Contributor AaronPeterson

At the moment the live CD allows you to manage the creation of partitions yourself before you install, or choose "everything in one partition". The alternate CD also has similar features, but also has the option of using LVM (Logical Volume Manager) to make post-install partition management easier, and MD (Multi-Disk) to do software RAID based installs.

These (LVM & MD) should be incorporated into the live installer (Ubiquity) and further there should be an easy option for having a separate root (/) and home (/home) partition on installation.

There are a few significant benefits to this, not least of which is the ability to easily reinstall the OS (or install a different derivative or even different distro) without losing the valuable data in /home.

Other benefits include resilience (from MD), easy partition resizing (from LVM), and better space management, making it so that a full /home partition does not affect the system as a whole (as / would not be full).

It would make ubuntu much less intimidating for windows server admins if there was a gui which allowed configuation of common network services such as:

web
ssh
mail
database
vpn
dhcp
ldap
dns

Some of these are easier than others but I have seen very little work on this front and I think it will help win over windows admins.

As a user I want to be able to listen to audio or watch videos with the least amount of setup. I would like to have a single interface (Codec Manager) that lists all of the most common audio and video formats and shows me if I am missing the necessary codec for playback.

Use Case: Enable MP3 playback.
Precondition: MP3s are not currently playable.
1. User logs into the system.
2. User opens the Codec Manager.
3. System displays a list of common audio/video formats.
4. User selects MP3s.
5. System displays some info about MP3s.
6. System displays a list of available codecs.
7. User selects a codec and clicks Apply.
8. System downloads and installs the selected codec.
9. System informs the user when completed.

Other possible features:
- Display a list of audio/video types that are missing codecs.
- An auto-setup function, that grabs the recommended codec for all formats.

Audio and Video formats that should be supported:

Audio:
- MP3
- OGG
- AAC
- FLAC
- Real Audio

Video:
- MP4

[....]

I've got two monitors, and right now if I use the wallpaper settings in gnome it stretches the wallpaper across the two monitors. It does this even for the default ubuntu wallpaper. This can look really bad depending on the image. In order to get around this I had to get two wallpaper images and join them into one large one with the GIMP and set that as my wallpaper.

There should be a way in gnome to set a different wallpaper for each monitor.

==== Merged with ideas of a similar scope: Different wallpapers on different workspace ===

Many workspaces option in Linux allows you to separate your work, why not allow users to have different wallpapers on each workspace. This allows for easier identification of which workspace you are on.
When used with compiz-fusion you can rapidly switch between your workspaces and the different wallapaper will allow you to quickly recognise what desktop you are on.

Currently this is natively available in KDE but not in Gnome. In Gnome you can't even let Compiz take over the wallpaper control because Nautilus doesn't allow for transparent backgrounds.

Other solutions like Wallpapoz are slow and when switching between desktops it takes too long to switch WP.

Better and easier support/installation of touchscreen drivers for Table PCs.

Code could possibly be shared/taken from other projects such as moblin, Ubuntu Mobile etc

Currently I can encrypt an ubuntu system during install, but if I did not I have to reinstall to get encryption. I would like a simple way to tell ubuntu to encrypt the system or a part of it, such as:

Swap
Home
Root
All

Hard drives have continuously grown in capacity and offer ever more affordable mass storage solutions. It would be great if Ubuntu took advantage of the large storage capacity of hard drives to bring real benefits to the user.

Setting up versioned directories (or /home file systems) should be an easy thing to do for both users and administrators. If set up

(a) old versions of overwritten files in that directory should be recoverable
(b) the entire directory should be easily synchronised (e.g. between desktop and laptop).

It should be configurable that after a merge only one of the hosts (desktop or laptop) keeps the history, the other only the latest version (and all changes since the latest merge).

In normal usage, having versioning should be completely transparent, both in the GUI as in the command line. Commit should be automatic (well, every time you save a file), not a manual afterwards command (as when using bzr).

In versioned directories/file systems, applications should not keep tilde~ backups of the next-to-latest version or use other similar workarounds. In a sense, Trash is also a workaround of not having versioning. For versioned directories, Trash contains "links" to the latest version (in the versioning system) of deleted (trashed) files.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=543626
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=237403 http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=434153 http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=431039
...

