Look and Feel category

everytime i shut down 8.04 i see all the text come up and tell me everything that is happening behind the scenes and frankly i dont care.

on start up i have a nice animated logo type thing.
would be nice if i could have this on shutdown like on shutdown of pclinuxos

http://www.pclinuxos.com/

when it does a shutdown it has a nice logo and says press the escape key for verbose mode.

very professional

An OS, no matter how technologically or ideologically advanced it is, should also be visually appealing.
And Ubuntu, being one of the most beatiful (I mean the default appearance here) distribution of Linux still can't compete with Vista (not to mention Mac OS X).
Here I imly the following:
-icons. All the icons should be converted into vector graphics, so that they were scalable (so that they could look the same everywhere).
-fonts. Even Liberation fonts look better than default GNOME's dejavu, but still they leave much to be desired.
-screensaver. Currently, it's just a black screen. Enough said, I guess. Ubuntu should offer aset of nice screensavers, basic, or OpenGL-driven.
-applets. GNOME applets should grow in numbers and functionality. At least I would suggest a wrapper that could display a Web widget as an applet, so that user could simply paste BB-codes from YouTube, Jaiku, Vimeo or else and see it on his desktop.
-3D effects. There shouldn't be a vast number of them, but all of them should be quality-driven. Just look how bad is Compiz rendering as you make anything that drives windows borders into curves - they are edgy and twisted.
-wallpapers. I know, Deviantart contest is on, but here is also another point: Ubuntu should provide numerous wallpapers out-of-box, and all of them should suit the default colour scheme. The same stays for login screen.
-themes. Ubuntu should provide themes that change the appearance more globally. Not only GNOME's appearance, but all the apps, bootloader, login screen, screensaver.
-customization. Changing Ubuntu's appearance isn't really easy these days, since you can't tune up all the aspects in one place. I mean, you can change the theme, but you should work really hard to make your style as sole as the defaut one - Qt, GTK and other (wxWindows, etc) applications share different configs. Just try to switch to a darker theme and you'll learn how many elements would require tuning. Ubuntu can offer great means of customization, but that doesn' mean that an average user is able to make a cool-looking style.
-bootloader. That was already mentioned, but still. Ubuntu should show text mode at all. Currently, it can occasionally fall back to console for a while, which is discomforting.
-hibernation/suspend screen. The same.

[....]

We need to change the default screensaver. The problem with the current screensaver is that the first time you meet it is when the screen suddenly turns black during the installation. That is very confusing for most users, as the first thought always is that the installation has crashed.

I suggest a screensaver that helps brand Ubuntu, like for example the "Floating Ubuntu" screensaver. It could also be a textbased screensaver that could run on older machines witch doesn't support 3D.

add a lot new themes to intrepid ibex, not just one!! give the user hte posibility to chouse which new theme he or she would like to applay to his or her new desktop, today a was watching the screenshots of alpha2 and it is still brown so i have heard that some people like, some of the people dont like the new theme, so why not replace all those old themes that ubuntu has like crux, glider, high contrast for a new coolection of themes, but no one but lot of new ones!!!

lets change ubuntu completly

Currently the Ubuntu startup process is quite nice from Grub to GDM. But once I log in, from GDM to a completely started Gnome desktop (where all the panels and applets and icons on the desktop are started) I see a brown background for a while, then the wallpaper appears, and the upper and lower panels start to show up, it stays like this a couple of seconds, then applets start to appear, and finally Gnome finishes starting. It would be more smooth, if we could have a nice progress indicator while Gnome is starting, and once everything is started, then display the desktop and panels. Maybe with nice looking transitions (fade in/out).

It seems that we've taken a "If it isn't broken, don't fix it" kind of attitude with gnome-panel. However, it's seriously lacking in polish. So I'd like to expose some mockups about the future of gnome and what they have in common.

http://www.gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Gentle+Gnome+mockup?content=31128
yes, Gentle Gnome does resemble a dock or kicker or whatever, but mainly it calls for the ability to have rounded corners on panels as well as apply a gradient, or a glass texture.

http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/May-B?content=45837
In May-B, we see rounded corners again, as well as full transparency. As in, ALL panel applets respect transparency. Also, notice we have more well developed panel applets like those featured in AWN.

http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/New+Gnome+Menu?content=65610
In this mockup we see a lot of texture, a hard line across the bottom of the panel to separate it from the desktop, and we also see transparency WITH AN IMAGE that ALL panel applets respect.

http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Elementary+Gnome?content=75687
With elementary gnome we see gradients, hard lines, rounded corners, more developed panel applets (such as launchers with an option to have running app indicators) that respect panel theming, etc. And also, to have panels that look nice when they are in the corner of the screen.

