With 19.10 now released, I thought it would be interesting and informative to look ahead to 20.04, which as an LTS release is also going to be much more important to a lot of users.
Critically, 20.04 will be the last LTS before 16.04 reaches EOL. So if you've been holding onto 16.04 to avoid all the GTK3 brokenness - which I know more than a few of us have been - that bridge is about to be burned forever.
So, what are the Top 3 changes you want to see in 20.04?
The ground rules:
You only get 3 entries. This isn't about your personal customised Linux distro, but what's genuinely important to you. It's also a way for the community to potentially let the devs know where the pain is as a consensus.
If one of your wishes is a bugfix though and you have filed the bug in Launchpad (or marked it as "Affects me too" there) then it doesn't count towards your total. Link to the bug in your post so that others can "upvote" it there.
If your bug gets fixed or your wish is granted, you can add a new entry to replace it.
Screenshots are helpful for both bugs and features, especially to let others understand the topic and encourage them supporting you. Log files belong in either specific Support threads or on Launchpad though, or nobody's going to read your wall-of-text nightmare of a post.
Linking to posts in the Support forum is fine, if you've already posted about an issue in there.
My guess is that the bulk of MATE's users would rather see the focus stay on papercuts etc for another release more than new features (because, let's face it, if we wanted new gimmicks and didn't care about quality, we'd be running a different DE in the first place!) but still, that's just a guess. Let's see how wrong I am!
FIX: Bad vertical spacing in GTK3. In short, 19.10 uses about ?15%? more vertical space for things like caja than 16.04 does, from extra padding between rows. This is a real problem on low-res displays like 720p laptops and TVs.
(And the Places panel in caja uses close to 40% more space, but IDK yet how much of that is this bug or if some of if was deliberate).
None of it is deliberate. It's a bug in GTK3, so I expect we're stuck with it forever. It can be worked around for padding values of 0 and 1 only, and is broken for values >= 2. Details are over here: Excessive vertical spacing in caja in 19.10 (and probably earlier)
WISH: Too many other GTK3 bugs to count. Since I only have one left though, probably something to do with getting some amount of color choice back in themes. (See Colour variants of Ambiant/Radiant-MATE themes amongst others).
More love for multi-monitor setups. Using a script that requires manual actuation every time I turn on or off an additional monitor to switch between custom panel layouts and wallpapers is not convenient.
Some UI polishes. If I set some custom color/transparency on my panels, I'd like the applets/menus to go along instead of keeping the default solid color.
A tool to tweak the colors of the Radiant theme (not just the accent colors).
The panther launcher integrated for Mate.
Not just working, but integrated with the menu editor and responding correctly to themes (though I think the developer quit developing it so... Probably wishful thinking)
Some sort of online accounts integration natively. Something that when logged into would sign into evolution and show online storage in Caja
The mate tweak interface changed to look like other settings panels with tabs at the top (just a personal preference so it looks more consistent)
The urgent necessity to adopt a new modern theme specific for Mate, for example Mint-Y (used by mint distro) but modified to be more compact with visible border, why one specific theme ? in order to converge and concentrate all design modifications to one theme because now every OS is using one default theme that is refined and supporting all apps used by OS.
Create new modern icon theme to handle all possible applications.
Rework the GTK3/GTK2 windows headers to be more unified and similar.
Adopt default sound equalizer for mate.
Trying to be compatible with most new printers and scanners, for now only few models work.
Fix fonts quality inside Mate especially the hinting feature, many fonts look much better on windows and look terrible on Mate.
Create new specific GUI apps for Mate to manage local tasks, events, alarms and reminders.
Create new cleaning app specific for Mate, for now there is no app that handle all default/non-default apps cleaning task (bleachbit is far behind ccleaner on Windows).
Create new specific app for fast editing image like paint on Windows.
Create new specific app for Mate to manage (install, remove, details) user/system fonts.
Ability to add new folder with mouse when current view is full of listed items, instead of using caja menu.
Add new printer to pdf file with similar capabilities to PDFCreator.
Create new brightness indicator, the old one is really slow to react compared to keyboard shortcuts.
