Usability category

Goal: integration on Nautilus of some common tasks.

Nautilus should perform these actions over removable devices (like pen drive and USB disks).

+ Basic tasks:
- Change the name of the disk.
- Format the disk with FAT, ext3, ext4 or NTFS.
- Show % of free space in disk.
- Perform a file system check or scandisk over the file system.
- Show hardware propierties: hardware company, etc.
- Clean hidden folders: .thumbnails, .trash, etc.

+ Advanced tasks:
- Encription of the disk.
- Make the disk have a quota (to warn users when using more space than configured).
- Make a USB live disk with Ubuntu.
- Make a backup of the disk.
- Index files for faster file searching.

All this tasks should be "centralized" in Nautilus to avoid using multiple programs to do them.

I think that it can be done by making Nautilus call other external programas via extensions or something like that.

I know that some tasks are "copied" from Windows' propierties window in harddrives but most of them are very very useful for newbies.

For example:

The other day was my birthday and they gave me a USB-external-harddrive. It was in FAT32 and I have not got any idea on how I can format it to ext3. OK, I know it can be done with terminal but some users (like me) see that disgusting and old-fashioned.

[....]

Many users HAVE to use Windows-software (sadly).

I found that they just don't know about the existence of wine. I speak of users who even don't know that it is not possible to install Windows software directly in Ubuntu (without wine).

It would be helpful and easy for those users if they would see a message dialog, when they double-click an exe-file. This dialog could explain that they want to open a Windows program and that they could try this by using wine.

Then they should have the possibility to cancel or to install wine. After the installation the exe-file should be started with wine automatically.

UPDATE: In the dialog there should be a brief explanation that not all Windows-software will work in wine and that there might be a better linux alternative. Maybe also a link to the wine website.

In Nautilus, when browsing in Icon View, it is currently impossible to distinguish between document types that provide previews without looking at their file extensions.

For example, if I have 2 similar documents side by side, one is a PDF, the other is an OpenOffice Writer document, they both look identical and I cannot tell which is the PDF without looking at the file extension.

See here for an example in Ubuntu 8.10:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/33359003@N00/3143087405/

Solution: Add a visual cue to the preview icon (either a mini file-type icon (like Windows), or simply a watermark with the file extension (like Mac OS X).

Windows and Mac examples:
http://www.jtbworld.com/images/PDFPreviewHandleralsowithAdobeReader8.1_16FD/ima ge.png
http://images.appleinsider.com/leopard-finder-071008-8.jpg

A great feature that I believe should be implemented in order to save some time and headaches to new (and old) Ubuntu users, is a "mount anyway" button on the popup you can see when the event described below happens.

Event: That error shows up when you connect a pen drive or disk drive which wasn't properly disconnected from a Windows computer.

The current solution is only to use force the mount using console.

This "mount anyway" button should be something warning the user some data could be lost, but it should use the force option, even if it means asking for sudo password (if not needed, better).

(I'm sorry I don't have an image to attach, but I don't have any Windows system near me right now...)

It's not a big deal but I think when you take a screen shot the screenshot should be named something useful such as the date, then the time.

For example today being December 26, 2008 and the time 21:11 the screenshot I take now should be named 2612082111.png not just "Screenshot.png". If you take several in a row for whatever reason you have to manually rename them (or I guess you could write a fancy script).

When I drag and drop a file, then I can't tabulate to other opened windows.

For example, I want to add a file attachment to a new email, so I write a new email, then, I drag the file from my desktop. And then I would like to have the ALT+tab function enabled in order to drop the file into the new email window.

I'm using xfce, but if I remember, Gnome is the same.

When changing resolution (when you move monitor / play games) my icons/applets on the panel constantly move around. I feel I am always organising them.

My solution to this would be:

Every icon/applet/thing in the panel should have:
1) a binding: left/center/right
2) a priority/order: a positive integer (natural number).

The binding would control the overall placement. All icons with the left binding will be on the left of the panel, a binding of right would be on the right of he panel and finally a binding of center would mean the icon is in the center of the panel.

The priority would control the ordering within a section of the panel. Thus if an icon is binding=left and priority=5, then all icons with a binding=left and a priority less than 5 shall be placed to the left of the icon and higher priorities after the icon. Obviously all icons where binding=left should be placed on the left of the panel and similar fro center and right.

Here is a diagram of icons, the numbers indicate the priority, and the binding should be obvious. I have used the | character to indicate the split between left, center and right as many spaces are no preserved in this system.

0 1 2 3 | 0 1 2 3 | 0 1 2 3 4

There is no need to the numbering to be incremental by 1. For example if you always want the logout icon at the far right, then it can have a binding=right and a priority=1000 e.g

0 1 2 3 | 0 1 2 3 | 0 1 2 3 1000

This should then work for any resolution (assuming the icons fit i.e. the panel is large enough for all icons), changing resolutions and other things should trigger the redrawing of the panel and the gap between the left, right and center will change, but this is expected. There is less physical room on a smaller resolution than a higher one.

[....]

Many of the applications in Ubuntu implement the same functionality differently:
[*] In Firefox, you switch to the next tab with Ctrl+Tab, in Nautilus with Ctrl+Page Down, in gEdit with Ctrl+Alt+Page Down.
[*] In Nautilus, closing the last tab closes the window, not so in gEdit.
[*] In Firefox and gEdit, new documents are opened in a new tab in the same window. In Nautilus they are opened in a new window.
[*] In Firefox and Nautilus, when the current tab is the last then switching to the next tab brings you back to the first. In gEdit nothing would happened if you tried.
[*] In Firefox and gEdit opening a new tab will by default bring up a blank document. Nautilus opens another copy of the current tab.
[*] In Totem, double clicking on the image toggles between full-screen and windowed mode, but not in Eye of Gnome.