Really, all these mockups have the same basic goals:

[....]

Please add 'Backup and Restore' in 'System -> Administration', with ability to backup my personal settings (including mail), and backup entire system.

if you have a mouse with a scrolly wheel thing in the middle it would be nice if you can adjust the settings of the wheel via system-> preference -> mouse

anyone know how to setup the scroll wheel so you cam make it skip more or less lines when turned cos you can not do it in the mouse options where it should be :-((

Early, when first computers arrive, it be equipped with monochrome text display, green or gray symbols on black background. The big advantages is it was eye-friendly (because no extra light energy put to the eye) and no matter of refresh rate (again saving your eyes).
Nowadays, when GUI is most-displayed environment, at Microsoft's hand (or no?) the white background brings to standard de-facto. The reason was "the documents in MSWord looks same as on paper, WYSIWYG or so). But no one worry about people's eyes.
Super-bright displays also burn out our eyes.
The solution is turn back to black background, and using white only when preview docs before printing.
Many years I try to set this color sheme on both Windows and then Ubuntu. But always were elements which out-of-control of colors, when programmers use 'black' color instead of 'current scheme symbol's color.
Another example out-of-control items is baloon tooltips in Ubuntu, address & search lines in Firefox, and many more.
A great advantage is 'invert' function of Compiz. It fixes all! But photos looks terrible...
I suggest that developers of Ubuntu must include at least one TESTED dark scheme in distro.
Thanks a lot!

(I added) Important note: 'dark' theme is not gray, but almost black. Absolutely need that *every* letter of text must be more bright than it's background. Including input boxes on web pages, balloon messages, comments displayed when mouse stay on picture.

i don't know why... but lots of things like this one,don't let me think that Nautilus is Modern File Manager ...


I think UBUNTU _should_ push Gnome developers to fix/remove these nasty Bugs..


Image:
http://i35.tinypic.com/6ge820.png


[UPDATE]
heh! it's the killer part of Nautilus !
http://i36.tinypic.com/2vazko7.png


(sorry for bad English)

Editing the gnome panel menus should not require opening a special menu editor. I should be able to right-click an item and get a "remove from menu" option. Additionally, right-clicking a sub-menu should have an option to remove it from its parent menu, and one add another item under it. So right-clicking the "Games" drawer label would allow me to add another item under "Games" or remove the "Games" menu entirely.

Additionally, I should be able to rearrange items in the menu by drag-and-drop techniques.

A lot of polish needed during shutdown / log out.

Very likely event during ubuntu usage:
- You click the button in the top of the screen. Then you do restart/power off/log out. But one of your apps has a document open.

What should happen:
- The app creates a notify dialog, the app's taskbar button appears in the taskbar and begins to flash, you click the button, the application goes visible and you can click "No, I don't want to save the file that's the reason I pressed power off without handling this file first", shutdown continues.

What happens now:

- After the app creates the dialog,

Problem A:
The app's button flashes. You try to click the button, but it doesn't respond. gnome-panel has gotten unresponsive after you started the shutdown procedure. You need to guess that ALT+TAB is your only way to exit. If you do nothing, it will never shut down and gnome-panel will remain unresponsive, which will probably make your life harder.

Problem B.
The app is in another desktop. So, this time the button does not even appear in the taskbar. Good luck finding out you got an app in another desktop blocking the shutdown process . If you find out, you cannot switch to the other desktop, because... gnome-panel doesn't respond anymore. My solution to this is CTROL+ALT+BACKSPACE, I wish a new user good luck finding that out.

Conclusions:
- gnome-panel should be the last app to die during a shutdown sequence, it should wait for all other apps to be closedm then quit. It should also stay responsive. I think the gnome panel currently waits for all applications to be closed, but it doesn't allow another thread to take care of clicks passed to the panel, this is bad.

[....]

