simple as periodically getting feedback from the community and telling us what you heard from us makes me feel more optimistic about Ubuntu's future. I apologize for the rant-like nature of my comment, but hopefully this gets read and something positive comes out of it. Thanks for reading.
shalmanese 10y ago
It would be nice to get this list sorted by most surprising as well. A lot of these feedback points seem to fall into the category of "faster horses" which usually tend to dominate when you solicit ideas from the general public.
Andrex 10y ago
I feel guilty: I didn't respond on the initial post because I doubted the really outrageous/far-out ideas like "dump everything you've been working on for the past five years" would actually be fruitful, but man, Shuttleworth shut me right up haha. Congrats on the Ubuntu team for the courage to make bold changes when necessary and to actually (finally?) listen to pointed community feedback and constructive criticism. I haven't been this excited for Ubuntu since 2010.
19eightyfour 10y ago
Here's a perspective on FOSS and Ububtu. One point of free open source software was we didn't need to be stuck with features we didn't like, that were decided by some majority, or leadership, because we could fork our own and customize as we like. So I think the enthusiasm for responsiveness of a central body to feature requests, is an enthusiasm for a thing not normally associated with a FOSS, which therefore demonstrates that either: that the Ubuntu ecosystem says it is FOSS, but actually operates like something else, or that FOSS fork-your-own theory doesn't apply in practice on large projects with lots of people, or that this perspective just related here is missing something.
- slitaz 10y ago
  The UI is the type of big software that needs design and follow this design. Otherwise you end up with a complex piece of software. You get this with all types of big software that need to keep a clean design to avoid future pains.
deadfece 10y ago
I think the best news out of this is hopefully that it seems you (as Canonical) have shifted away from "This is not a democracy. [...] we are not voting on design decisions." and the (paraphrased) "This is good because we [Canonical] made it!"
- slitaz 10y ago
  Which project is "voting" on design decisions?
jseutter 10y ago
Just want to chime in with others and say thank you for making this followup post. Regardless of the outcome, distilling the results the way you did means a lot to me and I'm sure others as well. Thanks!
- dustinkirkland 10y ago
  You're welcome. Thanks for following along.
sandGorgon 10y ago
The one thing I'm incredibly worried about is the packaging war starting all over again. There are zero reasons for having multiple packaging formats across liNux distros . I was hoping that snap or flatpak becomes universally adopted, but it seems that Redhat and Canonical are again split along political fault lines here.
- gurkendoktor 10y ago
  As Canonical has moved its focus away from end users, we might end up with a more intuitive split: snaps for the cloud, flatpak for desktop apps?
  - sandGorgon 10y ago
    not really. check this - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14053627 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14053627 We're engaging with dozens of major vendors of traditional/proprietary software about delivering their software onto Ubuntu via Snaps -- which is a new packaging format that solves many of the traditional problems associated with proprietary software working well on Linux.
- bkor 10y ago
  Flatpak purely deals with GUI/desktop applications. Sandboxed, then having a GUI way to break out of the sandbox securely (user interaction). Snaps also allow non-GUI things and Canonical wants to use it as well for cloud (or maybe already are using it). Due to Snap having a different focus, you cannot just drop Snap.
jumasheff 10y ago
Re: Make WINE and Windows apps work better How about booting ReactOS to run Windows apps? Sounds like a Frankenstein-ish solution, but...
shmerl 10y ago
Thanks for deciding to focus on Wayland from now on. This will benefit everyone.
Alan_Dillman 10y ago
Nice read, and I am wishing I had been in on the original topic. If I had, I would have commented that the version upgrade process sucks for anyone that starts from a minimal base(like I do). If I go through the upgrade, I will end up with all the default stuff. If I don't have thunderbird installed, don't install it for me. In short: upgrades could be smarter, faster, better, stronger.
JepZ 10y ago
I also really like the idea of 'Official hardware that just-works'. Not just for users without much technical knowledge but also for the rest of us. I mean nowadays we somehow manage to get most hardware working 'somehow'. Sometimes it takes a few years before your sound/bluetooth/wifi chip actually does what it is supposed to do, but most of the time we find ways to make use of our hardware. But when you are going to buy new hardware you are a bit lost. You can try to find out if there are any major problems with some hardware, search the ubuntu hardware database, but especially for new, rare or expensive hardware there is often not so much to find about. For example a few years ago I bought a 22" touchscreen for my desktop and for almost a year it somehow worked but didn't do the things it was supposed to do. Officially supported hardware by vendors would be a great step in the right direction.
- sparkiegeek 10y ago
  Perhaps you're not aware that Canonical already do this and publish results at https://certification.ubuntu.com/ https://certification.ubuntu.com/ ?
  - JepZ 10y ago
    Well, I was not aware of that ;-) Thanks :-)
akerro 10y ago
No one mentioned better Steam support/collaboration with Valve? CPU and operating systems are made for gaming, it's gaming that attracts users and investors from big companies and developers. Ubuntu would only benefit if they invested in MESA, faster AMD GPU integration and cooperate with Valve on Steam clients and gamedev research for Linux.
mapreri 10y ago
Just a note about Reproducible Builds: "We've been working with Debian upstream on this over the last few years, and will continue to do so" — well, apart from the regular sync/merge flow from Debian to Ubuntu, AFAIK Canonical never reached out to us Reproducible Builds folks from Debian. That said, we/I plan to reach out to Ubuntu/Canonical soon :)
- dustinkirkland 10y ago
  Canonical employs dozens of Debian developers, whose work goes to both Debian and Ubuntu. ;-)
  - mapreri 10y ago
    I know, I collaborate with several, and I am both an Ubuntu an d Debian developer :) Just that I know no Canonical employee is working with us on Reproducible Builds. (I only remember a very spotty contact like 2 years ago on IRC from somebody saying Canonical was interested) If they are working, they are doing it behind a curtain, which I'd find interesting ;)
agd 10y ago
" Fix /boot space, clean up old kernels (92 weight) ...committed to getting this problem solved once and for all in Ubuntu 17.10 -- and ideally getting those fixes backported to older releases of Ubuntu." Great news! Thanks for taking this feedback onboard.

