[Wishlist] - What would you like to see in future releases?

Development Discussion
#1

Specific programs, features, not necessarily MATE-related.

List them here!

I’ll start:

  • Basic voice control commands mapped to keyboard actions

Maybe because of age, I’m growing increasingly tired of having to use my hands to do stuff, for instance going to the next page when reading a book, scrolling down on a webpage when I’m reading an article, realizing after getting up from my workstation that I haven’t locked the screen and having to go back to hit CTRL+ALT+L.

  • Interactive GUI notification from firewall activity

Firewall on GNU/Linux distros is a “fire and forget” setup, once it’s on you never see any indication that it’s blocking stuff. This can be a pain sometimes, for instance a while back I was stumped as to why a WiFi hotspot login page was just timing out without logging me in, until by reading the portal page source I realized it was sending an HTTP request on non-standard port 8080 and the firewall was blocking it.

I’m hopeful evilsocket’s “OpenSnitch” will fix that at some point, though I haven’t been able to successfully use it on 17.04.

  • Initial setup feature for the ultra lazy

I’m one of those guys who install a lot of Ubuntu MATE instances, be it for other people or for testing purposes. Every time I have a sequence of actions I do to configure the basic MATE desktop:

    • In MATE Tweak unchecking the boxes for the various types of icons shown on desktop
    • In MATE Tweak, configuring the panel layout with indicators and application launcher
    • In MATE Tweak disabling snapping of windows, disabling animations and the showing of window content when a window is moved, switching the window manager to Marco+Compton
    • In Software Boutique selecting the software I want
    • Configuring my panels some more by adding applets and making them transparent
    • Selecting the latest @antechdesigns wallpaper
    • Configuring the default view for new folders in caja, etc...

Anyway, it’s a long and painful process, even with the cool tools available in Ubuntu MATE.
Hence I’d like Welcome to come to the rescue with a configuration export feature.
Basically a button I could click somewhere when I’m satisfied with my configuration, that would push the configuration to a new repository on github. Then the next time I do an install, I’d go click another button in welcome, fill in my github username and repository and have welcome do everything for me.
What do you think @lah7? Would it be doable?

2 Likes
#2

@ouroumov, you are a brave person indeed to start such a thread.

I’d like to see systemd wrapped in chain and dropped into the deepest part of the ocean, or optionally, fixed so it isn’t a total POS.

The login screen should make it clear which partition one has booted from, for those of us who may be running several slightly-different versions from different partitions, and show which kernel has been booted, so it’s possible to recognize that you fat-fingered the grub menu before you’ve wasted an hour fixing the wrong thing.

That’s just for starters.

2 Likes
#3

I wonder if you could hook up Martin’s new HUD with something like Mycroft? That would get you menu entries at least.

+1 for something like this!

What I’ve been doing that gets me part way is running gsettings list-recursively | sort > … on a fresh install, then running it again after I’ve set it up, and running a diff on the two files to get all the gsettings values I’ve changed. Then the next time I can run a script that just consists of a long line of gsettings set … lines with these values.

3 Likes
#4

There is a new Ubuntu MATE release every six months!
Keeping up with GTK 3 changes and developing MATE. Lots of bugs on Launchpad. All I can say is that I’m pessimistic about new features, who has the talent and time to implement them? Whimpy is probably the busiest man on the planet even though he sounds fairly relaxed (understatement) on the Ubuntu podcast. But then Ubuntu podcast is like a time-capsule from less stressful times.

#5

I claim that IF ubuntu-mate shows signs of being the linux distro that we’ve all wanted forever, talent will show up and time will make itself. That’s just a claim, we’ll see if i get proven wrong or not; superheroes don’t bother to show up and party unless they have super powers after all.

Talent aside (i know nossing) I’m strapped for time right now, assuming i ever get enough of this real-life stuff cleared away that i can get back to the hoss project, and i’m not going to divert from that project to fix something like caja, because i’ll be replacing nautilus/caja as part of the hoss interactive debugger, for starters.

But, i might be able to call a couple gray old dogs out of retirement if they thought they could have some actual fun for a change, and i can think of very little that can be done fully clothed that’s more fun than grabbing an eroding industry by the tail and swinging it around a couple times.

Talk is cheap, always has been; you can talk about doing something, or you can do it, but you can’t do both at the same time. fwiw.

#6

hoss project? Do you have your own distro with “hoss” in the name?