I use quite a few wine applications, to test web pages in Windows-Specific web browsers such as netscape for windows, for instance. ;-)

I'd like to tag the browser icons on my gnome desktop with a label indicating "this is a wine application". So what would be more appropriate than the inclined little red wine glass, aka as the default wine icon. Sadly, there is no wine icon in the default collection of launcher emblems. So please add one to this default collection. It would make the emblems much more useful immediately (to me, that is).

In international Ubuntu installations, the 'Desktop' folder changes name to translated one, and in some cases, even contain space! (like 'Рабочий стол' for Russian).
While it is "normal" for Windows users which turn to Ubuntu, it has disadvantages:
- Navigation via terminal and keyboard to such folders is very hard and confusing.
- Navigation via ASCII terminal to such folders is impossible.
- Some programs, after installing, tries to create links in 'Desktop' folder, which not exist.
- When folder name contains space, it is hard or impossible to write scripts correctly.
- it looks like pulled from Windows.
To resolve it, I suggest never change 'Desktop' name, but create localized link to it.

Have you seen how much eye candy, and how professional openSUSE looks? The system requirements are very low to (I don't really know how low, but i thing it is about 250mb or RAM and 3gb HDD). So why not add more eye candy in Ubuntu and make it look more professional? I am not saying to rise the system requirements, but for the people which have enough RAM and big enough HDD can get more eye candy.

And as well I have so far never needed to use the terminal in openSUSE (I have one cumputer with Ubuntu and one with openSUSE). It would be nice if the user no longer needed to use the terminal anymore!

Just for fun...here are some pictures of openSUSE and Ubuntu: (those are pictures are just examples)

Boot Screen
http://decoding.files.wordpress.com/2007/04/boot-screen.jpg
VS.
http://media.arstechnica.com/news.media/450/opensuse_boot.png

INSTALLATION
http://imthi.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/ubuntu-installtion-on-vmware-300x25 8.png
VS.
http://arstechnica.com/news.media/opensuse_installation.png


[....]

Ubuntu could have a laptop icon if installed on a laptop, or the standard computer icon when installed on a desktop for the Places->Computer (Computer:/// Nautilus location)

The emblems on icons give hints to the user about files and folders, however these mainly have to be added manually. Examples of more dynamic emblems are the read-only and symbolic link emblems.

I propose that more icon emblems be made which are dynamically allocated. These could even be animated and programmatically updated. Emblems could indicate things like:

* this file is being downloaded (with progress bar)
* this file has an unsaved version open
* this file is being accessed by another user
* this device is unsafe to remove
* this device is safe to remove
* a device's free space (as a progress bar)
* this version controlled folder can be updated
and so on

Applications could even add and update emblems on their own icons. For example:

* email programs could show an unread message count
* news programs could show an unread story count
* messaging programs could show a status icon
* messaging programs could show an unread message counter
* networked applications could show when they're disconnected
* editing programs could show if there are documents to be recovered
* downloading/transferring programs (like BitTorrent) could show a progress bar (or bars)

I would not go as far as allowing interactive elements (like play/next/etc. buttons on a music player) since these would interfere with the icon's main function, plus such things are more like full-blown applets/widgets/screenlets.

A nice benefit of this approach would be the ability to display a large amount of information completely in context (ie. only the information relevant to the displayed icons will be shown)

[....]

I think that we need a more simply way to change our Ubuntu look.

A better way to choose icons, and to associate them to extensions (rar, avi).

And to include a mini-tutorial in this part of Ubuntu (help/explanation button, for example in the same tab), how to change this, and this other.

To make more easy to change the splash screen, etc. A special section with all options to change Ubuntu look (for this will need a lot of Work, but I think that a lot of people like to change the appearance of their OS, and in Ubuntu could be better start to think in that).

Currently, Ubuntu automatically mounts the additional hard disk drives the first time that Nautilus is used to browse that hard disk drive. However, if the user attempts to start a launcher or download with Firefox a file to a location found in one of those drives, it will appear an error message or, in the case of downloading a file, nothing will happen. There are mainly two ways to overcome this: manually configuring the fstab file or using an additional application to change the mounting behaviour of Ubuntu. As both methods require some technical expertise, I think that Ubuntu could mount all the hard disk drives automatically on startup, so the users can use all of them right from the start using their application of choice.

** File Operations in notification area should show overall progress **
-- typo in the title

the notification area icon should be an indicator of the overall progress like brasero does..