Contributor 6205

Problem:
The default install of Abiword comes without .odt support (and misses many other formats). The user has to install the abiword-plugins package to work with .odt files.

If I had not explicitly sought for Abiword's .odt support I would have reverted to OpenOffice.

Spending extra time to make Abiword compatible is quite a high barrier for normal users (=users that expect an application to work out of the box).

Solution:
Abiword should support .odt by default. Either recommend to install the abiword-plugins package when installing Abiword or integrate the plugins into Abiword (means they cannot be removed).

At least integrate .odt support somehow BY DEFAULT.

I do not always clear off my SD card when I download images. The next time I download images I need to make sure I start at the correct image or else I end up with duplicates named file-1.jpg. F-Spot should detect files with the same name and offer to skip, overwrite or rename the files.

The fact of Interpid Beta having so awful system sounds and a weak wallpaper made me having an idea:

What about having a sponsored competition for each Ubuntu version artwork, like wallpapers, system sounds, gnomecc/kcsrc colour schemes, themes, etc.?

The prizes would be sponsored, symbolically (like Ubuntu merchandise, more shipit install CDs, etc.) or not (like computers with Ubuntu OEM), and i think this not only will not hurt artwork licences like cc-nc-sa or gpl, as well this can provide Ubuntu plenty of much better artwork (specially from the artwork .deb packages each version, having hundreds of excellent artwork instead of some few mediocre (poor) ones), and help increasing the Ubuntu popularity.

I like Rhythmbox a lot! I love the cover art retrieving functionality, but I think it would be perfect if Rhythmbox use the cover art in the local HD (inside the album folfer would be great).

Nothing important, but nice.

Thanks a lot!!

At the beginning of each release cycle, the improvements other major distributions have made in their last release should be reviewed by the Ubuntu developers for their suitability to be integrated with Ubuntu. Many distributions have detailed lists available of all new features:

Fedora
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/10/FeatureList

OpenSuse
http://en.opensuse.org/Testing:Features_11.0

Mandriva
http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Development/Ideas/Technical_specs_2008

This way we will get some new features for free and will avoid reinventing the wheel on other problems. Also it can be an inspiration to come up with even better solutions.

This is a simple one. When changing the volume slider there's no indication of the volume. This is a good thing IMO as you don't always want a loud *dong* when changing the volume. However, it would be handy to have a small button below the slider which plays a quick sample sound to test volume.

This would be handy when setting up a presentation and want to quickly test output volume. Or when playing with an external amp and need a quick test.

A similar button in the volume controls could be useful also.

In synaptics, the 'Downloading Package Files' Window currently does not show the total amount of download in MegaBytes

turn on auto-hinting in fonts rendering. It really makes fonts AMAZINGLY good. You Will notice the change

copy and past the following in your '.font.conf' in home folder.






true




somehow this is not the same as doing subpixel rendering or LCD screens with "slight" anti-aliasing.

Currently, all files opened in archive manager shares the same icon. I think it would be nice if there was somewhat different icons for each file-type opened with this application. Doesn't have to be a huge difference, just some small visual indication whether it is a rar, zip or a deb file that is opened.

My idea is to implement some functionality to be able to change owner of a file/folder using "Properties" under right-click of a file/folder. As it is now it only says "You are not the owner of this file and can't change permissions" (might differ depending on language, this was a rough translation from Swedish). I would like to be able to change owner of this file/folder and have policykit or gksu ask for permissions to do this if I'm not already root. Sometimes I fiddle around in console and leave stuff on my Desktop that isn't owned by my user account. This would be a nice solution to my problem, and any other problem which involves changing owner of file/folder.

Now that I think about it, I think the same could be applied if you try to empty your trashbin and you get errors because some files were owner by another user.

I open a movie file called vm-ob.avi. In the same folder there is a file called vm-ob.srt, which is a file for subtitles.

Totem should check for a .srt (subtitle) file in the same directory of the movie file (.avi, .mpg) to see if it can find a subtitle with the same filename as the movie, but with a .srt file extension.

VLC media player already does this.

Compiz Fusion is a great application, and most effects look awesome. However, it runs to 5% its capacity without compizconfig-settings-manager installed (unless you know how to configure it manually, thought that can be a pain in the ass). Thats why I think ccsm should be installed by default on Ubuntu for easier using of "other" plugins by new users.

