Contributor Veichtlbauer

Ubuntu needs to go green. Powertop, Lesswatts and other tools have finally hit the Linux scene to pave the way for better power management. It needs to be said, "if you want your battery to last longest, or have your energy bill be the lowest, you better use Ubuntu Linux."

Imagine if Wine was included by default in your Ubuntu installation, and upon installation, as well as offering to transfer your users, documents and personal settings from Windows... Ubuntu actually offered to transfer your installed applications onto Wine.

This would be the ultimate, final and comprehensive step in making the transition from Windows to Ubuntu seamless. Not only does Ubuntu offer free software equivalents of everything you could want, not only does it allow you to install and use your Windows on Linux, but Ubuntu actually copies your previously installed programs on Windows for you, and configures Wine to run them.

With the coming advent of Wine 1.0 Ubuntu could start by just offering support for the top 10 applications on Wine's release criteria apps. Gradually support for more applications could follow.

From Pure Windows->WUBI->Ubuntu installation with Windows apps, this would make a painless chain of options that would finally allow people to be weaned onto free software.

Canonical should hire a legion of tens of thousands of Chinese programmers.
It will be very cheap, and Chinese people are very intelligent and hard workers. Always top A grade students, perfect score on all tests.

In China people work 20 hours a day for only like $2 dollar a day.
We can employ them for only 6-9 hours a day with a great salary of $5-10 dollar per day.

It will be a great deal for them, because they can work less and earn more.

It will be great for us, because we can hire tens of thousand Chinese programmers, a whole legion of them and increase the development rate by a factor of a thousand.

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.

Don't create .fr-****** directories in the home directory. May use another location. Do I really need hundred of them?

Support for connecting to a windows domain name would be awesome to have. For one thing, businesses would clearly see the benefit because they could migrate their clients over to Ubuntu first while keeping their windows servers running. It should be as easy to join a windows domain name as you can in windows itself. Use windows 2000 as an example of how it should be. This of course should support the domain name lookup so that you can easily go to a bunch of windows domain name controllers.

..set up a distributed cross-compilation system if you need to. If you don't trust that, build in redundancy and checksumming.

The fact of the matter is that, as illustrated here,
http://mssaleh.wordpress.com/2008/05/19/ubuntu-804-lts-vs-windows-xp-sp3-applic ation-performance-benchmark/
constantly catering to the lowest common denominator in processor instruction sets is getting our butts kicked on performance even by /windows/ in many cases.
I don't want to waste my hardware's capability on i386 code, and I don't want to gentoo users laughing at me.

I want to go to the ubuntu site, pick my general type of machine (preferably using pretty pictures) , and have two choices:

-- Just give me something that works
or
-- I want to make the best use of my hardware

The latter option should let me download a utility that would examine my CPU and create a file (or something to that effect) that could be returned to the ubuntu site and used to choose the right disk image (with the right repository set of course) for my machine.

product: Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU 2.80GHz
vendor: Intel Corp.
physical id: 1
bus info: cpu@0
version: 15.2.9
size: 18EHz
width: 32 bits

[....]

Power profiles in GNOME power manager, to make it easy to switch between power-saving mode and number-crunching. I am aware this feature was introduced in Vista, which otherwise kind of sucks. Anyways, this is really very helpful in stretching the battery runtime of laptops.
This way, you could easily switch off compiz effects, enable more aggressive CPU scaling, shut down stuff like Bluetooth, etc.
The profiles could be easily accessible via the power manager icon in the panel.

I think of this NOT to be a duplicate of http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/4101/ as the goal is rather different.

It seems strange to have three OpenOffice.org applications in the Office menu, but have one over in the Drawing menu. All of the OO.o applications should be in the same menu.

The System Monitor application is great - except that the Resources tab is a real pig. It uses a lot of CPU to do its thing - I have a quad xeon system and it uses up to 40% of one of the cores just for graphing!

That's not such a big deal for this system, but on a single core older system it could really bog things down when you're trying to see what's going on with performance.

Also, we sort of have a quantum effect where the observation affects what you are trying to observe. Not so great.

I propose trimming out whatever fancy stuff is making it slow, be it spline interpolation for the graphs, or whatever. Just scale back to drawing some plain old lines until the smooth graphing stuff is working as fast. I'd rather see plain lines than have the performance monitor be inaccurate.

It's easy to get into the habit of looking to the computer screen for the time.

The time should be displayed in unobtrusive, simple text at the bottom of the login screen and in the status line of the locked screen dialog.

One thing that annoys me when using ubuntu is how slow the firefox browser is to boot up! To put it in comparision to windows where the browser (at least version 3) boots up quite fast i think this is a point where ubuntu really could improve. Don't know if it is in the ubuntu or firefox code the problem lies but it would be nice if something could be done about this!

