Contributor ShadowVlican

At the beginning of each release cycle, the improvements other major distributions have made in their last release should be reviewed by the Ubuntu developers for their suitability to be integrated with Ubuntu. Many distributions have detailed lists available of all new features:

Fedora
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/10/FeatureList

OpenSuse
http://en.opensuse.org/Testing:Features_11.0

Mandriva
http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Development/Ideas/Technical_specs_2008

This way we will get some new features for free and will avoid reinventing the wheel on other problems. Also it can be an inspiration to come up with even better solutions.

Currently the System Monitor is sort of worthless as a Windows-style Task Manager. When the system is frozen because of a buggy application, System Manager won't take the screen back, even when a keyboard shortcut is used to try to bring it up.

And often the keyboard shortcut assigned to killing applications won't come up either.

Both of these need to be more able to take over control of the desktop and dominate buggy applications.

Windows Task Manager has this ability, and will almost always come up no matter how many things have crashed.

Also, add links to shut down, reboot, or restart the windowing manager.

Right now,the user is left blind when trying to connect to a wireless acces point fails.It should at least show an error message with description of the problem or a possible solution

Users should be warned when they connect to a network which is obviously insecure (such as connected to a Hub instead of Switch).

Its quite easy to program. If SYN|ACK or ACK packets are received which are directed to another MAC address, we know its insecure.

There are algorithms too which can even help detect Man-in-the-middle attacks (to identify when its very likely someone is trying to intercept/change your traffic),however, this is more difficult to program.

We should be trying to provide the highest level of security possible to users.

Ubuntu lacks a nice intuitive interface for making programs autostart when the desktop loads.
There is the cryptically named 'Sessions' in
System -> Preferences -> Sessions
but this is a poor choice of names I think. I think it should be called something more intuitive like 'Autostart'

If you do click 'Sessions' you can add programs to autostart, but you must specify their name, path and optional comment yourself. Not very user friendly at all, since the location and exact names of various programs can be hard to know or find for a general user that normally starts the program from the 'Applications' menu.

When you click 'add' there should be a list of all programs that you can see under 'Applications' (but still also possible to specify it manually).

You can view currently running apps, but you should also be able to select one (or many) and click 'Autostart these programs'. That would be a nice touch.

Powertop is kind of confusing, and it seems like actions taken with it expire after some time. Something graphical and permanent would be preferable, built into power management.

There's a lot of packages who includes fonts for Ubuntu.
Imagine a Font Book who include theses features:

- list installed fonts
- add/remove fonts
- activate/disabled fonts (useful when you have hundreds of fonts)
- Install by browsing fonts like in Synaptics, with previews.
- Print sample pages
- Sorting fonts per family, or make customs groups.

The hardware testing program that you can run from
system -> hardware testing
should also let the user test and report on function keys on laptops. The common function keys would be screen brigthness up / down, volume up / down / mute, wi-fi on / off etc.

Often I find many of these keys not working on many laptops and it would be nice to be able to easily report this. It would be equally nice to report on working laptops, so that people looking to buy a new laptop with good Ubuntu support knows which models to go for.

After a year on Linux, I was kinda pissed today when I made my fonts look twice as nice despite having already enabled hinting and smoothing from Gnome's Appearance > Fonts GUI.

It turns out you need to copy or symlink files from /etc/fonts/conf.avail/ to /etc/fonts/conf.d/
(EDIT: This is done for you on *fresh* installs of Ubuntu Hardy or above)

The changes I needed to apply are in the script I just made:

cd /etc/fonts/conf.d/
sudo rm 10-antialias.conf 10-hinting-medium.conf 10-no-sub-pixel.conf 70-no-bitmaps.conf

sudo ln -sf ../conf.avail/10-autohint.conf .
sudo ln -sf ../conf.avail/10-hinting-medium.conf .
sudo ln -sf ../conf.avail/10-no-sub-pixel.conf .
sudo ln -sf ../conf.avail/70-no-bitmaps.conf .

(followed by restarting X)

I believe this should be at least checked if not done for you. At very least, you should be warned in some way that the full effects of hinting and smoothing are not being applied.

Make an entry to "install-font" in the context menu when right-clicking a font file. The font would then be moved to the appropriate directory in the home folder. It took me a while to figure out how to install fonts!

