Ubuntu's minimum resolution lie

Another reason to hate Gnome, scalability. Though Ubuntu advertise a minimum resolution of 640×480, there are many several menus and applications that assume a much larger display. Hence OK/Cancel buttons can be unreachable!

I noticed this several times with Ubuntu 8.10 on a Lenovo S10e which has a vertical resolution of at least 600 pixels.

So what to do about it? Run X in a higher virtual resolution? Urgh!

One could try hunt down all the applications and menus this affects and file bugs… too painful. Instead I dropped a mail to the Ubuntu Netbook Remix (nbr) people, asking if they are aware of this problem. However they replied saying: “Thanks for your kind updates. Please also highlight it to Lenovo for the hardware incompatibility.”.

Er, you want me to contact Lenovo that a plethora of GTK applications assume a minimum resolution larger than 600 vertical pixels? What will that achieve?

Sorry, most Web browsers are far more flexible with panning & resizing and hence are scalable to any screen size from a tiny mobile device to a cinema screen. So once again the Web trumps as an application platform.