Contributor NonPlusUltra

You'll every once in a while hear about benchmarks and stuff, the deal is that users, they don't care... If mp3 encoding took twice the time, they wouldn't notice it, if people wanted to have mp3 encoding finish ASAP, they would probably do it all from a terminal in a batch-system like setup...

What the user looks for is not to see tasks finish faster, what he wants is simpler... he wants the computer to react to his input faster. Yes, really, I wouldn't mind mp3 encoding taking twice the time if when clicking the gnome menu I would INSTANTLY get to see the menu with all icons rendered.

It is also noticeable when there's some heavy operation, I don't care if I am doing a heavy operation in another window, I should still be able to get responsive UI in the other window, in fact, the window doing the task should be responsive as well, if I click the cancel button, I should get to see its push animation... Instead what we have now are windows that take ages to "react" to mouse clicks when another process is busy, perhaps they do react but the thing that draws them just isn't drawing them...

So, really, if the idea is to 'improve performance' forget about benchmarks or silly things like that, this is a desktop OS, it is 100% about a responsive UI, really.

People around the globe that are using/concidering using Ubuntu are afraid that some of their hardware won't work for them. And some are frustrated to buy additional add-on cards to work around unsupportad onboard chips. All this could be avoided with a lookup in an ubuntu Hardware Database Website.

Some problematic hardware can be used with more or less work if helping information is available together with the hardware compatabillity data.

The hardware database can be found at http://hwdb.ubuntu.com/

From idea #47: The data should then be available in a format that is simple for users to browse on-line when considering new hardware.

I think it would be a good idea if you could drag and drop things into the drop down menu of GNOME. For example, drag and drop capabilities to the folders found in "Places". Also it would be nice to be able to right click on a launcher in the menus and find its command line and target.

Well, maybe not 4 billion, but what about 20?

Ubuntu comes with 6 or 7 themes available, but probably only 3 are really useful.

Users want to customize their environment. I have seen partial themes on many websites, but I have not been able to download *full* themes from anywhere. If they can not come preinstalled, maybe it would be possible to provide them easily (a couple of clicks). Or maybe provide an extra package to download, that would contain 10 extra themes... I dont' know.

In short I want *my* laptop to look different from Mary's, because mine will look really cool!

Ubuntu 8.10 has a new pop-up balloon, every time the desktop starts, it says a network connection is found.

This is not necessary and annoying!

Pop-ups and pop-up balloons are only useful when there is something wrong and the user REALLY NEEDS to be aware of it before proceeding his/her current activity. Otherwise it's just plain annoying, inconsiderate and very windows-like.

Alright, how to solve it then?

1. Use balloons only when REALLY needed (lost network connection, etc...)
2. Provide at least an easy and intuitive way to disable them forever, like a little option button on the balloon itself.
3. Make them less intrusive. Balloons should softly come in, be opaque and softly go away after 5 seconds if the user didn't click it. Also keep them small.

Everyone by now has seen the world famous mockups of what Ubuntu apparently should look like. The problem is that what is shown in those mockups is not yet possible with the current way gnome works.

I worry with everyone clambering for this mythical theme and with time running out before 8.10 ships, what will end up happening is Ubuntu will ship with the same old problematic brown and orange theme that is so hated by a lot of people.

There is a solution though...

The Dust theme
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Artwork/Incoming/Intrepid/DustTheme

The Dust theme has gotten a lot of praises on Digg and is easily as sexy as anything I've personally seen for Linux (and I'm not usually a fan of dark themes), bust most promising of all... is actually possible with the current technology we have at our disposal.

It's time to be bold! Stop defaulting to the same brown and orange and make a big bold change. Embrace Dust.

Yes you will get a few idiots who will say it's too like Vista just because it's black, but ignore them people. The wider tech community will praise Ubuntu for finally ditching its dorky themes and becoming sophisticated and sexy. New users will be eager to try out this Ubuntu thing they have heard so much about.

I know that Google is spending a bunch of money on the Wine project to support Photoshop and other Adobe creative suite apps, but Canonical should go right to the source and partner with Adobe to bring Photoshop to Ubuntu.

A common reason that most of my friend's won't come over to Ubuntu completely is because Photoshop is not supported and GIMP doesn't cut it yet as a replacement for Photoshop. It's just not as feature rich and powerful.

I can't think of any other way that GIMP could overtake Photoshop other than getting an Ideastorm for it that'll charge it with user ideas, preferences and features, etc.

What do ya'll think?

well so many of people suggested about gimp not use 3 windows.actually i and many i suppose(noobs) get scared when they see 3 windows all around desktop when they open Gimp(although there is a non official port called gimpshop but its outdated and not as good as gimp).
PS(photoshop) is setting web standards great piece of work but gimp too can compete with it.some needed changes:
*****single window.
****compatibility with photoshop filters .8bf filters,more support
****better documentation
**better icons and UI redesign(although i just saw feature planned for gimp next version 2.6) still deserves attention of developers.
**better support for pre defined key in photoshop also can be used in gimp
key combinations(keyboard shortcuts like ctrl+alt etc)
i am huge fan of photo editing software and web design somehow...usability in some software breaks barriers of commercial and free software.

I am working a lot with office documents. On the basis OpenOffice provides the same functionality that MS office does. However, there is one thing that makes Office 2007 just a lot nicer to work with and to finalise a good and professional document quick with; intuitive colours everywhere.

