Freedom to use the good bits of other distros in Ubuntu?

[Chanchao]

Hi,

Here's something I don't fully understand yet. 

As it happens I got so upset at OOo crashing all the time that I
completely reformatted the drive.  I subsequently tried OpenSuse 10.1
just in case that I was missing out on massive stability or something.
It didn't take long to come running back to Ubuntu. (and after
installing that (Edgy) from scratch, all problems are gone.)

But anyway, while I thought Suse was INCREDIBLY confused in the way all
the configuration settings are all over the place without a unified menu
structure or something else somewhat coherent, there was ONE bit of it
that was arguably vastly superior to Ubuntu's equivalent (or lack
thereof):  The tool that Suse uses to configure xorg.conf. 

Again they got it a bit wrong by naming that tool something totally
non-descriptive (SAx2 or some such) and make this a tool specifically to
configure the xorg.conf stuff even though newbie users wouldn't know or
expect things like display and mouse and VNC to be grouped together in
one specific little tool with a weird name.  BUT: what it did,
configuring and testing screen resolution, it did VERY VERY VERY well. 

It allowed me to specify my 1280x768 resolution, then offer a 'test'
where it tests the new settings and allows the user to tweak the screen
in size as well as left-right and up-down (more appropriate for CRT
screens I guess). 

Now, Ubuntu doesn't have anything of that power to configure X, screen
resolutions especially.  A common part of any Ubuntu installation is to
end up doing a sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg, select the
resolutions you wish you had in a text mode wizard and then most
probably do some manual tweaking of the xorg.conf file.  In my case I
have to install the 915resoluttion package from a non-standard
repository to get 1280x768.  Suse picked that up by itself.. pretty
amazing.

But anyway, this is not a whine about Ubuntu not having that, this is a
whine about *WHY* Ubuntu can't just grab the source of this excellent
X-config tool and use that to configure X?  The closest thing Ubuntu has
to a humane way of adjusting screen resolution is the
System->Preferences->Screen Resoltion thingy, which of course doesn't do
a whole lot on a system (xorg.conf) level.

Most if not all Linux distros are open source right?  

So let's rip it and put it in?  Just don't give it a weird name in a
weird tool with yet another user interface but put the things it
configures in the Admin menu separately. (keyboard, mouse, VNC, monitor,
screen resolution, ..)

In summary: Can we grab it?

Cheers,
Chanchao