Ubuntu Desktop 24.04 LTS roadmap highlights

Desktop
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Sorry about that. I will curb my responses accordingly. Thank you for responding. Also apologies to @vanvugt.

I am not talking about flavors. I am talking about the default, in GNOME, wayland. From what I have written, it seems I am getting responses for everything but the default. I don’t feel folks are taking the time to read what I am referencing and thinking of how it would apply in 24.04.

Zoom and Brightness are already a part of this correct?

  • (using the default iso/install)

If I Zoom, every monitor zooms, and does so quite drastically.
If I change Brightness, every monitor changes brightness.

  1. Can a step adjustment setting be added to Zoom that affects the kybd shortcut? (smaller increments)

  2. Can Zoom be controlled based on which output the cursor is on?

  3. Can Brightness have a kybd shortcut?

  4. Can Brightness be controlled based on which output the cursor is on?

Thank you.

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I love you. I like that idea a lot.

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Side comment… Figure 2 mentions Figma designs, which is a fairly common design tool, but if you aren’t already aware I’d like to point you (and anyone else reading) towards Penpot which, like Ubuntu, is open source: https://penpot.app/

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Yes. Very true. Backlight adjustment in a display is a function of the display controller board. This is handled differently in different types of pc builds:

  1. in a laptop and in majority of All-in-one PC models, the display controller board is connected to the motherboard for both- power, display signal and operating parameters.
  2. in a generic desktop monitor, all it recieves from the pc unit is display signal and/or audio signal. The other settings such as brightness, contrast etc are taken care ofby direct input from hardware buttons on the monitor itself. There is no way to directly control these settings from the driver because there is no way to instruct the controller board of the monitor.

For type 1, Ubuntu can take care of bright ess directly by adjusting the blacklight.
For type 2, there is a workaround that you already know of i.e. adjusting the greyscale as the Xrandr utility does. This isn’t very visually appealing however but may be useful for some people. The very bright backlight still shines through the black pixels lighting up a dark room. This is the only alternative to directly using the hardware buttons for now though[ unless you find some way to connect to the controller board using a serial port using raspberry pi or something similar :grin:]

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Hiya, apologies for my tardy follow up here – its been a busy start to the year! I’ll do my best to respond to everyone, but do call it out if I’ve overlooked anything.

@luisalvarado Does Ubuntu have a gaming team or gaming optimization roadmap?

We do in theory but in practice it’s understaffed. We are planning on growing the team and when that starts we should be more visible. But yes we need to do a lot more here. @ashtonn posted some details on a new matrix space and gaming team dev channel should anyone want to drop by to see what the team are currently working on (new gaming tab for the app center). We’d like to provide a better ‘getting started’ experience for gaming which I think covers some of your later comments in this post.

@johnandmegh re X11 and wayland It might be helpful, as that assessment takes place, to catalog the results

@vanvugt is there anything you can share on this ^ currently?

@barnesc May I suggest:
sudo snap install M365
sudo snap install GWS

Agreed. My examples above were in haste. I also suspect we’ll need -unofficial or similar to avoid confusion.

@whiskeyPeak Just curious, but how will this change affect the current Linux plugin ecosystem? If the flutter engine is modified upstream to incorporate GTK 4, will only the plugins that have also made the switch work? What about older Linux distros that don’t have any version of GTK 4 installed?

@robert.ancell are you able to answer this one?

@mohan-ram If there is no time this time around will this feature be implemented in 24.10?

Yes :slight_smile: @SergioCostas started on this work a few days ago so :crossed_fingers: we can get it into 24.04!

@SeekTruth I see no mention of Accessibility feature fixes or enhancements.

I assume you’re aware of the funding the GNOME project is managing as part of the Sovereign Tech Fund? Part of that effort is accessibility and we’ll land those improvements in due course. We know there are areas we need to improve here. There are other canonical teams starting to look at this but I don’t know the status of those efforts.

@SeekTruth A brightness controller would also be a welcomed integration.

I personally struggle with multi-monitor setups where I need fractional scaling … and each monitor has a different brightness level so I end up having to tweak them manually which isn’t a great experience. Plus my eyes are getting old so I need a setup thats comfortable for long days in front of the screen. I know that macOS has tools which do allow you to tweak monitor brightness independently.

