Contributor BadChoice

When copying file an option to get a visual notification when the file operation is finished would be useful.

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.

Let's be clear: Ubuntu is installed with a good theme..
BUT it isn't as good compared to Mac Os X theme or Vista, and it doesn't reflect it's huge capabilities...

to be completely honest with you, this look gives new users a feeling of a rustic and old operating system...
-- this is what many of my friends (Windows users) just said when I convinced them to install Ubuntu...

-- just ask yourself, do you use default theme??? did you download some nice icon pack or install stuff like Avant Window navigator... ect...

* I like Ubuntu project, and this situation isn't acceptable for me!!!

I'm not talking about copying ideas from other operating systems but we must think of adding a modern and original theme with new nicer colored icons and better looking windows.. ect..

THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT, Ubuntu use must be much more PLEASANT, especially for newbies !!!

Just think "commercial", the idea is to seduce new users..
I know that, for "confirmed" users, this isn't an issue, but it's a vital one for newbies!!!

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

[....]

I believe it would be a good idea to redesign the file system hierarchy in Ubuntu in a way similar to GoboLinux . Especially as a newbie migrating from Windows or Mac OS X is used to "/Applications" or "C:\Program Files" respectively, not to things like "/usr/bin" and "/usr/share". See the GoboLinux website for more reasons for this idea.

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.

[....]

I've been playing around with Apple Mac OS X Leopard and, although the system didn't impress me that much, I loved one feature that I'd really like to see in Ubuntu.
It´s call Quick Look, and allows you to view the contents of a file without open its default application.
This is great when you have a folder with different types of files (JPG, MPG, DOC) and you want see the content of the files quickly without open many applications (Eog, Totem, OpenOffice Writer in this case)
You can look how this work in Mac OS X on here, here and here.

I can't add this to the bug report as it's technically not a bug. When you try to upload a file to a website that is expecting certain files such as JPG's and other images, a user will be unable to upload images if their file extensions case is different.

My wife actually stumbled on this, so here's an example based on her issue.

First step: create 4 files on the desktop:
test1.JPG
test2.jpG
test3.Jpg
test4.jpg

Now go to MySpace and log in /* you know you have an account ;) */

Now, click Add/Edit Photos, then click Upload Photos. You should be looking at a file upload app, currently titled Photo Upload - 1.3. Click Browse and browse to the Desktop. The dialog box lets you select *.jpg, *.jpeg, *.png, *.bmp, etc, etc, etc. If you navigate to the desktop you will see the only file you are able to select is test4.jpg.

Of course I knew why this happens but being that Ubuntu is Linux For Human Beings, the average joe computer user demographic that Ubuntu is targeting won't figure this out right away. And to top it off, most digital cameras create capital file extensions automatically (ie, DSC0001.JPG), and this happens with any site that limits uploads to certain file extensions, not just MySpace.

Before the dialog box lists the available files to upload based on the predefined file extensions, it should conduct the initial search for those files as case insensitive. This way, even though the list of files is limited to *.jpg, a user should still be able to see test1.JPG, test2.jpG, test3.Jpg, test4.jpg all in his/her list of files to choose from.

./neco

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."

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)

[....]

An interesting hack I saw in some utility for Windows a while ago, I can't remember what the app was called, is you could 'ghost' a window, which would put it 'always on top', transparent, and in a state where you couldn't click on it, so it was always on top of everything but you could still work beneath it.

Now, this is seldom an incredibly useful thing to do, but sometimes it's nice to use on a buddy list or an email client when you're waiting on something or to watch a video without really losing and desktop space to do other things. It's a little confusing at first, but after a while it's pretty easy to focus between different things.

This could be a creative option to have when you right-click (by convention) the title bar along with Maximize and Minimize, making the window only interactable when selected from a task list or alt-tab.

When I press the screenshot key to grab a screenshot, then I get the mouse cursor on the screenshot too.

I don't want the mouse pointer on the screenshot.

When you take a screenshot, don't capture the mouse cursor.

One thing that helps make the Mac OSX desktop experience much more pleasant than that of Ubuntu is that the OSX developers to some degree have realized that users of the system wants to make the best possible use of the precious screen real estate available to them.
Therefor all window borders are much smaller, to let the apps have more space.

This is an especially pertinent issue on a laptop with a smaller screen.

I think Ubuntu have lots of -room- for improvement here. The window borders are huge. They should be much smaller. More space for apps, less for window borders and decorations. Usability is king.

Installing can be fun. Why not let the user create their login picture during the install. Perhaps even fill in information about the installation why the installation is actually happening.
For example, why do we ask for time zone information when we set that at the end of copying all the files. Or why can't we have the user select a picture of themselves with cheese/memaker(http://memaker.org)/image file during install.
Other items that could be done during the copy process...
Add other users and permission rights.
Enable repositories.
Setup special hardware settings like your multi button mouse.
Change your desktop background?
All kinds of things..
I am sure there are others. :D
And when all that's done, actually tell interesting information if we have internet access, it could go to a webpage and give a nice presentation of the new features found in the new Ubuntu.

I think that would be awesome that if there was a Key combination to change the window or minimize it, like in Windows the Alt + Tab or the super key.
Sorry for the English.
Thanks

I think that desktops needs to enchance resolution because everything its so big!! I have a panoramic screen and in windows I can see 1/3 more than in Ubuntu. Its very useful you can have two or tree aplications opened and see them all, or a big list of music etc...

Lot of people have ubuntu + other operating system installed in his/her computer (FreeBSD, windows, etc.)

Now for accessing to this system, we could reboot computer and dont select ubuntu (in grub menu). It could be good if we have virtualized access to these OS: in any OS present in grub menu, ubuntu could virtualize them (with qemu, virtualbox, etc.).

So ubuntu users could run your OS at the same time that ubuntu and copy and share information among that.

dont care with add apostrophe like "command -param"

While the default Ubuntu theme in Gnome is OK, there is room for A LOT more refinement. I would like to see things like:

- Beautiful icons like those in OSX
- Cutting edge, highly readable fonts

I would especially like to see tremendous attention to detail paid to all kinds of small things, such as default icons, etc. Much of this may come in the form of enhancements to the default Gnome/KDE themes.

There is just something incredibly pleasing about the look of OSX, and Ubuntu deserves to look at least as good.

With the right input from top designers, this is possible.

example from duplicate idea 5581 :
http://fc02.deviantart.com/fs22/f/2007/321/2/f/Ubuntu_Theme_Mockup___Light_by_b radwjensen.jpg

Excuse me for the typo in the title, it's, of course, a "TOOL" ;-)
I actually had a big problem last time I reinstalled: backuping my documents and files on a USB key, I reinstalled the OS.
But when I copied the whole thing on my new /home partition, every preferences folder had its permissions changed, so that no application would actually start.
I had to repair every single folder with its good permissions, which took me at least 3 hours.

Could we have a tool to repair the permissions all over the system, so that this kind of burden would be avoided (and it could probably speed up the system a little, if it repaired everything correctly)