Comment by s_kilk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by s_kilk | Hacker News Reader

- 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 cycle through an On -> Off -> On -> Off loop. I think when one display goes to sleep it sends a signal which wakes the machine back up, or something.

I'd also like to see more options for configuring multiple mice/trackpads/trackballs in the Settings app, general improvements to quality-of-life issues which are very noticable when transitioning from, say, macOs to Ubuntu.

One more polish issue: I'd like to see more attention paid to power-drain regressions in the OS. I had an issue recently where a process related to automatic updates was spinning in the background and consuming 100% of a CPU core, and cutting my battery time in half compared to what it should have been. I looked into it and found it was a known issue that wasn't fixed yet, but could be solved by deleting one of the default apps. If I were a less sophisticated user I would have just concluded that battery-life simply sucked on Ubuntu, and frankly I would have been right.

[EDIT: all these issues were encountered on a Thinkpad T460, which should really be one of the best supported machines in the world for this OS. If things are flaky under the best of circumstances, I dread to think what it's like on some weirdo Siemens laptop some user might have] - ROLE/AFFILIATION: Software Developer

-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 know there's more)

or

2) Show the "wired connection" icon. Gray out the entire wifi section of the network manager dropdown menu. All while it is actually connected to some wifi and I can use the internet.

These issues are mostly fixed by a `systemctl restart network-manager`, but sometimes require a full restart.

I'm the kind of person that recommends people to get Ubuntu. "Everything just works nowadays on Ubuntu". Then I get a call a week later and have to explain to them "just type sudo systemctl restart network-manager into terminal" They then give me the "What? That is so stupid."

ROLE/AFFILIATION: Student / Sysadmin / Machine (Deep) Learning Engineer / Memeber of a students' club that organizes an event on every Ubuntu release where we help fellow students dual boot Ubuntu (or another Linux distro, but we recommend Ubuntu)

EDIT: formatting.

A big +1 from me. Network Manager is so bad I wonder how it ever got adopted by the main distros.

And there's currently a big but where you can't get internet when you reconnect to a vpn after disconnecting. https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/network-manager/+b...

Yes. Connman (developed by Intel) is a much more modular design. Network Manager evolved from a Gnome applet.

+1 This!

Good alternatives exist too, like the light and fast connman. I use it on a thinkpad running NixOS and it works beautifully.

Seconded.

Agreed. There are new Network Manager bugs in just about every Ubuntu release.

At one point the NM task bar applet was simply gone.

Then it stopped managing wired connections breaking networking entirely for me.

Now the network no longer works after disconnecting from a VPN, which is an improvement compared to the previous situation where it often showed the VPN as active when it wasn't.

Add the fact that openvpn via Network manager has been broken for ~3-4 years as well.

Yes. Network Manager is horrible.

I was writing the exact same thing. The apps are not integrated, fancontrol doesnt work on recent desktops (dunno whose fault is this) compared to windows, and its hard to get a bird's eye view of the system settings. A better package manager UI would help.

Better stability is really important! Recently there was an update for the nvidia drivers for 16.04 LTS, this broke our GPU servers on Amazon and ruined desktop login for my grandfather. All because the updated Nvidia driver no longer supported the GPU's.

To Canonical/Nvidia defense, while they do remove support for older chips, they always do that in major updates. You, as the user, can avoid this by using nvidia-<number> package, not the nvidia-current one.

I have a machine, that has GPU supported in nvidia-340, but no later driver. Ubuntu only updates to the newer -340 packages, it does not skip to the highest possible number available.

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