786 points by dustinkirkland 10y ago

There's something very HN about the fact that the author of one of the most discussed posts in the site's history can issue a follow up post, dealing with that discussion, to such little notice.

cbhl 10y ago
It was very interesting to see the summary view of the comments, but frankly, the real follow-up was the announcement that Ubuntu is moving back to GNOME in 18.04: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14043631 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14043631 That action was, IMHO, one of the biggest thank yous they could have given us.
- adelarsq 10y ago
  I agree. I did stop using Ubuntu when Unity was introduced. May be time to be back
  - reitanqild 10y ago
    Same here. Was a huge fan before. Disliked Unity so much. Seems some people honestly like the look of it, how it works etc. I however strongly dislike DEs that: 1. messing with alt-tab 2. mess with menus (I liked the idea but found the implementation to be painful)
    - slitaz 10y ago
      This dislike should be mostly psychological. There are people that got primed to dislike Unity and when they attempted to use it, they struggled because of the 'old dog learning new tricks'. We saw this with the intro of Gnome Shell, which fractured the community between the old Gnome UI and new UI. If we continue to split up when something new is introduced, we are doing it wrong.
      - reitanqild 10y ago
        I am not against new. I'm almost embarrassingly simple to get enthusiastic about new tech. The things I mention however are things I have found to be actual problems in my workflow. They obviously work well for others and I respect that. I hope others can respect my observation that with Mac/Unity alt-tab more keystrokes or waiting might be necessary. It is also an objective observation that with Mac style shared menu on top of the screen in a dual monitor setup you will sometimes have to move the pointer across two screens to reach the menu, then back again to continie working.
        braveo 10y ago
        To this day I still get frustrated on Windows because they broke Alt+Tab. Used to Alt+tab would simply cycle through in order of most recently used. Now they've got some functionality where shit can inject itself into that list so alt+tab and then alt+tab back and then alt+tab back to bounce between two different programs doesn't work consistently anymore. I'm sure I just don't understand the use case for the new behavior, but it drives me bonkers. I also hate, and I mean HAAAAAAATE when text editors autocomplete matching brackets, single/double quotes, etc. It completely fucks with my flow. so maybe I'm just an old control freak.
saghm 10y ago
Obviously this wasn't the case when you commented, but this is now on the front page (ranked sixth). I guess people noticed after all!

gingerbread-man 10y ago

Link to the original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14002821 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14002821 "Ask HN: What do you want to see in Ubuntu 17.10?"

apexalpha 10y ago

A sincere thank you to Ubuntu from someone who didn't study anything remotely close to IT but is now a software engineer anyway. I've always been interested in software and computers in general and, besides with the raspberry pi, I think Ubuntu has been the biggest influence on my interest in software and decision to learn programming. A few months back I looked up my first ever forum post. https://gathering.tweakers.net/forum/list_message/28824598#28824598 https://gathering.tweakers.net/forum/list_message/28824598#2... Asking why my PC wouldn't boot after 14 year old me stuck some components, including the HDD, in another pc. Turned out you needed something called 'drivers' to run a motherboard. Shortly after this I ordered my first red Ubuntu live CD that you guys shipped and that was my first experience with Linux. Anyway, open source projects that allow you to thinker with software and even break it played an important role in my life, and Ubuntu was my doorway to a decade of learning, playing and wonder about software and technology. Running 1604 LTS now. Sad that you guys are dropping Unity for GNome but still happy with Ubuntu. I'm sure it'll work out. Thanks, and good luck.

