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.

People who use wubi install to try the system would benefit from a tool that would make it easy to migrate the install to a native (partition) install.

I would like to be able to connect to the software repository using a secure connection that uses SSL.

This will prevent man-in-the-middle attacks (MITM).

It will also prevent example a totalitarian government to snoop on what I download or update. Example, maybe I download cryptography, anonymity or privacy software.

It will also insure that the repository is the real repository, and not a fake one that hosts a Trojan horse or a keystroke logger.

Many games feature the ability to play with other people. However, the first thing the game will check for is to see if it is currently up to date.

When Ubuntu enters version freeze, the games fall out of date, and it can be harder to play them online without finding a 3rd party update or compiling it yourself (Freeciv, Scorched3D, and Battle for Wesnoth to name a few).

This also creates issues when different distributions freeze at different times, so it can be hard to play with other Linux users.

If ubuntu 8.10 decides to change the theme, also retain the current theme: human. Because I think there are many people who do not like the new theme and prefer to use human.

Create this minimal edition only with very basic software and the graphical interface!
in this way each user can customize his own disto and then remaster a live cd in order to have a fully customized system from a fresh install!

Also create a rolling release like Debian testing, where users install it only once and then get the newest packages with few bugs. This way the users won't have a "static" installation and therefore would not have to upgrade every 6 months!

Whenever I install a new Ubuntu desktop at work, I find myself removing a bundle of applications not mandated by our IT policy. This is annoying, and I don't do it enough to develop a custom solution.

Why not offer an ubuntu-desktop-minimal that depends on nothing but X and GNOME itself, along with any other 'core' desktop infrastructure?

Ubuntu's standard application bundle could go in an 'ubuntu-desktop-applications' package which would depend on 'ubuntu-desktop-minimal'. 'ubuntu-desktop' would then depend on 'ubuntu-desktop-minimal' and 'ubuntu-desktop-applications'.

This could of course be done with Kubuntu as well.

Another advantage would be that upgrades would be better handled - removing OpenOffice wouldn't suddenly opt-me out of the main Ubuntu desktop package.

Gnome-panel drops behind other desktops in the look and feel of the panel.

There are loads of Ideas e.g. on gnome-look.org about improving the panel and especially the menu. It looks like a lot of people don't like the situation right now.

It would be nice to have some discussion, how gnome-panel could be improved.

Please notice, this is not about changing the panel into a dock, but about extending its funktionallity and look and feel while keeping what we already have, and works well.

There have been complaints that Ubuntu lacks a disk configuration utility, which forces newbies to manually edit fstab if they want to use a drive that was not present when they installed the system. Manually editing the file is difficult and frustrating to them, and not an ideal way to handle the issue on the long run.

An application exists by the name of Disk Manager, which keeps tracks and notifies of newly added units, and for extremely easy (automagical) configuration. That is the kind of stuff we want in Ubuntu.

-Disk Manager notifies about new drives:

http://flomertens.free.fr/disk-manager/images/notify.png

-Disk Manager allows the user to mount or unmount drives without any hassle, even by providing a simple name for them:

http://flomertens.free.fr/disk-manager/images/add.png

-Disk Manager allows to easily enable NTFS writing support:

http://flomertens.free.fr/disk-manager/images/main_general.png

-Disk Manager allows to keep track of mounted / unmounted partitions and free space on them:

http://flomertens.free.fr/disk-manager/images/main_advance.png

[....]

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