Compare fore example the colours of Open office: http://openoffice.blogs.com/openoffice/images/2008/01/06/fc1.png

to the ones of office 2007:
http://img369.imageshack.us/my.php?image=office2007pw0.jpg
http://img177.imageshack.us/my.php?image=table2007ny2.jpg

You can say I can choose any colour in OpenOffice as well, but I am not a designer who can match nice colours, it would take me a lot of effert and I just want to make an appealing document in which the numbers are just presented in a nice way.

I don't think it would take so much effort since it is just inserting a couple different colours and arrange them in a nice way. In the contrary to its little effort, it would make work for me so much more easy and productive.

Pleeeeeease make an Ubuntu Media Center. I'd love to move my server over to Ubuntu but there are no good Media Center for it, so I'm stuck on Windows. :(

Audio/Video/Pictures support would be the bare minimum needed, but TV Tuner support/Web Browser/RSS Reader/whatever else you guys want would be excellent as well.

I know theres already an Ubuntu MC project (which is dead I think?), but it was going off in more of a FrontRow direction, where as I was kinda hoping Ubuntu could implement a proper MC like MCE or MediaPortal.

Make a guest account that people can login to, and check mail, surf web.

Every time the guest account logs out, its purged so next user who login is a clean fresh account.

Mac OS X has this;
* http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/300.html#system

So I right-clicked on a file and selected "Cut" in the context menu.
So that I later could "Paste" the file into another directory.

Make so that when you select "Cut" on a file, the icon becomes dimmed.
Because right now, there are no visual indication, so you don't know it worked.
In Windows there is a visual notification by the icon becoming dimmed.
In Ubuntu there is no visual notification, the icon does not become dimmed. This is confusing.

This is what I want:

I want to be able to mark applications "Not Compiz compatible" so that Compiz shuts down when I launch a game or some other 3D-heavy application. This is something I want to improve stability and performance for such applications.

When I first started using Ubuntu, the way I heard about it was several links down in a google search for "linux". This is exemplary of the poor exposure that Ubuntu has. We need to spread public awareness about the operating system, through media outlets, online campaigns, and possible tv/radio/billboard spots.

I think that the best place to start would be online campaigns, especially a series of official videos on youtube and other video sites. These should focus less on technical specs and the benefits of open-source, and more on the benefits of switching from Windows while retaining the ability to preform daily tasks. This will be targeting the main bulk of computer users: Microsoft customers who want to email, type, web browse, and don't like paying for an OS. Other facets of this campaign should include spreading the word about Ubuntu to non-tech oriented, high traffic website (myspace, yahoo), getting Ubuntu back as #1 on distrowatch.com, and creating guides in layman's terms so that non tech-savvy people can understand how to preform simple tasks. For example, don't tell people to open xorg.conf; tell them to type in the terminal 'sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf'.
Doing all of this will require a re-mobilization of the Ubuntu marketing team, several people to design a professional looking marketing video, and structure. Once more momentum is generated, the media will be apt to catch on to the trend. However, we want to make sure at all costs that this is positive exposure. Anything negative (eg. Ubuntu is for geeks only) could immensely hurt our image. Physical advertising is harder to get together, but if someone can find an investor, this could be very possible.
A final idea would be to push for Ubuntu in school systems. I know that where I live, the schools are forced to run Windows 2000 because of slow computers and no funds. Ubuntu could both free funds for education and implant knowledge about the system into children, our future consumer base.
Comment back with any ideas on how to improve this.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MarketingTeam


edit: We are now #1 on Distrowatch! Also, here is a great example of a promotional video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLHjT5-XM9o

[....]

Now i don't see any informations when my archive has ben extracted.

From #5352 (merged):

When you are extracting an archive in File Roller you get a progress bar with a little box that moves to the left and to the write. The problem is that this gives no indication of how long the file will take to uncompress. I know that in Windows there is a progress bar the moves depending on how much of the file has been uncompressed. You can also check this manually by comparing the size of the uncompressing file to the total size that it should be once completed.

I think a tool/deamon that save the users setting on a usb stick would be nice.

Backup configuration files and settings like...
- GnuPG keys
- e-mail settings
- contact list
- unit settings (metric/imperial)
- paper size (A4/letter)
- currency
- timezone
- locale settings
- printer configuration
- network configuration
- ...

It should basically do what Apple .Mac sync service does, but on USB-Sticks. This tool should not be an entire backup tool for all kind of data! Only small configuration settings and perhaps some desktop gadgets.

After first time configuration, it could automatically sync the data throught a background daemon started by d-bus, after the usb stick is connected, per example. If a user has GnuPG installed, the possibility to encrypt the data should be offered to the user.

During install, if the usb stick is present, the installer could prompt for import the settings and configure all of them. This would accelerate and simplify the entire installation process.

This is concerning the graphical and the text based installer.

It`s a bad habit introduces by microsoft. Do not ask questions in the middle of the installation after you did already started to copy things.

(1) The user starts the installation.
(2) He is asked if he wants to install.
(3) Make as many hardware tests as you need.
(4) Now ask all needed questions.
(5) Install Ubuntu in one run. Tell the user he can no go away for perhaps X minutes.

Otherwise it`s annoying. Input answer, wait a bit, input answer, wait again over and over again. You can improve this!

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.

One of the things included in Hardy was ufw (Uncomplicated firewall wall), but everything has to be done via CLI. There is a very nice GUI frontend being developed for it and it would be nice if it is bundled as a default package.

Links to the project:
https://launchpad.net/gui-ufw
http://gufw.tuxfamily.org/index.html