And these examples are only what I could think of over the top of my head. I think all applications, at the very least the default ones, should offer the same interface and behavior for the same functionality, instead of constantly surprising the user. I don't really care what the implementation is in the end, as long as it works the same everywhere.

Today I was reorganizing a directory. I made some new sub-directories and reorganized the files.

When I was done, I wanted to make sure I didn't accidentally remove a file or duplicated a file. So I wanted to now if my new directory structure did hold the same amount of files as the original directory structure. If so, I'd remove the old structure, because both of them would contain the same files.

I looked at the properties of the old directory: 328 items.
I looked at the properties of the new directory: 354 items.

Looks like the new directory holds more files. So it looks like I duplicated some files. This isn't true, because a sub-directory's an item too. I made some new sub-directories, so that's why the amount of items differs.

A better way would be to display the following information:

Old directory:
- 316 files
- 12 sub-directories
- 328 items in total

New directory:
- 316 files
- 38 sub-directories
- 354 items in total

This'd give a better indication of the contents of a directory and it'd be way easier to compare them.

When editing in f-spot ctrl + z (there is no Edit>Undo either) should undo changes on current version. Having to go back to original after after a bad change after having done a few things can be quite frustrating, especially since Ctrl Z is pretty standard throughout the system.

In windows, when a file type is unknown there is an option to search what it is on the web or to open it with a chosen program.

In Ubuntu there is the option to open it with a program or a command.

There should be another alternative that would open up add/remove and would automatically input the file type in the search box. This would then yield all the programs that can use the file type.

Unfortunately add/remove would need to be changed to allow file types to be searched

Lots of multi-file-archies (like RAR) contains only a couple of files, say an ISO-file and a readme.

When unpacking these the progress bar will first go to 50% (unpacked the readme-file) and then stay at 50% until the other (big) file is unpacked.

I think file-roller progress bar should move as the unpacking traverses all the different files. This way you get a much better indication of progress.

I and my friends agree that Nautilus doesn't live up to the expectations of a modern desktop OS. It's the slowest file manager I had ever to do with, be it Linux, Mac or Windows. Compared to the windows file manager it's orders of magnitude slower, listing files like 500% slower, hence one of the main reasons of the perception among windows and Mac users that Ubuntu is painfully slow (and the Linux crowd fails to understand why they're saying so).
It also lacks fundamental features that are a must-have among normal/newbie users and windows converts. Creating a new file or folder in a Nautilus gets impossible if the list is longer than the Nautilus window (you have to start using the file menu - a lame solution for modern software). You can't select multiple files using the mouse, something that windows has solved long ago considering it's impact on user experience.
Combine these lacks with the others (I wouldn't explain for brevity) and some (perhaps many) Linux fans that fail to acknowledge this (by just saying things like: "it's not mac nor windows", "get another file manager", "we're proud of not having this features and we don't even need them") and you got one of the right answers of why Linux is gaining like 0.1% on the desktop side yearly.
Canonical solved successfully the file installation issue on Linux by providing the wonderful Add/Remove software program. It's high time to also modernize the program that is arguably used most of all other programs and is to some extent the face and perception of the OS - the default file manager.
I believe Canonical has the power to make the quality shift in this field.

When I set an image as a wallpaper from eog or any other app, and later i move or delete the wallpaper file, my wallpaper turns to a blank color.
and i mostly don't remember where was the image file or what was its name so i end up feeling very helpless.

i suggest that when i set an image as a wallpaper, it gets copied into a directory like ~/wallpapers or something first and is used from there instead of the original file.

I have Ubuntu 8.10. If there are two wifi networks available my Network manager tries to connect to the one with the weaker signal (probably because it's the first in the list)...

Network manager should be intelligent enough to choose the best available connection.

When accessing a hard disk/flash memory etc where there is a lot of IO activity, there should be more affect to the responsiveness of my mouse (touch pad in this case) or keyboard. Currently when I copy / move photos from my flash card (via my card reader on my laptop) to my hard disk, my mouse pointer becomes vary jumpy and unresponsive and it is almost impossible to reliably click on anything. This should not happen. An effort should be made to reduce and ultimately remove this unresponsiveness.

If Ubuntu is just installed on a computer that also has another operating system installed, a question should be asked in the boot loader to set the preferred boot OS.

This question is only asked during the first boot and thereafter the OS selected by the user should become the default.

There also should be an option in the Grub menu to change this setting (e.g. the user selected Windows in the past because (s)he was uncertain, but as (s)he likes Ubuntu very much, (s)he wants to change this default)

This feature is present in OS X, and is one of the few things I really like about OS X. It's just a little application that reads a file quickly, instead of starting a large and resourceful application. It should be able to show several different file types, like text-documents, spreadsheets, images, vector-graphics, PDFs, and so on.

When you change your resolution trough the GUI in ubuntu, there isn't asked to keep that settings and if not accepted to turn back in 10 seconds.
For example: Recently a new ubuntu user i know changed his resolution too low. By doing this he couldn't see his menu bar and so on anymore...
This can be very frustrating for new and experienced users when changing to the wrong resolution accidently...

For all Desktops enviroments.

Gnome has defaults applications for every file type but if "BOB" wanna change the default application he cannot. well it is possible, Bob right clicks on the file, properties, openwith tab and yeta yeta yeta (he changed the jpg default application). But what happens if Bob downloads a jpg file from the internet with firefox, epiphany or konqueror? the navigator has its own default applications, eye of gnome because he uses gnome, he has to change (again) in firefox what application he wants.

Anyone see the problem? the same with ALL the others application, like fileroller...

The default application info are not integrated in the system, there must be a central management and all application must obtain the info from that manager.

I don't know if i am explaining the right way, i speak spanish.