EDIT: If you want simple-ccsm to be installed by default promote this idea, since they are pretty similar.
EDIT2: No, this will not make Ubuntu slower. Compiz Fusion is already installed by default since Gutsy, all I want is the configuration tool for Compiz (a very little app) to be installed. All what ccsm (or sccsm) does is to change configuration files.

Canonical currently has a big problem. It needs developers. Its a vicious cycle, developers are needed to improve development, yet to increase the number of developers, we need better development programs.

The sad reality is that whilst Canonical has a wealth of development tools available, they are barely officially supported, out of date, or have no easy way of using them (like systemtap).

We need Canonical to step up and make the development environment for 9.04 a priority, so that first time linux developers, and long time developers have a powerful environment, that is officially supported by Canonical. By improving the development environment to be easy to setup, and more updated, developers are more likely to jump on board. In fact, whilst many developers consider coding on OSX to be a privilage, I have never heard the same said of Ubuntu.

Current areas we are severely lacking include:
- Eclipse is out of date in the repos and has been for ages.. Why?
- Sun and Apple have Dtrace officially supported, with a GUI frontend that really makes things easy. We don't have any support for systemtap nor have we got any comparable profiling gui.
- Windows and OSX has a fully supported out of the box development environment with the most popular languages in 2 clicks. With ubuntu, we have to manually work out which gui's we want, which tools, etc
- Debugging? Ha.. its actually quicker to port the code to OSX and use OSX's development tools in some cases then debug currently, because it supports step-backs and such.
- QT can compete against Cocoa. GTK even with Glade is a joke still. I'm not asking you to fix this, but if you want to encourage GTK development, at least have glade/eclipse integration in a developers metapackage
- Developers centre. Ubuntu has none, so developers aren't given a simple list of changes that might affect them next release, such as the change from Alsa as backend, to Pulse, so we can prepare in time. We don't even have a centralised way of really working together with other ubuntu developers.

Some may say developers can help themselves, but first impressions count. If it takes 3000 clicks to get your development environment to the standard provided by Apple in 5, whilst requiring you to also search for equivilent tools (such as dtrace which are considered standard for many OS's now) by yourself, you certainly wont prioritise the OS. By rewarding developers, with a better development environment, the end result will be a higher quality linux environment.

[....]

Most gnome software that has tabs allow to extract certain tab into a new window just by dragging the tab into a free space of a screen. For example, gedit and gnome-terminal acts in this way. But not nautilus - it allows only to reorder tabs, not to extract them. I think Nautilus should support this extracting, in order to keep UI consistency.

If possible, could suspend and hibernate be grayed out or hidden on any machine where it does not work?
If this is not possible in an automatic way, then make it a simple configuration option.

This is not a dupe of http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/6909/ that calls for disabling suspend and hibernate all out. I only want it disabled if it doesn't work on the machine in question.

Main reason being that I know of some people who keep accidentally trying to suspend and/or hibernate out of habit from when they used windows, where this did work [bleh]. I'm tired of hearing them complain about it.

It is better to have an eject button for media in places drop down menu : http://img262.imageshack.us/my.php?image=screenshotco9.png

would be interesting if the .Trash folders could use the Trash icon instead of the Folder icon.

Currently the System Monitor is sort of worthless as a Windows-style Task Manager. When the system is frozen because of a buggy application, System Manager won't take the screen back, even when a keyboard shortcut is used to try to bring it up.

And often the keyboard shortcut assigned to killing applications won't come up either.

Both of these need to be more able to take over control of the desktop and dominate buggy applications.

Windows Task Manager has this ability, and will almost always come up no matter how many things have crashed.

Also, add links to shut down, reboot, or restart the windowing manager.

It should be "multimedia player" or "audio/video player" or "media player" (as mrdoob proposed).

Update-manager just shows a list. I have no way of knowing which repositories are behind which updates.

What is to prevent a third-party repository from pushing updates for *any* package on my system?

Example: Say I add the repo for Banshee media player. I expect (and trust) it will only push updates that involve Banshee, but what is to stop them from pushing a non-banshee related update? Maybe it's a bit paranoid of me, but I'd like to know which updates are coming from which repo. Then, at least if I see a third-party repo pushing an update for something like sudo, then I'll know something is fishy - but right now I have no way of knowing where the updates are coming from, and that bothers me.

Also, the update-mananger, could possibly group the update list by repository.