But I don’t have a good answer for you here and so will have to bank this feedback for the moment but thanks for raising it :pray:

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I didn’t want to make my initial comment just about anecdotes / make broad assumptions based on my own experience…but in my own experience, I have one Nvidia-only desktop and one Nvidia/AMD-hybrid laptop, and both are borderline-unusable in X11 (bizarre graphical glitches, the X server hangs up for ~20 seconds when starting any program), and both work near-perfectly in Wayland (occasional glitches in some apps, but overall crisp and smooth).

So, I was just thinking that consolidation of the known issues would help the broader community (with a broader variety of hardware and software permutations) pin down the specific setups that are causing trouble / creating the perception that Nvidia + Wayland + GNOME isn’t “ready”, and also test whatever potential changes would be needed.

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Thank you for not rushing to remove support for X11. Wayland isn’t ready yet. For some it works pretty good, but for others it can have pretty big issues that may impact productivity. Other distros want to rush Wayland adoption by pushing people towards it, while disregarding that it still has some issues.

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Really appreciate the response. Since both are already integrated into 22.04 LTS, (even though without multi-monitor support) is it at least possible to…

  1. Create an optional step setting for the zoom, so it is not so drastic when using the shortcut?
  2. Create a shortcut option for the brightness setting?

Thank you <3

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Yup. Recently got switched to wayland without my knowledge (swapped nvidia to amd gpu) and to my surprise basic things like push to talk stopped working. Only after some digging I have found that I’m on wayland and experiencing this drawback. Went straight back to x11

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First at first, these are awesome changes. I love the way how Ubuntu Desktop is being developed. Especially --simulate flag will be really useful for me in order to test stuff accordingly.

I have few questions about other products though:

  1. Will Ubuntu Core Desktop be published at around/same time?
  2. Can we install other desktop environments (e.g. KDE) on Ubuntu Core desktop? Or anything like Kubuntu will be developed for (K)Ubuntu Core Desktop?

Thanks!

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Yeah, Wayland is still young, but not bad – I haven’t had any issues with it. Just think about what it could be in a couple decades like X :wink:

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I believe these are changes needed upstream (i.e. GNOME). For zoom, the GNOME foundation received a grant from the SWF with accessibility being a focus. My recommendation is to get in touch with that project.

I’ve written down both of these into my ‘roadmap’ scratch pad list. The only promise I can make is that we’ll consider these for prioritisation and inclusion in future roadmaps. I hope that is acceptable?

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@pfc:

  1. Will Ubuntu Core Desktop be published at around/same time?

It won’t be released by 24.04, and unfortunately, I can’t provide a date until we’ve worked through issues that need resolution – we want the user experience to be excellent and that’s going to take time. Thankfully the work we’re doing in Core Desktop in many instances benefits classic/hybrid even though the linkage might not be immediately apparent.

  1. Can we install other desktop environments (e.g. KDE) on Ubuntu Core desktop? Or anything like Kubuntu will be developed for (K)Ubuntu Core Desktop?

All I can say on this currently is I hope so!

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Indeed; I will reach out to them as well. Thank you for being specific in your response. With the computer being my lifeline, I eagerly await April after attempting countless distros over the past 4 years. :pray:

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We think we should be able to make the plugins use the GTK_MAJOR_VERSION define to support both GTK3 and GTK4 while the transition is in progress. The plan is to identify the most popular plugins and fix them before the transition occurs.

Older distros will have to stay on an older version of Flutter if they don’t have GTK4 available. We think that most distros should have GTK4 now so hopefully this is the right time to switch. It doesn’t seem practical to support both GTK3 and GTK4 in Flutter.

Hope this helps!

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Important for me personally, are there any plans to integrate the App Center, and Snaps in general, like GNOME’s Weather app, into GNOME’s centralized search?

I think the best possible Ubuntu experience is when the GNOME experience is fully functional.

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No plans currently, but I have ambitions in this area :slight_smile:

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Agree , this is one of the reason we remove app center and install gnome-software+flatpak

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A post was split to a new topic: Doesn’t Install

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Are there any plans concerning the visibility of Variable Refresh Rate in Settings?