Comment 20 for bug 203612

I understand the thinking here about removing it as it can hurt your system, however, it basically concedes the fact that some users will be stranded with a broken Ubuntu installation that they cannot fix without expert help. As someone who is that expert, I regularly try to get friends/family to try Ubuntu. I even tried to get my wife's laptop up and running the other day. The X configuration problems are currently unacceptable. I know this is not a Ubuntu specific problem, but the significant work put into polishing the distro, all the nice artwork, and cool new features are all useless when it doesn't work.

This is NOT a 0.1% problem. I have yet to see a perfect install that has the correct video driver and resolution. NVIDIA restricted driver installation works maybe 50% of the time, sometimes it asks you to pick glx-new and glx, and you always end up picking the wrong one, turning Visual Effects on has NEVER worked fully for me, at best it works, but makes video playback crappy and messes up the user switcher, at worst it makes your X session unusable or crashes your system. The "at worst" is the more likely case. Dual head? Forget it. At where I work I have 5 users I support with dual heads, NONE work without custom xorg.conf tweaking. The new 8.04 xorg.conf is devoid of all options, basically saying they are auto configured, now it's even worse trying to tweak the conf yourself.

I know I'm ranting here, but these issues are not given the attention they need. I know it is not the job of the Ubuntu team to fix problems with X, but X can clearly work in all of these cases when configured properly, it is an obtainable goal for this distro to give the user the ability to do this. Waiting for an Xrandr GUI is leaving Ubuntu broken until someone else comes along and makes another crappy tool that half works.

I was on a marathon of Ubuntu installations this week, and still head deep in problems and complaints, so sorry about the flaming, I really do love Ubuntu.