josteink 10y ago
They're not dropping Gnome. They're dropping Unity and Mir for Gnome and Wayland. And that's just awesome. A few years late, but still awesome. Linux needs more Wayland-love than just Red hat/Fedora.
- apexalpha 10y ago
  Hit refresh. I noticed :)

mschuster91 10y ago

Ad "LDAP/AD integration": > This is actually a regular request of Canonical's corporate Ubuntu Desktop customers. We're generally able to meet the needs of our enterprise customers around LDAP and ActiveDirectory authentication. We'll look at what else we can do natively in the distro to improve this. OK I get the need that some may have to integrate an UI but please don't ship a full-blown Samba/winbindd plus config generator as default. Here's the why: Everyone has different LDAP setups. Some use a homegrown LDAP, some use MS AD in varying versions, some use Samba as AD in varying versions - and then everyone uses a different LDAP/AD scheme (e.g. is the username attribute lowercase-able, which attribute is it mapped to, are all PCs/users in a single OU, do you want to restrict logins to specific groups, does the organization need "full" AD setup or will a plain ldap_bind be sufficient ...) and you almost always need to hand-tune the configuration for your specific setup. A GUI configurator will most likely only work OOTB for people sticking with a standard MS AD, and make problems with non-standard setups, multi-domain memberships or similar. And: Non-enterprise users will most likely not need AD/LDAP support. Those who do should have competent admins anyhow, but what I can certainly say is that the documentation could be updated (e.g. https://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/Samba_Winbind/ https://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/Samba_Winbind/ only works for 12.04/14.04). I'd rather like if the documentation were improved than yet another shoddy Samba config generator that's falling out of sync with Samba more sooner than later... (source: lost more than a few hairs wrestling with AD and LDAP)

ansible 10y ago
And: Non-enterprise users will most likely not need AD/LDAP support. I strongly disagree with this. Everyone with more than 2 users in their organization can benefit from AD/LDAP support, if it is easy to set up and administer. Because... what else is viable for managing multiple user accounts across several machines? Twenty years ago, I would have said NIS (from Sun, originally called YP for 'yellowpages'). But that was horribly insecure. NIS+ was supposed to fix that, but support was never there in Linux land. Kerberos? That seems too difficult for most small networks. Don't get me wrong, I don't like LDAP, but there isn't anything better that I'm aware of. LDAP has some support for other applications (for example, we use it for Redmine user accounts), I don't know of anything else besides LDAP that has widespread support. But the initial configuration was a bit of a mess, where I was going back and forth among the official docs, the Ubuntu docs, and other guides. I should write my own guide so that I can add to the confusion.

josteink 10y ago

Awesome to see our response followed with such attention, not to mention feedback with concrete promises about what (and what not) to expect dealt with. Good job, Canonical! Happy to be a user! (And good job finally ditching Mir. You could have kept Unity for all I care. Linux can handle a few dozen DEs. But having more than one display server, now that was just nuts.) Edit: while the feedback post here may have been the most discussed post on HN ever, the announcement of dropping Mir clearly made rumbles too, with a record 10,000+ upvotes in a "niche" subreddit like /r/linux. When a player like Ubuntu does the right thing, people clearly care.

icc97 10y ago

> Official hardware that just-works, Nexus-of-Ubuntu (130 weight) I really like this one. I'd made comments of wanting pre-installed Linux, but the Nexus concept is a much better idea. It's following a model that seems to have worked well for Google. It's a fantastic way to break the chicken and egg situation of getting pre-installed Linux available.

Paul-ish 10y ago
I hope down the road, if the program is successful, they can increasingly push for open hardware in the machine.
- ethbro 10y ago
  I also like the Dell XPS 13 model. Offer a pre-installed Linux version of a machine at higher cost, but do your best to upstream patches and homogenize hardware with the Windows pre-installed version. Seems to split the difference between "a Linux laptop is economically unfeasible" and "with a little care in component selection and upstreaming drivers / fixes, compatibility can be assured."
  - AdmiralAsshat 10y ago
    Offer a pre-installed Linux version of a machine at higher cost, but do your best to upstream patches and homogenize hardware with the Windows pre-installed version. I actually find the fact that the Linux version is more expensive to be insulting. If anything, it should be cheaper, given that you're paying the "Windows Tax" on the W10 version of the laptop. Now if they cost the same price, with the caveat that the $80 or so that would normally go to the W10 license is instead going to Dell's Linux team to ensure hardware compatibility and/or submit upstream changes to Canonical / Red Hat, then I'd be all for it.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - shock 10y ago

DoofusOfDeath 10y ago

Hey Dustin, thanks for the follow-up! In your original story, I posted a request for Canonical to come up with some viable strategy to get Adobe CS (and related color-calibration HW/SW) usable on Ubuntu. I expected a lot of traction for that suggestion, because AFAICT a lot of creative professionals are looking for a way to escape the Windows/Mac duopoly. However, it looks like my suggestion didn't make the cut for the list you just posted. Can you share any thoughts on why getting Adobe CS usable on Ubuntu is / isn't a strategic priority for Canonical?

