Hello,
shouldn't we do something, at least try to detect Lazarus is running on Unity and display some warning to the user that Lazarus currently will work very poorly with Unity?

Best regards,
Fl?vio

No, absolutely not. You didn't even show any evidence that the problem is in Lazarus.

As far as I can tell all problems are in Unity, so you could propose them to add a dialog saying that it breaks Lazarus (among other apps):

http://kenkinder.com/2011/05/18/why-ubuntu-11-04-unitys-reviews-are-so-bad/

Please be serious. Of course the bug isn't "in Lazarus" (besides the fact we certainly seem to be doing something unconventional WRT ScrollableArea) but the important thing is user experience. Ubuntu currently doesn't need/want Lazarus. I guess we want Ubuntu? And actually, Lazarus svn + latest Oneiric is pretty buggy even on OpenBox (LXDE), messing up z-position (e.g. showing dialogs below editor) and having erratic mouse capture/behavior frequently.

-Fl?vio

I'd suggest that it's down to whoever packages Lazarus for Debian/Ubuntu to wrap the IDE in a script that acknowledges that there are problems with some desktop/WMs, and indicates why. I don't think it's the responsibility of the core project to try to detect what's calling it, either at build or execution time, since that could introduce more problems than it solves.

Unity is certainly generating a lot of controversy, as are Gnome v3 and KDE v4, and it might be best for Lazarus to wait until things settle down and the GUI originators reach consensus before trying to accommodate them.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/08/05/linus_slams_gnome_three/

And actually, Lazarus svn + latest Oneiric is pretty buggy even on OpenBox (LXDE), messing up z-position (e.g. showing dialogs below editor) and having erratic mouse capture/behavior frequently.

With the usual health warning attached to versions pulled directly from SVN.

Mark Morgan Lloyd wrote

Unity is certainly generating a lot of controversy, as are Gnome v3 and KDE v4, and it might be best for Lazarus to wait until things settle down and the GUI originators reach consensus before trying to accommodate them.

Correct. And a flag that it doesn't work with some major system feature (like GUI) is a task for the package system, and not the application.

IOW, IMHO in such case Debian or Ubuntu should specify how to flag our debian packages for non-Unity conformance so that non X using Debian spins can pick this up.

It would be interesting to know what freedesktop.org, responsible for standardising various parts of the desktop hence indirectly for things like xdgopen, has to say about the "unholy mess" that Gnome, KDE et al. are making of things.

If programs are suddenly not starting up properly it implies that somebody is starting to ignore agreed standards.

Could anyone with Unity test Lazarus-Qt?

Ubuntu is maintaining a blacklist of programs that don't work correctly with the unity scrollbars. Firefox, chrome, eclipse and other big names are on it. Getting Lazarus on it would probably be feasible but getting all LCL applications on it will be impossible. wxWidgets is in the same situation.

Ludo

Ubuntu is maintaining a blacklist of programs that don't work correctly with the unity scrollbars.

Has unity its own scrollbars or are you talking about liboverlay-scrollbars? If the latter, they are not only used by unity and it is simple to disable them, just like you have to for eclipse, etc.

R.

Unity is certainly generating a lot of controversy, as are Gnome v3 and KDE v4, and it might be best for Lazarus to wait until things settle down and the GUI originators reach consensus before trying to accommodate them.

I do not have any problems with Lazarus under Gnome3 on Natty except that it is not GTK3 and that is only aesthetics.

R.

Overlay scroll bars. And yes you can disable them. http://bugs.freepascal.org/view.php?id=19266
There are workarounds for most problems on natty. The most radical being reverting to Lucid.
The question here is: do we inform the new lazarus user and how?

Ludo

The question here is: do we inform the new lazarus user and how?

Yes and wiki. Even new users should be able to Read The Fine Wiki.

You can provide a starter like this one, too:

#!/bin/sh
LIBOVERLAY_SCROLLBAR=0 $(lazarusdir)/startlazarus

or set LIBOVERLAY_SCROLLBAR=0 in startlazarus

R.