Comment 17 for bug 27667

Jerone, I've taken over the X maintainership from daniels. I am of the opinion that you are correct on this bug. Dropping the highest resolution was a bad design decision; the real problem here is that the code is using poor logic to tell the difference between an lcd and a crt, and as a result is dropping perfectly good resolutions far too often. In fact, while troubleshooting this issue, we noted 2-3 other logical errors in the CRT vs LCD code, that are probably producing weird resolution selection bugs in a number of other corner cases.

Furthermore, LCDs have grown to be much more common these days than when this design decision was made; as a consequence, the tradeoff this design took in favoring CRT niceties over LCD correctness has changed considerably. I believe that today getting things right with commonplace LCDs takes precedence over unusual CRT needs.

As well, with Gutsy we have better tools for letting users adjust resolutions. Psychologically, I think a user finding the install gave them too high of a resolution is going to simply think, "Whoa my hardware kicks ass, but I need to reign it in a bit..." whereas another user finding the install gave too low of a resolution would think, "Man, Ubuntu sucks, it can't even figure out my monitor's resolution properly." I think it's better to err to the former case than the latter, and just point them at the nice GUI tools we provide to fix up things post-install.

Besides which, as you pointed out, xresprobe is a low level tool, and it is inappropriate for it to be making the decisions about which resolutions to give the user. If this logic is in fact needed, it should be at a higher level - perhaps in the xserver postinst script, not here.

Therefore, I am dropping the CRT-specific logic, so LCDs and CRTs are treated identically, and xresprobe will return all available resolutions to the caller.