GuiA 10y ago
How much of that work would fall on the shoulders of Adobe, rather than Canonical?
rlpb 10y ago
Adobe CS is proprietary software owned by Adobe. What do you propose Canonical do? What makes you think there exists any viable strategy that Canonical could follow?
- alkonaut 10y ago
  As I have said before - the second there is even a rumor that Adobe would allow (license wise) for their products to run outside Win/Mac, the correct business decision for apple would be to buy Adobe and ensure that hole is closed very quickly.
dustinkirkland 10y ago
Hey there! Thanks for the suggestion. We're engaging with dozens of major vendors of traditional/proprietary software about delivering their software onto Ubuntu via Snaps -- which is a new packaging format that solves many of the traditional problems associated with proprietary software working well on Linux. I'm going to ask Evan Dandrea and Michael Hall from Canonical to engage with Adobe around CS and anything else in their suite that might make sense to Snap. Cheers! @dustinkirkland
- 10y ago

hatsunearu 10y ago

Why is dropping Unity lumped with dropping MIR? Unity is great and I love it, I don't want to lose it.

reitanqild 10y ago
Sorry for the loss. Honestly. I for one however had a really strong dislike for the alt-tab behaviour as well as the shared menu.
- bigpeopleareold 10y ago
  This is possibly configurable, I don't know and didn't care. In GNOME, this is configurable behaviour. I liked this default and kept me on Unity because of that. This comes down to personal workflows. I got very frustrated dealing with the alt-tab behaviour of only showing windows when my focus is what application I need to use when I do the alt-tab. This is also the one holdover from using OS X daily, the one feature I felt was right (really, for me and probably a lot of people.)
josteink 10y ago
If I remember correctly Unity was a fork of Gnome with lots of patches applied to the point of having both Gnome and Unity on the same system taking effort and being risky w.r.t. stability. My guess is that they've invested entire Unity vNext on Mir, and if they're dropping Mir, they'll might as well drop Unity 8. That leaves them with Unity 7, and to unfuck a decade worth of changes they've done to make it work with mainline Gnome source. Basically lots of work to have a 6 year old product back to square one, before they can, once again, attempt to further develop it. I'm guessing they've decided that's not worth the effort and that their time is better spent helping improve something already mature (Gnome 3). Touché, but they could have listened to the community back when they announced Mir and Unity 8 too ;)
- slitaz 10y ago
  Unity 7 is a computer plugin.
- 10y ago

zserge 10y ago

I believe that the major pitfall here is that the feedback you've received is mostly about the changes that people want to see. However if we consider the number of people who want Gnome vs the number of those who want Unity 8 vs the number of conservative users who like Unity 7 as it is now - the results might be different. I personally am very happy with the current Unity. I find it intuitive and more aesthetically pleasant/polished than Gnome Shell (I've only used that as it comes with Ubuntu Gnome). So please, don't drop current Unity. Or if you have to switch to Gnome Shell - please keep the user experience as close as possible to the current Unity to help users migrate.

kleiba 10y ago
In other words: people who like the current status quo are less likely to make themselves heard than those who want something changed. So the trends you tried to extrapolate from the HN discussion may be biased.
- emodendroket 10y ago
  I also wonder how representative HN users really are, but maybe that's less of a concern with a product like desktop Linux which hardly has any nontechnical users in the first place.
- Old_Thrashbarg 10y ago
  As an anecdote, that was exactly my experience. I'm one of those light-weight desktop Linux users. I've only experienced Windwos, OSx and Ubuntu. I can say that I really enjoy the current Ubuntu UI, but due to lack of knowledge of Wayland and whatevery, I'm disinclined to speak up.
- srrr 10y ago
  To get more unbiased input one might try something like http://www.allourideas.org/ http://www.allourideas.org/ . This method of priorisation and feedback gathering is much better than "more votes = higher priority". The downside is lack of comments/discussion.
- 10y ago

