Linked by Kroc Camen on Thu 1st Oct 2009 21:02 UTC
We reported earlier on a blog post entitled "Ubuntu Report Card (2009)" where the author detailed how they felt the Ubuntu experience had improved over the years. In a follow-up series of articles looking at the future, Tanner Helland has written 10 different broadly-scoped feature requests that [he] 'and many others would like to see by the time Ubuntu 10.10 rolls around'.
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Member since:
2005-06-29
This is not necessarily an Ubuntu issue; it could be solved at the Desktop (KDE/Gnome) or even X-Windows level; however a graphical tool that allows one to configure the pointing device -- whether mouse, trackpad, trackball, or something else -- completely is really needed.
I am left handed, and the first thing I do when setting up an account on a machine (whatever OS) is to configure the pointing device for left-handed use.
The standard tools allow one to do swap the left and right buttons, however it does so poorly. For example, with a touchpad, the traditional touchpad actions are mapped to the swapped right button actions, rather than either (a) retaining their original mapping, or (b) making their behavior user-definable at a GUI level. Also, when three or more buttons are available (my IBM Thinkpad T41 has 5 buttons) there is no GUI method to configure these.
The functionality to do so exists at the X-Windows level, but for such basic GUI functionality these should be configurable at the GUI level for two very good reasons:
- It is one of the first things a new user experiences.
- As a GUI feature, setting and verifying should be at the same level.
There was a qsynaptics/ksynaptics package available for KDE at one point, however it did not contain all the necessary functionality, seemed to be Synaptics-specific, and was discontinued. I believe this one feature lack turns off many potential new users up front.