Contributor Corey

Similar to the way that ndiswrapper interfaces with wireless cards by making a compatibility layer between linux and the windows drivers, work on a means to use the great mass of readily available windows drivers to interface with non-linux-compliant hardware.

And yeah, I know, obviously it wouldn't work the way things are now. But lots of stuff didn't work before, and some brilliant and diligent people went about making it work.

It would surely be easier than convincing every single manufacturer on the planet that they need to spend time and money developing drivers for an OS with currently such a small percentage of the global PC market.

It's easy to understand that the author of each idea is voting UP for it, but many users just pulled down the counter and didn't even write why...

I've found this to be an accessibility problem for older people, children, and first-time computer owners. There are better ways to open files, folders, and activate items. Even though double-click has been the way to do this for many years, it's so fraught with problems that I suggest we completely eliminate it, and replace it with better, more efficient, alternatives.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-click_(computing)

(Apologies in advance for the length of the following paragraphs:)

I realize you can turn on single-click activation in Nautilus, but that only solves one or two of the many problems (and comes with its own problems), and you still need double-click for some things, so you can't turn it off completely -- which means it still disrupts you when trying to single-click multiple times.

Problems with double-click:
1) It can disrupt the functionality of single-click, if you need to single-click two times, separately. There are a number of UI controls that require you to click, and then click again to edit. Because these 2 actions need to be distinguished from a single double-click, you need to click...wait...click. Some examples of this are text-entry boxes that you can select, then edit (eg editing transform matrices in Inkscape).
2) Efficiency: because it's hard to guess how long a double-click interval is, when you want to single-click twice separately, you tend to wait a bit longer between clicks, so that you don't accidentally double-click (and potentially do something irreversible). I find this slows me down. The flip-side of this coin is that you often still accidentally double-click, interrupting your work-flow.
3) It's only used for about 3 types of actions; opening files, folders, and activating items. This means it's much less important than single-click. So I think the ability to single-click twice in a row should be considered more important than double-click.
4) Discoverability & Learnability: maybe us hardened computer users have been double-clicking for years, but it's actually a really hard-to-discover function for people new to computers. If you didn't know about it, how would you know to try double-clicking? What does it map to in the real world? Nothing -- you don't double-pick apples, or double-close the fridge door, or double-pull a trigger, or double-press a piano key to play it.

[....]

Mozilla-firefox-adblock (https://addons.mozilla.org/pl/firefox/addon/1865) should be replaced by Adblock Plus (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1865)in Ubuntu's repositories because the Adblock isn't developed anymore (since 2004).

Often new users to Ubuntu don't know whether to use Ubuntu (GNOME), Kubuntu (KDE) or Xubuntu (XFCE) (plus all the other versions such as Ubuntu Studio, Mythbuntu), and so have to install one or more of them until they find one they like.

It's also possible for people to install the "meta packages" ubuntu-desktop, kubuntu-desktop, xubuntu-desktop and so on to pull in the "other" desktop environments. This process can be a little hit and miss with extra packages left lying around from the "old" desktop environment.

It should be made easier to "migrate" from one environment to another (post installation) by allowing users to easily install a new meta-package (and the necessary dependencies) and remove the old one in one go.

Of course if the user has plenty of disk space they can easily install all three (or more), but once they make the decision on which DE to use, they will often want to remove all trace of the old ones. This small app should make that possible.

Be able to change the Ubuntu Icon next to 'Applications' in the top panel to provide a more customizable desktop for the user

If you're not a graphic artist, you probably don't know what this means. To be short: the practical effect is that you fonts look smoother, like the Mac OS X fonts.

Also, most fonts look very bad with hinting enabled, virtually only Vera/DejaVu has acceptable results, while most other fonts are not usable.

This is very easy to implement: it is just a true/false value in /etc/fonts/fonts.conf
You can also set it per user in your ~/.fonts.conf by pasting this snippet:


false


(Affects only newly started applications)

Artists and eye candy people, make your voice heard!