My feeling is that in a lot of post out here, people want Ubuntu Mate be something else than Ubuntu Mate ...
Look what @vkareh is mentioning
My list is:
Remove all ability to use themes
Remove support for desktop icons
Remove all accessibility features
and is not the only one out here
I think Mate should focus right now on three main things, used by user to interact visually with desktop.
background wallpaper - resizing, HDPI ... as I understand that is not very consistent, and right processing algorithm.
mate panels - a lot of improvement has done, but along with this improvement has appear some small bugs (I also see some wired text in new custom panel config, are new features not finished, or ...). So it look like this panels are in work, and it require more work to bring them to "stable", to finish them.
Mate indicators - I don't like that small size of them on 20px panel with - because of some padding from panel border, witch other icons does not have. Also missing date near the clock. This look like it require more work, as jut replaced up and down and are not displayed well as in previous releases.
All this three elements you can see on all desktop all day long, by all people, and give the first impression when you load up Mate Desktop, even if some are background technical staffs, it affect the most important three elements of first Mate interaction.
Par example, I see in Github a lot of work on Caja, but personally I don't remember having an issue with it, wile right now the indicators are my permanent issue, as look worse than ever before.
So the conclusion, one issue that I mention is already on @vkareh list, and also on his list the OpenGL Marco staff is really nice nice feature, but is a future not bugfix, so on my opinion should have less priority than bug fixing, and finishing in work staffs.
But on the other side I understand that he can work on desktop on whatever he likes, because he is working on it from his passion, so I appreciate his work a lot.
I understand that he can work on desktop on whatever he likes, because
he is working on it from his passion, so I appreciate his work a lot.
Thanks Honestly I try to keep a running list of things that need to
be done across the entire desktop. Marco has been in need of some
serious love for a few years, so its list is longer and I'm trying to
bring it back up to our standards, little by little. I'll move on to
something else eventually, but currently it's possibly the most visible
part of MATE.
The mate-panel is highly visible as well, and has a huge list of
issues. However, a lot of those rely on third-party libraries (mainly
GTK and WNCK). I've been doing a fair amount of work on those to improve
the panel, but ultimately it's up to the respective upstream projects to
accept our patches. A lot of the other issues come down to stability and
crashes: those are really hard to track and fix, and if I cannot
reproduce the issue consistently, I cannot develop a fix for it.
One that I'd really like that's pretty minor is the ability to modify a panel that is fully covered by apps. Specifically, I reduce the size of the left panel on linux, but doing so requires moving the dock so I can click on the panel underneath.
Agree on these two. Now, for some I haven't seen mentioned here:
A color profile GUI for monitors, printers et al. Xfce made one on the latest release. Know some people who work on stuff that need to change their monitors color profile, and what better than to make it as easy as posible?
For gamers and for people who want more precise movements, mouse acceleration, speed and sensitivity settings in the GUI.
A way to change the information pane of Caja to the right so it doesnt take over the places pane and I can have both at the same time.
What would giving marco an OpenGl compositor entail? Smoother transitions and other stuff?
What would giving marco an OpenGl compositor entail? Smoother transitions and other stuff?
Wobbly windows and explosion effects when closing windows
I'm joking!
It would enable the non-GTK parts of MATE to be rendered by the GPU. Think shadows, transparency, thumbnails. Might also improve GTK rendering (I'll have to check on this. I know GTK can do some level of hardware rendering, but it might need to be assisted by the compositor).
It could also allow us to do some nice features eventually, like smooth transitions, zoom, etc.
I'm very disappointed that we do not have file-previews on Caja. I really miss them
Yes, me too. I have an in-progress branch to fix this, but it's not trivial. I've had it for many months now (maybe even from over a year ago), and every now and then I re-take it, but it's really sloooow progress at this point
OpenGL is older than Vulkan, so desktop will be "accelerated" on a lot of videocards, compare only with Vulkan one ...so OpenGL is the way for consistent desktop run on all video cards.
I just note that KDE took almost 2-3 years to have a consistent desktop run on OpenGL, so I might afraid that Mate will take longer, as it has no so many developers comparing with KDE, this is only a guess ...
Honestly I try to keep a running list of things that need to
