Ask HN: What do you want to see in Ubuntu 17.10?
- FLAVOR: Ubuntu Desktop<p>- HEADLINE: Is there a better medium for feedback?<p>- ROLE&#x2F;AFFILIATION: C++ Software Engineer, currently in the genomics industry, in Houston, TX<p>- DESCRIPTION:<p>All-in-all, I&#x27;ve been pushed to Linux out of sheer hatred of the direction that Windows is going. I&#x27;ll never install anything newer than Windows 7 <i>ever</i>. When Windows 7 goes End-Of-Life, I&#x27;ll go 100% Linux. Apple&#x27;s products are neat but they&#x27;re nowhere near <i>worth</i> what they&#x27;re priced at (used them in the distant past). That leaves me with Linux and commodity hardware.<p>Really though, I feel like commandline power users end up taking a back seat to happy-go-lucky pretty interfaces that I feel are designed for airheads (to put it mildly). Sure they look great but they&#x27;re not <i>productive</i>. If I have to touch my mouse, the interface is probably doing something wrong.<p>So, what do I want to see in Ubuntu?<p>+ Is there something similar to EPEL but for Ubuntu (and other Debian derivatives)? I&#x27;m particularly looking for `devtoolset` packages, but I&#x27;m sure others would love for other EPEL packages that, as far as I&#x27;m aware, are currently either old (sometimes super old) in the apt repositories or else simply must be completely rebuilt by hand.<p>+ The installer should ask about privacy issues (for new installations). Make it very clear, not some hidden thing that&#x27;s easily skipped or not even seen.<p>+ Zeitgeist? Absolutely useless to me. I know <i>exactly</i> what I want and where to find it. If I don&#x27;t know where it&#x27;s at then I know how to find it (happens maybe once every three or four months). I don&#x27;t even want it installed at all, it&#x27;s that useless. It&#x27;s literally worse than useless: it consumes system resources (CPU, disk, etc) for utility that I will <i>never</i> use. I&#x27;m pretty sure serious developers feel the same way. Why isn&#x27;t opt-in?<p>+ Unity? Unity is not functional. By not functional I mean it hurts my productivity. After nuking Zeitgeist, I go right on to disable Unity and install Cinnamon. It&#x27;s far simpler, far more familiar, far more stable, and doesn&#x27;t waste anywhere near as much system resources. I really like how Fedora has various spins with different default desktop environments.<p>+ When using `vim` I always have to put `:set paste` in my ~&#x2F;.vimrc, or else go figure out where you broke pasting. I don&#x27;t want comments to continue on the next line. I&#x27;ll add the comment characters, thanks.<p>+ `apt` is not nice to the command line at all. Try searching for stuff using `apt`, pipe the output through grep, and see how apt warns you that it&#x27;s not meant for ~smart people~ command line processing. IMO that&#x27;s counter to all of Linux. `dnf` on the other hand is both far more intuitive and far more friendly to piping around in bash.<p>+ Turn off ssh-agent and <i>all</i> variations. I will always have passphrases on my keys and absolutely <i>never</i> want that passphrase remembered by the computer. Ever. I will always specify which key to use. And, I have hundreds of keys. I have so many keys in my ~&#x2F;.ssh that _every_ ssh-agent will immediately cause a disconnect because of the remote server thinking I&#x27;m trying too many keys (hint: think about how insecure that actually becomes). I&#x27;ve found that removing the ssh-agent will sometimes not work: it will sometimes be reinstalled (usually an update does that). Better to just chmod -x. And the worst is that ssh-agent isn&#x27;t the only agent. There&#x27;s that damn GNOME ssh agent. One or two other ones. But installing it? Oh man, uninstalling it is impossible because it&#x27;s literally a dependency for half of the stuff in a fresh system. How is that even possible when I can satisfactorily `chmod -x` all of the agents and... achieve what I want and everything still works? Don&#x27;t answer that, I know how it&#x27;s possible. Solve it instead.<p>+ Work with nVidia. We both know they&#x27;re not going to fix their drivers (<i>cough</i> I hope I&#x27;m proven wrong... <i>cough</i>). It literally took me 2 full days to get a working installation with an i7-6850K and GTX 1060. TWO FULL DAYS. That&#x27;s just to get it to &quot;work&quot;. By that I mean that the computer is useable. But it&#x27;s not perfect: I&#x27;m sitting here watching flickering on my screen. Sometimes screenshots are corrupt. Luckily I don&#x27;t do a lot of heavy work with graphics or I wouldn&#x27;t even be using Linux specifically because of this issue. That&#x27;s quite a shame to think that.<p>+ Work with hardware vendors. Microsoft very clearly has discounts for vendors <i>cough</i>Dell<i>cough</i> such that a computer with identical hardware specs ends up being cheaper if it comes with Windows. This is, in my opinion, very clearly anti-competitive. But apparently it&#x27;s legal? So whatever. It&#x27;s not cool to &quot;buy&quot; a Windows license (for a negative price point?!) that I can&#x27;t see or transfer to another computer. I take that new computer, take out the hard drive, put a new hard drive in, and install an actual operating system instead of spyware. What a waste of a license that I&#x27;d rather not have had in the first place. I don&#x27;t care that it&#x27;s cheaper. I don&#x27;t care that they do it.<p>Upon reflection... maybe I shouldn&#x27;t be using Ubuntu.