Arizhel 10y ago

Instead of adopting Gnome3, they should adopt KDE. It's far more customizable (so "Easily customize, relocate the Unity launcher (53 weight)" would be already done) and much better architected than Gnome. And for people lamenting the loss of Unity, it wouldn't be that hard to make a custom theme for KDE which largely replicates the look-n-feel of Unity. Gnome simply is not set up to allow any kind of customization, and the devs actively discourage it. The opposite is true for KDE, and a distro that wants to stand out with its UI would be better served with a DE that allows them the freedom of customization.

dankohn1 10y ago

Congrats to Dustin not just for some amazing crowdsourcing with the original post, but then for an extremely concise, thoughtful and humble followup for those of us who couldn't wade through all of those suggestions ourselves.

dustinkirkland 10y ago
You're welcome Dan! It was a lot of work, but so, so, so worth it. I'd do it again in a heartbeat. Or rather, maybe in 6 months :-)

trololo12345 10y ago

Will this mean, that the integrated Amazon search in the desktop is also gone forever? I'd like to see Canonical making money with support instead of that Amazon thing or selling "Apps" to the user. That is the number one reason, why I do not recommend Ubuntu. Other than that, I'm amazed how much the community was heard! Also thanks for the in-depth analysis blog post :)

slitaz 10y ago
The Amazon thing was gone in 2016. Having an option for integrated payments in the software store is a nice thing, isn't it? You get the donations feature in the store instead of going elsewhere.

MrTonyD 10y ago

Back in the days there were backroom deals to get Adobe on Apple platform. Steve would meet with Adobe executives and trade them cash and offshore stock (untraceable, of course) so that they would port to Apple. All the development for Apple was fully funded for Adobe. In case it isn't obvious, Adobe could choose to support only Windows and do just fine - eliminating development and support costs for the Apple platform. Thus, bribing the rich and greedy became the effective technique.

no_wizard 10y ago
Source? This seems incredibly unsubstantiated. There were public efforts Steve made to keep Adobe on the platform and I know there were developer meetings to ensure the transition to Carbon and Cocoa went fine. I have seen no evidence of illicit stock grants or Apple giving direct cash to executives at adobe. I hate to be that guy but I would like more information on this, otherwise it feels rather unsubstantiated and just paints both Apple and Adobe in a bad light for no reason.
- MrTonyD 10y ago
  I worked on projects for Steve and reported to his direct reports. One would have to be very naive to think that this isn't just typical business practice. Or do people really fall for that "free market" stuff that we are being sold?
  - no_wizard 10y ago
    Well, I'm not naive. I'm sure there is a lot of things that the public would find unsavory that happens all the time at the upper echelons of companies like this, sure. I'm willing to believe that. I just have never seen any substantiation between Adobe and Apple doing this sort of thing, even when Steve was alive. This is the first time someone has even confirmed it yet alone alleged this happened. I know both companies had done things in the past that were less than savory (see that whole lawsuit about suppressing wages. Very disgraceful!) Never this. It's been alleged for years, but never once was there evidence. I'm sure you could make a mint here if you wanted to, if you could substantiate any of it.

sunstone 10y ago

While it's true that Ubuntu still has a few inconveniences, from my perspective it's still much better than the alternatives. The mere thought of having to use Windows or IOS for development make me want to curl up in the corner with my blanket. Daily I use ubuntu for my desktop, laptop, TV streamer and cloud servers. Overall my satisfaction level across all devices is at least 9/10. Great job team Ubuntu!

tie_ 10y ago

I have a strong dislike for systemd, so while I'm really sorry that upstart "lost" the fight, Ubuntu gained a lot of respect in my eyes with the decision to go with the rest and avoid unnecessary fragmentation. This could have easily ended up another as another community rift, slowing down everybody along the way. Now they do it again with Wayland/Mir! It actually takes a significant amount of both balls and goodwill to give up on the product that you invested so much into for the sake of aligning better with your open source community. Bravo! FWIW, I too would like to keep the DE experience of Unity, and especially the Dash panel and shortcuts. If that expose-text-search could scan non-focused browser tabs that would be a killer feature, but that's for the other thread. The idea of "Let's simply ask HN users what they think" is a gem, that I suspect will now make it into many PMs' playbooks ;)