#7

It’s more than a distro, and less than a distro, all at once. It’s an entirely new architecture that can be emulated on top of any OS that provides some basic functionality (linux, iOS, Android, Windows, mainframes, any of those) and is designed to be burned as firmware and run on “naked” hardware (as if there was any such thing these days). There’s some basic info about it on my blog which is linked in my profile if you’re interested. Working on it keeps me at least somewhat out of trouble.

1 Like
#8

I’m interested in this as well. I haven’t had a chance to play with Mycroft yet, but I’d love the ability to use voice commands of some sort on my desktop on days when my hands are bugging me more than usual.

#9

I’m still interested in a Panel Switcher for MATE, which would save, export, import and install a panel configuration along with associated icons and launchers. I first mentioned this in January here:

#10

@Michael1, @Wimpy hopes to land this in the 17.10 cycle, see his answer (to point #9) here.

#11

A way to turn off tooltips. Can it really be impossible?

1 Like
#12

Meta + L to lock the screen by default.

3 Likes
#13

I would like to see a more attractive lock screen. Like Gnome’s or KDE’s plama. The square box in the middle with a zoomed in background is not very pretty. A full screen lock screen would be great.

4 Likes
#14

I would like to see a long standing bug fixed so that one could use Caja to copy files in a SSH or SFTP session and retain the original file’s timestamp. Please see https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gvfs/+bug/332646 - “when copying or moving files to a directory mounted over sftp, the time stamps are not preserved.” Judging from those subscribed to this bug, it is a very low priority item.

4 Likes
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#15

I’d like to see more polish and tweaking to the smaller but still important UI bugs, for example the Ambiant-Mate dark themes don’t show the focus caret when using the keyboard to navigate in the menu/advanced menu etc (bug logged a few months ago). Slightly misaligned textures in dark menus also show up the default transparent grid-pattern in a thin line at the bottom border of the scroll region. Just fixing little things like this would bring Mate up from brilliant to superb!

2 Likes
#16

Alan Pope just reverted the status of this bug to “confirmed”, it should help. :]

2 Likes
#17

Thanks ouroumov. I hope that the next LTS release has this small irritation fixed.

1 Like
#18

i’d like to see PHP along with ncurses actually install without Apache, i’d like to actually use PHP as the system scripting language, i’d like to dispose of systemd, i’d like UM to boot up correctly every time, and i’d like to take a nap. i expect the last item to actually occur.

#19

As of Ubuntu Mate 16.04.2

  1. A way to easily replace Ubuntu MATE’s green coloring scheme with the end users choice of colors.

  2. Remove Plank’s preferences icon by default. Can currently be removed using dconf-editor. Go to net.launchpad.plank.docks.dock1 and uncheck show-dock-item.

  3. A way to easily disable the Guest Session. Can currently disable by adding allow-guest=false to /usr/share/lightdm/lightdm.conf.d/50-ubuntu-mate.conf

  4. Enable the key combination Ctrl+Alt+Backspace by default. Currently enabled by adding XKBOPTIONS=“terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp” to /etc/default/keyboard

  5. Enabled Area Screenshot Key Bindings by default.

  6. A way to easily disable apport. Currently can be disabled by changing enabled=1 to enabled=0 in /etc/default/apport

  7. A way to easily turn off Bluetooth by default. Various workarounds.

  8. A way to easily change greater and lock screen backgrounds. Various workarounds.

  9. Ubuntu-Mate’s panels stay on top of a VirtualBox Virtual Machine when in full screen mode while using Compiz as the Window manager. Can currently correct this problem by opening the Virtual Machine Settings, going to User Interface, and disable the Mini ToolBar.

  10. Network manager applet changes state after suspend and wireless networks can no longer be seen. The wireless network remains connected but is now displayed as a LAN connection with no options to disconnect. To restore the network manager applet (nm-applet) to a normal state with out logging out, open a terminal and run: sudo service network-manager restart

  11. A wider range of backup scheduling for DejaDup. This can currently be changed with dconf-editor in org.gnome.DejaDup.

  12. Add a feature to Disks Utility that would allow a disk to be securely erased.

3 Likes
#20

I have a very simple one that goes way back to Gnome2.

Make one session screen combining shutdown and logout functions in one place. Every time I use XFCE it reminds me how nice this would be. :slight_smile:

5 Likes