Contributor amdlintuxos

One of the first things new users comment on when trying linux is the lack of "smooth-scroll" in applications. Although it is a relatively minor point - smooth scrolling has come to be expected these days. Some of the advantages of it are,

* Looks more modern and professional,
* Allows the user to read while they scroll with the mouse wheel,
* In (for example) a Pidgin chat window the motion of a smooth scroll when you receive a message draws you eye: our brains are configured to respond to movement,
* Smooth movement is natural - jerky movement is not,
* Everyone else is doing it!

What would be required is for enough Ubuntu devs to discuss this on the Gtk mailing list, to show there is a demand for it. Once implemented this would include all Gtk applications, including Nautilus, Firefox and Pidgin.

(Excuse me for my bad English)

When Nautilus is trying to display a lot of previewable documents (PDF, picture formats, etc.), thumbnails runs like a turtle.

Nautilus must be improved to do it faster.

An idea was suggested here : http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/2235/

Thank you.

I've got a 1 Gb USB storage with an 800 Mb file on it.

When I want to copy an updated version of this file (same name), Nautilus warn me that the operation can't be done cause there is not enought space on the disk.

So I have to manualy erase the old file, empty the trashcan, and finaly copy the new file.


Therefore I suggest that Nautilus check files name when coping or moving operations BEFORE complaining about having not enought space left. (and then simply ask if we want to replace/rename/cancel)

downloads should go to $HOME/Downloads. XDG_DOWNLOAD_DIR should be set to "$HOME/Downloads" instead of "$HOME/Desktop" in the file ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs.

This Downloads folder should be the default download location for firefox and this folder should be bookmarked in nautilus by xdg-user-dirs-gtk (like Music,Videos,Pictures and Documents).

RATIONALE :
* less cluttered desktop and/or homedir
* still easy to access your downloads

Nautilus is curently very slow especially when opening folders containing many files and sub-folders.

It takes 10 seconds for example to display /usr/bin directory with Athlon XP 2500+ CPU and 512 MB RAM machine. Thunar does the action with no lag on the same configuration.

The idea is, while moving or copying files if Nautilus find a duplicated file name between the source and the destination folders, it would compare both files and show some data for both of them, also allowing us to make a comparison, like file size (in bytes), creation and modification dates, thumbnail when possible (very important when organizing photos) etc also verifying if they are exactly the same using checksum (or any other solution to do this), ignoring if they are identical or, if not, letting us chose Replace, Replace all, Ignore, Cancel or Rename. I don't understand the Ignore all button, I think Cancel has the same purpose.

Managing large quantity of files will become a little bit easier for everyone with this. Some times i need to go to both folders and open the properties of both files to check some details to make a decision. (Sorry for my English)

I was checking from Mandriva http://blog.crozat.net/2008/09/improving-boot-time-on-general-linux.html that they are making a boot time faster to their distro. Also Windows 7 team has declared to boot in 15 seconds and to use a module intelligent manager which reduce to --40 MB-- the start of the sessions.

Something like that was promised for Jaunty but is a clear idea, if I don't have bluetooth I don't need that module running and wasting my ram. This can be a great idea at least for Xubuntu which is designed to old computer or with limited resources.

Transmission could have a time remaining info - this would help a lot

When I select a music file, video file or picture in Nautilus I would like to get some basic information about them in the status bar:

- For video and music: Length and quality.
- For pictures: Size (in pixels)

I think it's annoying that I have to open a movie just to find out how long it is.

If a file or directory is deleted (moved to garbage bin) provide the option to use Edit+Undo or Ctrl+Z to undelete files for say 30 seconds after.

This way is a file or directory is deleted accidently it can quickly be restored with an Undo command.

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?

turn off the effects could give us more rendering with 3D aplications

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.

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

when i open some sound file in firefox and there is enabled visualizations and i have slow PC then its terrible

For now, the easier way to crop an image is to open it with Gimp. It is explicitly written on the official ubuntu documentation. For me, it is a basic need to crop a picture and I think it must be possible to do this with Eye of Gnome. Gimp is not user friendly at all for newbie users with simple needs like that one. The philosophy of Gnome is to keep all simple as possible. This action should be simple to do too.

Totem's subtitle quality leaves much to be desired, to say the least. In fullscreen mode the subtitles look very pixelated. In windowed mode they are OK, but they get scaled up just as the movie in fullscreen mode and subtitle quality suffers from this.

It would be nicer if the subtitles got re-rendered in fullscreen mode in high quality.

Add an option to optimize Ubuntu to install, boot, and run faster on older PCs with limited memory and slower CPUs. This could be implemented on the Alternate Install CD.

Optimizations could include, for example, disabling non-essential daemons and services.

xubuntu only has a lightweight window manager; but under the hood it seems to have all the overhead of full Ubuntu.

By comparison, Slackware boots and runs much faster than Ubuntu (or the KDE-based Kubuntu) on any given PC. With proper tuning, Ubuntu should be able to match this performance, while keeping its usability advantages.

When I boot up, the gnome menu should load up by default. I have to wait 2-3 seconds after clicking the menu icon for it to load. This load should have already been done, as the first thing many people do once booting up is to run a program via the menu. It is the little polishes like this that make Ubuntu such a great operating system.

(Note: This affects the Gnome Menu applet. I'm not sure if it affects the Menu Bar applet.)

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.