The default media player is called Totem Movie Player right? In the panel and the window heading it has this title, but in nautilus [when you right click for open-with] and the applications menu it is simply called 'Movie Player'.

It would be less confusing if the name was standardised across ubuntu

You can get read-only files in several ways, but the most common way is to copy files to your computer from a CDROM. Is there any reason to keep read-only permissions when copying files from cdrom to hard disk?

This is probably not super-critical in this day and age of monolithically-sized hard-drives on the cheap, but it does pertain to smaller units such as the EeePC, and perhaps older machines.

Synaptic and Apt-Get have a great feature whereby the tool estimates the download size and expected drive usage upon installation, however it doesn't compare that value against the actual free drive space on the system. It is perfectly possible to attempt to download 100MB worth of updates that will consume 200MB of disk space after installation (total 300MB) when you only have 50MB of actual disk space free.

A simple query of the drive and a message dialog advising that the downloads and/or installation cannot be completed due to lack of space would save many a new user from tearing their hair out when Apt-Get kicks up a stink about being unable to perform any other task (such as removing apps to make space) because it has an unfinished installation that needs to be sorted out first.

To solve the potential problem of malicious repositories
(repositories advertised online contain malicious packages. Users add these repositories to their source-list and get infected with the malware in these repositories/out of date repositories like the "attacks on package managers" by the university of arizona):

Add a blacklist to apt where known malicious repositories can be blocked.
The list is kept up-to-date by regular updates.
This is a fix. Not a solution.
Important: The ubuntu repositories must not be blocked (or it would lead to a update-dos)

When you use quite often USB key, you always have to unmount them correctly to keep your data safe. When you're copying a file on a USB key, you must wait to empty the copy buffer.

I would propose to link the USB key icon to the state of the transfer :
- If there's a transfer, we can see clearly that we can not take the USB key away.
- When transfer is finished and the buffer emptied, the icon can show that the USB key can be safely removed

and thus it's not yet useful to click on "unmount", because the unmount management is totally transparent, and treated by the system. We can simply pick the USB key away because transfer is already finish and correctly closed. This will be a great innovation to simplify unmount such usual disks.

edit : Maybe the icon can stay like the same, but w can add some little sub-icon to inform of the state.

(see also ideas 1373 and 10032)

There should be a more efficient format for apt-get (or the update manager) to download updates. Firstly, it should only need to download the files that have changed in a package (not the whole package), and secondly, it should download a DIFF of those files.

My latest update contains a 34.2 WHOPPING MB update to the linux restricted modules. Here's the changelog:

* Fix broadcom Makefile to get correct objects from split-module.

I'm downloading 34.2Mb just to get a *Makefile update*??? I don't even use any broadcom stuff. Even if I did, I probably wouldn't care enough about a Makefile to make it worthwhile downloading 34.2Mb!

gnome-system-monitor provides a cleaner interface than Windows "Task Manager", and provides many useful features including list of processes running, memory and network usage, etc.

This functionality should be more accessible by key binding it by default to CTRL-ALT-DELETE as Windows does--as this is more familiar to users coming from Windows. The current key binding for CTRL-ALT-DELETE brings up the shutdown/logout options, which is already accessible as a desktop button, which is redundant for a relatively less used function.

gnome-system-monitor is an idle interface for monitoring the system and killing processes without using the terminal and provides an interface for doing this that most are already familiar with. Changing it's key binding would make it's functionality much more accessible.

It's silly to be pushing open standards when we don't follow them for our own sites.

Improvement went from 54 errors to 4.
Ubuntu.com Failed: 4 Errors
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fubuntu.com&charset=%28detect+aut omatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0

All Ubuntu websites should pass the W3C validation checks. (none appear to currently)

For reference:
Microsoft, Redhat, Sun, Novell, openSuse and Apple fail.

Debian, Fedora, Linux Mint, Gnome, KDE, Opera, Firefox and OpenOffice.org pass

It is unnerving to touch buttons when the screensaver runs while a movie is playing.

When you shutdown while you have screenlets off, the screenlets appear for 1 sec, then dissapear and then the OS shutdown normally.
This happens because compiz ends before screenlets. To give Ubuntu a more consistent shutdown, we should consider turning off things in 3 levels:

1.Normal apps
2.Docks and bars
4.Compiz Fusion & any other WM