Expansion of Add Remove Programs - show user-provided descriptions, feature lists, screenshots, comments, ratings, integration with launchpad. Initial page should be top-rated apps, or newest apps. Managed by a webapp?

Or... leave it as it is, but create a website displaying all the great software available for ubuntu including all the features mentioned above with apturl links to install.

From #4613 (merged):

It should be indicated how much I'll have to download to install something.

We have download limits here and well... quite often I exceed them. It would be useful to indicate how big the download is going to be.

The possibility to restore deleted files with a right mouse click in the trash bin in Gnome

On Windows pressing either Ctrl+Alt+Del or Ctrl/Shift/Esc brings up the Task Manager. If apps crash in linux many users will try these key combinations with no reward. Mapping these key combinations, by default, to the the Gnome System Monitor will help a large number of new users.

Right now, the most likely successful migrations to Ubuntu happen for *nix experts and total novices who have someone install Ubuntu for them, but the most likely people to try Ubuntu are Windows power users--those who like a lot of configuration options but who are also used to using the GUI for tweaking options and not manually editing a text configuration file.

The most popular requests for editing the /boot/grub/menu.lst file involve changing the default boot option (to Windows instead of Ubuntu) and changing the timeout before a boot option is selected. The other less popular ones would be just bonus features, I guess.

I'm bored with dual-screen on GNU/Linux, it really has to have a graphic configuration, and better features.
I would like to move windows from a screen to another, but when I maximize I need it to be in a single screen.

Update: Xrandr GUI blog post by Bryce Harrington

Change start page of Brainstorm to show latest ideas or something, else people will probably push for the already high-graded ideas and won't care of other newer ideas.

Maybe a page with random ideas?

And remove the grades if not specifically requested, since it will affect peoples voting.

When i change some hardware pieces i need to configure them manually, ubuntu should recognize there has been a hardware change and configure it.

Provide this warning with possibility to solve the problem.

It is very frustrating when you get caught out after 30 boots and the system does a full check. Especially if you are about to give a presentation or you just need to read one bit of information. The Ubuntu team have done a great job of speeding up the boot time but this irritation undoes all the good work.

Possible solutions and further explanation:
http://micrux.net/?p=52

When someone wants to unmount a volume and the mount point is used, he gets a message telling him that the volume can't be unmounted because an application uses it. The user has no idea which application is actually using it and can't remove the device.

I propose that the popup tells him which application(s) is(are) using the device and propose to terminate them (that list should be kept up to date when the app. dies).

First of all: What is the difference between Preferences and Administration? For example: why do I see 'Encryption and Keyrings' in Preferences and 'Keyring Manager' in Administration? What is the difference between 'Default Printer' and 'Printing'? Why do I have to disable the Tracker under Sessions and not under Search and Indexing? And why are these menu's so large? I have 24 items in Preferences (they don't even fit on my screen!) and 18 items in Administration. To put all this stuff in a popup menu is bad interface design imho. Besides, the number of option should be much smaller. A few suggestions:

- Merge 'Screensaver', 'Screen Resolution' and 'Screens and Graphics'.
- Merge 'Network', 'Network Proxy' and 'Network Tools'.
- Merge 'Update Manager, Synaptic Package Manager, Software Sources'.
- Merge 'Encryption and Keyrings', 'Authorizations', 'Keyring Manager'.


Below are all settings I can visit via the System menu. This is just way too much.


-- Preferences --
Universal Access
About Me
Appearance
Bluetooth
Default Printer
Encryption and Keyrings
Keyboard
Keyboard Shortcuts
Main Menu
Mouse
Network Proxy
PalmOS Devices (I don't have one)
Power Management

[....]

Ubuntu needs to go green. Powertop, Lesswatts and other tools have finally hit the Linux scene to pave the way for better power management. It needs to be said, "if you want your battery to last longest, or have your energy bill be the lowest, you better use Ubuntu Linux."

Replace initscripts with upstart events. Our boot sequence is currently slow, full of race conditions and poor interactions, especially with competition between the series of tasks run by sysv-rc, udev and sometimes just with the kernel. We developed upstart so that we could have a truly event driven boot sequence that would be fast, reliable and flexible; we should take advantage of it.