kuschku 10y ago
> FWIW, I too would like to keep the DE experience of Unity, and especially the Dash panel and shortcuts. If that expose-text-search could scan non-focused browser tabs that would be a killer feature, but that's for the other thread. Maybe switch to KDE’s KRunner? It’s the most functional and extensive search framework yet.
dustinkirkland 10y ago
Thank you!
yuhong 10y ago
I have a thread on when Pottering was hired at Red Hat: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14044287 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14044287 I think there was a lot of hate for PulseAudio too. I wonder what about Kay Sievers now, which was even hated by Linus Torvalds at one point.
- AsyncAwait 10y ago
  The 'haters' are the vocal minority. Lots of people I know, (myself included), actually prefer systemd as it greatly simplifies system management and writing of service files and is a lot more dynamic than upstart was. Maybe it's just my bubble, but systemd tends to be accepted as the right move now. I am sure the people who hate it have good reasons, but all I've heard is 'doesn't follow UNIX philoshophy', (guess what, the whole Linux ecosystem doesn't really, even Stallamn isn't a fan), 'centralized', (somewhat valid, but there's still Gentoo and Void Linux), binary text files, (installing a 'text logger' over journalctl takes 5s and the filtering capabilities of journalctl are awesome). Also, the hate for PulseAudio largely died years ago. I for one am glad for people like Pottering, who are willing to think longer term and produce great* software. Yes, maybe more buggy at the start, (but not really the case with systemd), but great eventually. Also, let's be honest, the reason you see more bugs in i.e. PulseAudio is because it is being developed in the open from its inception.

Johnny_Brahms 10y ago

Not related to Ubuntu, but maybe someone here knows a good way to kill the swipe left/right to navigate in blogs. I accidentally left the page about 5 times, which is rather annoying. Using ff mobile if that helps. Edit: hallelujah! Set dom.w3c_touch_events.enabled to 0 in about:config

lucb1e 10y ago
Yeah this is a real pain in the ass of the Blogger® platform. Not sure there is anything Dustin can do about this, other than move the whole blog over... Nice find of the about:config setting though!
- dustinkirkland 10y ago
  Whoa, good to know, I've never hit that before!
- reitanqild 10y ago
  Googlers around here: any idea when you'll start fixing/resetting blogger to how it was?

mi100hael 10y ago

> Add night mode, redshift, f.lux (42 weight) This request is one of the real gems of this whole exercise! This seems like a nice, little, bite-sized feature, that we may be able include with minimal additional effort. Great find. This one should come for free with the switch to Gnome, since it's now present in 3.24. https://www.gnome.org/news/2017/03/gnome-3-24-released/attachment/night-light/ https://www.gnome.org/news/2017/03/gnome-3-24-released/attac...

bkor 10y ago
I'm using 3.24. There's still a few improvements to be made. People want the change to be a little bit less sudden (never noticed the transition, but apparently it's like an on/off thing). And personally I'd like the thing to turn off while you're watching a movie. You can temporarily turn it off, which is pretty cool. Once you do the real colours seem super bright.

mwcampbell 10y ago

I'm impressed with your thoroughness in processing the responses. But I'm just curious: Why did you lump usability for children and accessibility for users with disabilities into one suggestion? Anyway, returning to GNOME should help with the latter.

bkor 10y ago
The accessibility of GNOME under X11 should be really good. Not so sure about Wayland though. E.g. not sure how dasher would work, nor orca. Secondly, some of the things (IIRC pointer highlighting) actually is done using some X11 application. That needs to be moved (e.g. mutter).

Jerry2 10y ago

I currently use Ubuntu on one of my laptops precisely because it's not GNOME. I can't stand GNOME3's hamburger menu UIs, giant title bars, lack of real menus, inability to make changes without digging into their version of dreaded "registry" and that pointless menu bar at the top. If I'm being forced to move to GNOME, I'll be switching to Fedora instead since they have a solid track record of GNOME and Wayland support. My desktop will always be Arch, however with Cinnamon and, occasionally, i3 for development.

gurkendoktor 10y ago
Even if Canonical only keeps a fraction of its desktop staff, they could easily improve on GNOME's default settings and theme, something that Fedora won't do.
- bkor 10y ago
  It should be much easier since GTK+ "4" (not too many changes in GTK+3.x) combined with finally having a theme API, though the intention is to have some bits of GNOME run these development GTK+ versions at some point in future. They're redoing how widgets work in GTK+ "4". That's basically like changing HTML and having slightly different elements. Though there's a theme API, I wouldn't be surprised if some theme work is needed as a result. See the last bits at https://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2017/03/31/gtk-happenings-3/ https://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2017/03/31/gtk-happenings-3/ for why I think above things.

