There have been a huge number of reviews of Ubuntu over the past few months. Generally they are all quite positive, but list a handful of issues they ran into. These lists vary, but there is always one problem that every one of them lists: Monitor detection.
Digging through Ubuntu's launchpad bug tracker, I see that this bug is reported over and over - of the 500-some bugs for the xorg package, I'd guess somewhere around 150 or more are dupes of the "bad monitor detection" bug.
Symptoms vary: Most people notice that their monitor just gets detected as a generic monitor with resolutions of 640x480, 800x600, and 1024x768. However, some people with monitors having refresh rates that don't match up well to the generic monitor see other problems, like only having one resolution available (640x480). I imagine there may be people for whom X doesn't work at all! And a lot of people report issues with detection of HD screens; my guess is that at least a subset of those issues are due to this same monitor detection bug.
I haven't sorted this out yet, but with some preliminary poking around and experimenting, I have some observations.
First, I've yet to find a case where Ubuntu's x installation actually detected the monitor correctly at all. Not one of my monitors (and I've got a few!) got detected. It's certainly possible I'm just unlucky here, given that the systems I've installed Ubuntu on are far from "generic", but this is rather surprising. (I'd be curious to hear of anyone that installs Ubuntu and finds something other than "Generic Monitor" listed in their xorg.conf file.)
If this is the case, then it makes me wonder if it might be better to just leave out the monitor stuff from xorg.conf and just rely on Xorg itself to auto-detect; I actually found Xorg worked quite well on my widescreen laptop without an xorg.conf at all.
Second, xresprobe, one of the underlying tools used for monitor detection and resolution determination, does not compile or run on my x86_64 system; in the code it appears to have some platform specific code dependencies. It does work okay on my dual head x86 desktop, however it detected only one of my monitors.
In this case I am curious what proportion of the people reporting this problem are on non-x86 platforms? Perhaps we need to replace xresprobe with a more platform-independent tool? What do other distros use for monitor detection on non-x86 platforms?