Contributor Loffe

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

[....]

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.

Include Compiz Fusion Manager by default

An Alarm to user remember about some important events.

Evolution have an alarm, but it is a big and fat program and many people don't like use it just to have a alarm.

I found these Alarm programs:
http://gnomefiles.org/app.php/Alarm+Clock
http://alarm-clock.54.pl/

Maybe other more simple Alarm can be included.

When sharing files out via Samba, Ubuntu requires users to re-enter their existing password into smbpasswd.

Currently, when a user changes their password with 'passwd' or a similar tool, their entered password is hashed into md5 or similar and then saved to /etc/shadow.

Its is easy to reconfigure pam so that passwords are also hashed to md4 in /etc/samba/smbpasswd

OS X already does this.

It would be nice for a mechanism that would automatically retrieve the newest FGLRX driver from AMD/ATI and install it, including the configuration of the xorg.conf file.

I often see requests on the forums for Ubuntu developers spending more energy on fixing bugs than adding new features. Since we have two releases every year, why not officially have one be the "new features" release with only major bug fixes and have the other be the "stability" release focused on refining all the new features introduced in the last release.

So the October release would add a bunch of new features and be focused mainly on the bleeding-edge crowd of users. The April release would not add features but be a super-stable version of the October release.

And please don't tell me the LTSes are the stable releases. Dapper was no more stable when it was released than Edgy or Feisty were. LTS means long-term support, not long-term stability.

What do you think?