BudFox 10y ago

It is sad to see the modern and reliable Unity 7 put out to pasture. GTK was not used for Unity 7. Canonical chooses QT for Unity 8. KDE can easily replicate Unity 7 look/feel. QT no longer has an objectionable license. It is not clear why Gnome is the choice over basing on KDE?

drej 10y ago

Just an irrelevant side note: When you do a requests.get(url), you can use the .json() method on it instead of all the json.loads([...].text). I remember doing the same for years and only discovering .json() recently, I love it.

dustinkirkland 10y ago
:-) Awesome. Thanks for the hint!

analognoise 10y ago

I stopped using Ubuntu after it came with Amazon shit installed.

cdelsolar 10y ago
ok

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

PleaseHelpMe 10y ago

I am slightly sad by the fact that rarely anyone mentioned about the battery life of ubuntu, but got excited with the "Nexus-of-Ubuntu" thing. I wish the best to ubuntu.

dustinkirkland 10y ago
Power/battery management definitely made the list. See the blog post ;-)

_jordan 10y ago

I would have really liked to see gnome2-esq style DE - bare bones, focus on a great windows like task bar / windows management. I really hated the unity dock thing and I especially hated the color scheme.

noisy_boy 10y ago
I think the Mate desktop aims to deliver just that.
- _jordan 10y ago
  Indeed, but it's just missing a lot of the polish and modern features

hysan 10y ago

I was really happy when that Ask HN thread was first posted and even happier now knowing that all of the comments were read and thoroughly considered. That said, what this blog post and the general feeling I get from Ubuntu as a whole is that: 1. There is too much of a focus on how far Ubuntu has come and not enough focus on how far things still need to progress. I too remember the days when sleep/hibernate were a crap shot, but that was when I viewed Ubuntu as an open source alternative without much expectation. Nowadays, I see Ubuntu as a mature desktop and as such, I judge it much more harshly. Anything that doesn't work or isn't 99.99% stable is a red flag for me. So I do hope that the Ubuntu team puts more focus on making things up to date, rock solid, and super stable rather than go chase after new features. Just like a building, you need a stable foundation before building upwards. 2. There isn't a clear target audience for Ubuntu Desktop. What does Ubuntu Desktop want to be? Before it was convergence and while a very neat idea, I was never clear on who was supposed to use it. The requirements screamed high income, tech savvy end users. However, development focused on Unity, Mir, etc. with work going into features that didn't fit the target audience. For example, like the post says, HiDPI & 4K were a surprise. Why was this surprising? The group that would most likely be your early adopters and trend setters are the same exact group that would have this type of hardware. Same with trackpad, gestures, customizability, flux, root on ZFS, security, etc. All of those are used heavily by the demographic most likely to follow the news on Unity and convergence. It baffles my mind that Ubuntu's Product Management couldn't make this connection and understand what core features to build out first in Unity/Mir. Yes, these are on the sidelines now, but I really hope the Product Management team takes the time to figure out some direction. 3. At the moment, Ubuntu is at a major crossroad. Even after Mark Shuttleworth's post, this post, and all of my usual Linux news following, I don't really know where Ubuntu Desktop is going to go. Tell us what we can expect as users. Tell us when we can expect it to come. Tell us how you intend on getting there. And most importantly, tell us how we can help! Either though regular posts to various communities like the Ask HN one, or ways we can contribute actual work. Not everyone is a dev, but as an example, I used to do professional QA and yet I found it extremely difficult to find out how I can help QA things and submit useful bug reports (this isn't just Ubuntu but most open source projects). The usual "check the docs/wiki" or "submit something on the issue tracker" are not helpful. In all of my years using Linux, that Ask HN thread + this blog post was the first time I ever felt like I was heard and managed to contribute to Ubuntu. Even something as simple as periodically getting feedback from the community and telling us what you heard from us makes me feel more optimistic about Ubuntu's future. I apologize for the rant-like nature of my comment, but hopefully this gets read and something positive comes out of it. Thanks for reading.

shalmanese 10y ago

It would be nice to get this list sorted by most surprising as well. A lot of these feedback points seem to fall into the category of "faster horses" which usually tend to dominate when you solicit ideas from the general public.

Andrex 10y ago

I feel guilty: I didn't respond on the initial post because I doubted the really outrageous/far-out ideas like "dump everything you've been working on for the past five years" would actually be fruitful, but man, Shuttleworth shut me right up haha. Congrats on the Ubuntu team for the courage to make bold changes when necessary and to actually (finally?) listen to pointed community feedback and constructive criticism. I haven't been this excited for Ubuntu since 2010.

