Contributor Chocwise

it would be nice to have an option to quick&easy switch between compiz and metacity; especially if one is running ATI-based machine and experience flickering in open gl applications (eg. google earth), which can be resolved by turning off the compiz fusion.

currently I have not network at home, no LAN or WLAN. This causes my Firefox to start in offline mode.

Which is a good thing, I think it makes sense. The problem is that I have a local webserver running (on this machine) and I can't connect to it via http://localhost/ or http://127.0.0.1. Firefox then complains about the 'offline mode'.

I think local addresses like the ones above should always be allowed as they are not dependent on the actual LAN/WLAN connection.

Right now there are too many brainstorms to be sifted through and made sense of, spreading the votes of any reasonable person too thin.

Brainstorm should select a group of moderators to filter out ideas that are not feasible, not ideas, bug reports, or poorly worded before they are able to be voted on by the general registered user populace.

It will make Brainstorm less cluttered and allow people to decide on a few well-crafted and feasible brainstorms instead of having to make sense of the mess of 10s of thousands of brainstorms that have no hope of ever coming to fruition ("Include all proprietary codecs by default," "Make Ubuntu better," "Fix this upstream Gnome problem").

Warn users if they try to use a weak password. In the style of google account creation.

I originally thought that this would be good for the users login password. However, possibly this could be implemented for all passwords system wide.

This complaint is about the compiz-by-default choice.
Compiz is great (like a lot other stuff) but it should not be installed by default (like a lot other stuff).

Before Compiz-by-default choice, Ubuntu - like GNOME - aimed at being simple to use.
Then Compiz was activated by default : users had to learn a lot of keyboard shortcuts to generate a lot of visual effects without regard to their utility but with regard to their bling bling side. And simplicity was only a souvenir.

Therefore i suggest to update Ubuntu hardware minimum requirements :
- Needs super brain with a lot of memory to remember Compiz' shortcuts
- Require at less 3 hands (or 2 hands with 12 fingers per hand) to be able to easily key Compiz' shortcuts

OR :
Maybe we could concentrate on giving only a bit of polish (thanks to transparency & dropped shadows) and especially on bringing useful functionnalities like preview on alt+tab and that Exposé thing ?

What about coming back to the rock-solid Metacity (which has composite in 2.22 version through XRender) and help to improve it (see for instance bugzilla Bug 502491 – New feature for the Compositor, Exposè-Like http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=502491 ) to keep the desktop as simple as it should be ?

Compiz would stay available through Synaptic for people who'd like to have more effects.

It should be good if it can be possible to have some shadow behind the desktop icon with a choosable color and choosable alpha channel.
The reason for this feature is to have better visibility with some wallpaper that have region that seems to hide icons.
With this feature the icons should always be in good contrast and fast reachable.

I tried to make an example but I'm not good with graphics program so if someone could make an example , it will be nice.

Instead of suggesting a "Service Pack Like" idea, I'm suggesting to update the ISO files at Ubuntu website and mirrors, that way, we can download the ISO with the latest packages and the latest fixes already out of the box.

When I open the System Monitor the program itself needs ~13% of the CPU. This isn't bearable, especially if you think that the System Monitor is mostly used when a program hangs and produces 100% CPU workload or so.

The System Monitor shouldn't burden the CPU in any notable amount.

I think more Windows users would try out Ubuntu if they could just double click an .exe file instead of going into a command prompt, browsing to the folder and then typing "wine *.exe" to install the program.

I like how Ubuntu adds shortcuts on the desktop and the "start menu" after you install the program making it easy to run but installing Windows software needs to be easier.

In todays computer systems the main bottleneck is not CPU but disk access which is several orders of magnitude slower than CPU and memory. In such circumstances the way to improve application performance is to prefetch data it needs from disk before it even requests it and it is the point of prefetching techniques. This speeds up boot and decreases the time needed to start programs. This replaces and it is faster than the currently used readahead.

I don't know Linux whatsoever. For users like me, it would be excellent if we could easily install programs built for windows - even if this means a baked in or optional emulator. I would like to install programs such as World Community Grid (www.worldcommunitygrid.org) or Zone Alarm etc... and I can't because they aren't in a .tar .gz format or whatever

(please forgive my simple windows-brain)

I would find Ubuntu much more usable if it had a better software base, such as Slackware.

I think it would be really cool if the 9.x release of Ubuntu were called something like Ubuntu 9.0: Hungry Hippo.

Here's a link to a proof of concept.

Instead of just voting "up" or "down" (wich doesnt express much how we feel about an idea), there should be something like this:

A user could give a rating from -10 to 10 (or from -100 to 100), for example:

+10 if the love the ideia and think its a very usefull and important
-10 if we think its a very bad ideia and oppose it strongly
+1 if we like it a bit, but think it´s not a priority

and so on...

And also (like some other ideas have suggested), show the total of positive and negative votes (and of course, the sum of everything) and a button to report an idea to a moderator.

I think all this would make a much better voting system...

Would be nice if there is a Automatic documentation popup before and after the installation of ubuntu desktop editions which explains things like...
1) How to install/uninstall software using apt,dpkg and graphical tool.
2)How to enable mp3, flash, dvd support..etc.
3)How i can use ubuntu for development and as a server.
4)How to set root password and reset root password.

The doc should allow a new user to get started using ubuntu without any help from the internet or from others.

Thanks...

The edubuntu-artwork package should have special settings for Xfce, for users that use the edubuntu-addon-light package to use Edubuntu on low-end hardware. Edubuntu+Xfce should use the Gartoon icon set, the EdubuntuColors GTK+ engine, the Edubuntu wallpaper, and a more simplistic window decoration like the one called "Default". This can be accomplished by changing some files in /etc/xdg/xfce4. These customizations should be in the edubuntu-artwork package. This way, edubuntu-artwork will treat Xfce the same as GNOME.

I firmly believe there is no reason why Ubuntu can't work together with a company like Apple. I would love to see some of apple's proprietary software ported to Linux. A more user friendly way of accessing Apple hardware would be nice too. The idea behind such a merger would be the idea of kicking Microsoft when it's down. With how poorly Vista is doing, now is the time to team up with all of Microsoft's rivals and kick Microsoft off it's high horse.

Brainstorm is a great website, and I'm not complaining at all. Just a good suggestion:

I really LOVE watching Digg headlines scroll past me showing live voting statistics. It would be really cool if something like that existed for this site.

The biggest problem with Linux is that there is no easy way for big companies to distribute there products to us. If there was a store in the "Add/Remove Applications" window hopefully developers and companies won't be so scared of creating and selling Linux versions of software.
Maybe ID will release there games under this distribution system. If it works well hopefully Adobe will release there software and I won't need my Mac anymore.

Some programs have audio but rely on the master volume control to limit that programs audio level. This can be limiting as a user might be playing a video that is silent but have a voice communication which is too loud.

I want the ability to control volume at the application level. This will give me more control over the audio output of programs.