I’ve just been prodding around in the Ubuntu 9 (Jaunty Jackalope) information. Well, by prodding I mean “reading the main page about it” – but it’s fantastic to see that Ubuntu will finally be getting some proper multiple monitor support. None of this messing around with the command line, config files and different config files depending on whether your laptop has an external monitor or not.

Unfortunately the new development appears to be part of GNOME 2.26 and I can’t seem to find any suggestion of KDE or XFCE picking up on this anytime soon for Kubuntu or Xubuntu users. This seems a bit strange to me since Xubuntu particularly is used in various netbook distributions and seems to be the more popular option for laptop users – precisely the segment of the market where users will wish to add and remove monitors on the fly

It’s a step in the right direction, but this sort of improvement should be implemeted as high up the hierarchy as possible. It’s difficult enough to persuade users it’s a good idea to switch to liux. Harder still when they have to choose between distributions, even more so when there’s a variety of desktop environments on top of that.

And Linux users ridicule Microsoft for releasing 6 versions of windows 7.