19eightyfour 10y ago

Here's a perspective on FOSS and Ububtu. One point of free open source software was we didn't need to be stuck with features we didn't like, that were decided by some majority, or leadership, because we could fork our own and customize as we like. So I think the enthusiasm for responsiveness of a central body to feature requests, is an enthusiasm for a thing not normally associated with a FOSS, which therefore demonstrates that either: that the Ubuntu ecosystem says it is FOSS, but actually operates like something else, or that FOSS fork-your-own theory doesn't apply in practice on large projects with lots of people, or that this perspective just related here is missing something.

slitaz 10y ago
The UI is the type of big software that needs design and follow this design. Otherwise you end up with a complex piece of software. You get this with all types of big software that need to keep a clean design to avoid future pains.

deadfece 10y ago

I think the best news out of this is hopefully that it seems you (as Canonical) have shifted away from "This is not a democracy. [...] we are not voting on design decisions." and the (paraphrased) "This is good because we [Canonical] made it!"

slitaz 10y ago
Which project is "voting" on design decisions?

jseutter 10y ago

Just want to chime in with others and say thank you for making this followup post. Regardless of the outcome, distilling the results the way you did means a lot to me and I'm sure others as well. Thanks!

dustinkirkland 10y ago
You're welcome. Thanks for following along.

sandGorgon 10y ago

The one thing I'm incredibly worried about is the packaging war starting all over again. There are zero reasons for having multiple packaging formats across liNux distros . I was hoping that snap or flatpak becomes universally adopted, but it seems that Redhat and Canonical are again split along political fault lines here.

gurkendoktor 10y ago
As Canonical has moved its focus away from end users, we might end up with a more intuitive split: snaps for the cloud, flatpak for desktop apps?
- sandGorgon 10y ago
  not really. check this - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14053627 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14053627 We're engaging with dozens of major vendors of traditional/proprietary software about delivering their software onto Ubuntu via Snaps -- which is a new packaging format that solves many of the traditional problems associated with proprietary software working well on Linux.
bkor 10y ago
Flatpak purely deals with GUI/desktop applications. Sandboxed, then having a GUI way to break out of the sandbox securely (user interaction). Snaps also allow non-GUI things and Canonical wants to use it as well for cloud (or maybe already are using it). Due to Snap having a different focus, you cannot just drop Snap.

jumasheff 10y ago

Re: Make WINE and Windows apps work better How about booting ReactOS to run Windows apps? Sounds like a Frankenstein-ish solution, but...

shmerl 10y ago

Thanks for deciding to focus on Wayland from now on. This will benefit everyone.

Alan_Dillman 10y ago

Nice read, and I am wishing I had been in on the original topic. If I had, I would have commented that the version upgrade process sucks for anyone that starts from a minimal base(like I do). If I go through the upgrade, I will end up with all the default stuff. If I don't have thunderbird installed, don't install it for me. In short: upgrades could be smarter, faster, better, stronger.

JepZ 10y ago

I also really like the idea of 'Official hardware that just-works'. Not just for users without much technical knowledge but also for the rest of us. I mean nowadays we somehow manage to get most hardware working 'somehow'. Sometimes it takes a few years before your sound/bluetooth/wifi chip actually does what it is supposed to do, but most of the time we find ways to make use of our hardware. But when you are going to buy new hardware you are a bit lost. You can try to find out if there are any major problems with some hardware, search the ubuntu hardware database, but especially for new, rare or expensive hardware there is often not so much to find about. For example a few years ago I bought a 22" touchscreen for my desktop and for almost a year it somehow worked but didn't do the things it was supposed to do. Officially supported hardware by vendors would be a great step in the right direction.

sparkiegeek 10y ago
Perhaps you're not aware that Canonical already do this and publish results at https://certification.ubuntu.com/ https://certification.ubuntu.com/ ?
- JepZ 10y ago
  Well, I was not aware of that ;-) Thanks :-)

akerro 10y ago

No one mentioned better Steam support/collaboration with Valve? CPU and operating systems are made for gaming, it's gaming that attracts users and investors from big companies and developers. Ubuntu would only benefit if they invested in MESA, faster AMD GPU integration and cooperate with Valve on Steam clients and gamedev research for Linux.

mapreri 10y ago

Just a note about Reproducible Builds: "We've been working with Debian upstream on this over the last few years, and will continue to do so" — well, apart from the regular sync/merge flow from Debian to Ubuntu, AFAIK Canonical never reached out to us Reproducible Builds folks from Debian. That said, we/I plan to reach out to Ubuntu/Canonical soon :)

dustinkirkland 10y ago
Canonical employs dozens of Debian developers, whose work goes to both Debian and Ubuntu. ;-)
- mapreri 10y ago
  I know, I collaborate with several, and I am both an Ubuntu an d Debian developer :) Just that I know no Canonical employee is working with us on Reproducible Builds. (I only remember a very spotty contact like 2 years ago on IRC from somebody saying Canonical was interested) If they are working, they are doing it behind a curtain, which I'd find interesting ;)

agd 10y ago

" Fix /boot space, clean up old kernels (92 weight) ...committed to getting this problem solved once and for all in Ubuntu 17.10 -- and ideally getting those fixes backported to older releases of Ubuntu." Great news! Thanks for taking this feedback onboard.