Tightly integrate, mail client, blog writer, feed reader, and calender into one application that is not too memory intensive. Something like having thunderbird by default write blogs, and have a two way sync with services like google calendar. Or maybe evolution but that is a heavy application that requires a lot of memory and i don't use it for that reason.

For newcommers having to type in sudo XXX in a terminal might be irritating.
I propose having a graphical way of using administrative permissions to edit core files of the OS such as xorg and others.
Now I know xorg has a front end but it doesnt do the job right in my opinion and there are other things people might need to do like use nautilus under sudo without using a terminal.

So many people have Windows programs as the only thing keeping them from making a full transition from Windows to Linux. Perhaps it would be possible to make WINE a part of the Ubuntu install, so newbies could still use many of their Windows programs? Perhaps the first time they click on an EXE a window would pop up, saying that it'll run in WINE and may not work (as WINE is not quite perfect - yet anyways).

Today most of the computers are providing 2Go of RAM or more. When I'm looking at the memory consumption of ubuntu it is about 400Mo.

I think that Ubuntu should look at the RAM capacity of the computer and take the full advantage of the hudge amount of memory that we have today.

I'm sure it will be possible to preload most usefull apps and to bring a more efficient, smooth and fast system.

In Nautilus I can choose Single Click, but this only a feature of Nautilus.
In the GNOME dialogs Open file, Save file, etc, I must do two clicks!
(In Windows the Single Click is for all system).

Kde 4 has its compositing window manager, instead gnome hasn't it. To have some bling a user should install compiz but it's not really reliable software, instead i see that you're working on clutter (for ubuntu mobile), it will be a great job to improve metacity using clutter as foundation library and move results upstream to the gnome community.

cdroms are slow, don't allow to modify their content easily, they are weak and not as easy to carry as USB keys.

It would be great to provide Ubuntu as a liveUSB just as Mandriva does. We should be able to carry our distribution on any computer, manage our preferred settings (do I want binary drivers enabled ? what is my preferred resolution ?), etc.

The thing is not to make something transportable, but really a nomad system that could be used just the best way as it could on any computer.

Remove Mono and dependent applications from default Ubuntu Desktop CD. Mono occupies a significant amount of the valuable space on the live cd that could be used for translations and other things. Applications using mono use much more memory than their non-mono counterparts. Functionality can be provided by other applications that are just as good.

This will NOT remove Mono or any of the applications from the Ubuntu repositories, just the default Desktop CD. (Although removing them from the CD may mean they don't need to be in Main anymore)

This affects two applications included by default: tomboy and f-spot. Tomboy can be replaced by either sticky notes or zim and f-spot by gthumb.

Enable Nautilus to use tabs.

Nautilus is Ubuntu's default file management software. There is no reason why you should need to open countless Nautilus windows to manage your files. It is time to bring tabs from your web browser to your file browser.

It's a great idea can manage the phone numbers and make calls from the pc. Export the contact's info and export to gmail or google calendar. Give internet to the phone as gnubox

Every time I install and reinstall Ubuntu on a system (which is somewhat frequently), the first thing I always do when booting up is change the panels. Basically I make it a bit more like Windows (my personal preference). I know, I know, groan all you want. But here's what I do, and here's what I suspect many others do:

* Delete the entire top panel.

* Delete the Applications/Places/System widget and put in the simple Ubuntu "start" widget (saves a TON of screen real estate)

* Put the clock in the lower right of the screen (showing time with AM/PM only, no date)

* Put the volume control slider to the left of the clock

* Move the 'active windows' applet to the bottom as well.

* Move some of the other applets (system tray, etc) to the bottom.

Basically I just want to end up with one panel on the bottom, with my "start" menu, my window list, then my tray icons/volume/clock. Tada!

I know it's kind of a "one-off" and not terribly hard to do after installing, but I think it'd be pretty sweet to just have an option, or an advanced option, on installation, that would basically be like a radio button or something and would say

"Choose your desktop style:"

( ) Gnome classic
This style will have two panels, a gigantic start menu, with places, and a system menu, plus it will show the date on your clock. Also, when you run programs and maximize them, now you have a panel at the top, a menu on your windows, and another panel at the bottom.

[....]