Contributor asham

HIG - Human interface Guidelines - how an application should behave, common location of buttons, etc.

Users needn't care about the underlying toolkits, but only about the application.
currently, gnome applications on kde, and vice versa, looks totally out of place, not only because of different themes/fonts, but also because their HIG is incompatible in many ways.

I suggest creating an OpenHIG.org, or similar site, that will publish guidelines for the free desktop HIG, and that all open desktop environments and applications will conform to it.

When I got error messagebox while incorrect mounting of a NTFS drive, I can't select its text content to later use.
All displayed text must be selectable & copyable.

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

QGTKStyle is a Qt Style which uses GTK native widgets to provide GNOME native look and feel.

It would be nice if a package of it was present in the repositories. It would be greater if it was automatically installed with the Qt4 libraries and KDE4.

Links:
* Home Page: http://labs.trolltech.com/blogs/2008/05/13/introducing-qgtkstyle/

Currently, if you run at a low resolution (particularly anything under 800x600) Windows will not fit completely on screen, and you will not be able to see the bottom half of the window.

It should be noted that when the user changes the resolution to a smaller size (under 600px high) the resolution dialog is too big to fit on screen, and the user cannot click or see the "Accept", "Close" or any other buttons/information.

Providing a scrollbar would fix this.

Many new users are confused by device names such as /dev/sda1, /dev/sdb5, /dev/hda2, /dev/hdc4, etc.

So I propose to show volume labels (partition names) in the installer, to make it easier for users who install Ubuntu to know which partition they are installing on.

Screenshots:
* Before
* After

This will make it clearer and easier to install Ubuntu without any mistakes being done which might result in that a new user accidentally looses valuable data.

Marked as not an idea.

please delete.

When I login to a GNOME session, the windows appear glitchy and fragmented until the desktop is done loading. When i login to a KDE(4) Session, I see a very nice splash screen, which then fades out to a fully loaded desktop. A default GNOME installation should support complete loading of the desktop before it is displayed.

The profilation of affordable NAS devices for the home network has made the need for an easy way to mount shares on these devices on boot.
At the moment if you wan't to have samba shares to be mounted on boot you have to manualy modify the fstab.
This can be a frustrating and dangerous job.
What is needed is a simple tool with a GUI that allows a user to select the share or shares they want mounted click OK and fstab will be updated correctly and the share mounted.

Mark said that "pretty is a feature".
Ubuntu must be eyecandy, pretty, beautiful, glossy. Sometimes human theme is not so, if we try other ones. For example, glossy theme works well.
My idea is beautiful by default.

n.b. Give attenction that this idea is in "marketing".

Provide a notification balloon when a network cable is unplugged from a network interface.

Sometimes you don't know if a cable works or not, or the cable is damaged, or it accidentally gets pulled out.

There should be some visual indication that the network cable has been unplugged.

Please see illustration of concept:
* http://launchpadlibrarian.net/14520679/Network.png

I don't really know if this has already been implemented on Ubuntu, but applying Fedora ideas to boost X startup would be appreciated.

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/OneSecondX

Microsoft Windows had a briefcase option. This is very useful. For example you have a folder with many docs(100). Now you copy them to your USB. Next day, once you edit them on your pc, you should be able to synchronize the contents with the USB folder and update the files you edited instead of copying all the contents. This would save time and be an intelligent way of handling files. Like a CVS...

Hello,

Instead of marking bugs as "not an idea" I propose that the brainstorm developers export all the "non ideas" which are marked as bugs to be exported as a CSV file and FTP'd over to the Ubuntu bug tracker. Once there, the bug tracking database should import the data and be listed as a bug.

Since brainstorm and all other ubuntu logins will be universal soon, this will integrate nicely.

I just think its a lost cause to mark stuff as not an idea, and then do nothing with it. All that data just going to waste, and then telling the user to post it to the bug database. It just isn't efficient, and it is causing bugs to go unreported. One of the biggest problems with Ubuntu (and the Linux community in general) is that bug reporting is not taken seriously when reported by an end user. Most of the time it is because the end user reports it to the wrong place. This is why Brainstorm should allow this feedback from end users to flow freely to the bug tracker. Because brainstorm is a much friendlier feedback loop for end users than bug databases are.

Ubuntu 8.04 comes with the GCC compiler but without the 'build-essentials' metapackage.
This makes GCC useless; its not even possible to compile a simple "Hello world" program.

Either have GCC not installed by default or have the 'build-essential' metapackage installed by default so that GCC works.

The CAPTCHA on this site happens to be one of the few CAPTCHAs that make it harder for humans, but really have very little affect on computers.

As such, I propose that this site use a real CAPTCHA such as reCAPTCHA. reCAPTCHA has the following advantages:

1) Audio for the blind. This is in the spirit of open source (accessibility)

2) Refresh option for when it cannot be read

3) Solved words will help translate books from paper to the computer so we can all have free digital libraries

4) It will be easy to implement (don't have to come up with your own solution)

i like very much suspend option, but in some case i want to donwload a file or application via apt-get, so i put the file to download with wget (or installing using apt-get) and leave the machine, after a wile the machine is going to suspend and the download file is paused.

IDEA: it would be interesting put the next option in the "power preference": don't suspend the PC if i am downloading.

(sorry for my english)

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.

Sometimes when I click the little notification icon for the update manager it takes a while for the app to launch. Not sure whether I actually clicked the icon I click it again. This usually leads to that I have something like 2 - 3 instances of the update manager running.

From a user point of view It would be better if Ubuntu disallowed multiple instances of the update manager and other apps where there is absolutely no need to have more than one instance running. The same goes for add/remove and others.

I was doing some important research, taking notes on gedit when Ubuntu completely crashed after trying to install wmv codecs.

Result - hours of work were lost :(

So my sugestion os to automatically save stuff that is written into Gedit, like it's already done on OpenOffice.