I think we should take animated desktops one step further and have interactive desktops.

Have a few preloaded in some special format that when you click and hold and move the mouse over the screen, we see a water wave effect. When you have an open window, bubbles subtly radiate from the borders and gentle waves come from the sides. When you move the window, the water is disturbed and creates small waves where the window was just as if you moved a plastic sheet over water. In the background is an animated desktop that also simulates water, fire, or whatever the file is made as. This could be one of the options, but many more would be available, or users could just turn it off.

Now THAT would be really cool

Debian allows to download and install everything , i mean the whole os from Internet no need to burn iso to cd/dvd ,but ubuntu doesnt have such feature have a look at this website .

http://goodbye-microsoft.com/

Drag & right click (this is, you click on an item an drag it to another location, such as a different folder, where it appears a popup menu with several options, mainly "Copy to" or "Move to") is not available in Ubuntu 8.04. This option would be quite useful, since offers a very easy way to choose if you want to copy or move a file (there are other possibilities, also).

Would be cool to be able to get a DVD with both the 32 bits version and 64 bits...
But of course not as the "default download" and not replacing anything...

Many new eager users who have been using Windows often feel disheartened at the fact in order to install some software they need to “compile” something or run a “sudo” command line. The same goes for changing settings of a hardware device. I do not mean to sound like a whiny Windows user. I actually am pretty good with computers, I build my own. But I REALLY want to use Ubuntu without having to know UNIX or Linux.

---correction---
I really would like to use Ubuntu without having to know about advanced tweaking, compiling, or tarballs. And please understand, I think I can deal with all of that, but I am speaking in general terms about the average Joe or Jane that may know how to install a program or configure a sound card in Windows, but does not need to know how to compile source code, or edit *.ini files or jump to DOS to issue a command line in order to install or configure something.
---end correction---

I like the user interface, the way it looks and of course I absolutely love the price. Ubuntu just needs to offer easier software installation and hardware device settings. Unfortunately most of the world is used to the ease of installation Windows offers. In order for Ubuntu to became more attractive to Windows users (and it is almost there) it needs to equate that ease of installation.

Now, I know a lot of packages are available through "click to install". I think ALL installable software for Ubuntu should be like this. Now, we still want installation options, you know, “Express” or “Normal” and “Custom” installations, where we get to tweak installation settings. Also installation percentage, time remaining, and the ability to minimize installation to the taskbar or system tray (sorry, I am using Windows terms, I do not know their names in Ubuntu). I strongly agree that there should be one global repository with multiple mirrors, so ALL Ubuntu software is available to ALL at the same time, without having to go from one to another to find different programs to install.

The Ubuntu Device Manager needs to be more of a report or a list and really allow user to tweak ALL settings and aspects of a specific piece of hardware, yes I hate to say it, but kind of like Windows. Maybe even go beyond the Windows Device Manager allowing the user to create hardware profiles for the whole computer, including all devices and sub devices connected to these devices. For example, the profile of “My computer” would contain information about the motherboard, maybe through a device driver or a motherboard profile, and once clicked a graphical representation of the motherboard’s architecture shows up on the screen, complete with clickable components, like south bridge, expansion slots, and if something is connected to this slots, like a sound card, it would show it graphically as a card installed in the specific port. The port and the card are independently clickable and tweakable. Maybe under the port properties there could be a link to the sound card properties. Too hard to make a graphical map? I’d settle for a tree representation, but please don’t make us compile something, or run “sudo” commands or edit some configuration file, or deal with "tar balls". I had enough of that when working with MS-DOS back in the 80’s. Still offer this as options for “advanced tweaking” for “super users” if you will, but also offer configuration windows with more complete options for us “regular” or “semi-advanced” users, when it comes to software installation and hardware device manager.

[....]

Make the major Ubuntu Brainstorm ideas about
Bootloader/GRUB,
Kernel- and Rescue-Management and
Package-Management
prime objectives for the next Ubuntu 8.10.

To these ideas I'd count at least
http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/21/ with all its "duplicates"/sub-ideas,
management ideas about multiple kernels after updates, the flood of recent BitTorrent support ideas for the update-manager and whatever else can be found on Brainstorm about these subjects that got a lot of positive votes.

It is extremely easy to accidentally remove a file by dragging it over the Trash. That is why, after doing it there should be a question "Do you really want to remove the file?"

Like windows, Ubuntu should provide options for creating Desktop icons and inclusion in application menu whenever a new application is installed in the system. this will provide better usability and access to the program and enhance the overall accessibility of the system.