Contributor bert.ubuntu

When one starts Synaptics manager it takes a long time to be available for use (I am using 1.7GHz Dualcore/1GB RAM!!!).

After that we have to click on "Search" and then type what we want. But most of the time when starting Synaptic the first thing you want is to search for something.

So I suggest that "Search" should not depend on a click to show it's input text bar but rather it could show a large bar at the top with focus as it fires up, so we may start typing as soon as we see the program running.

After one search is complete it should focus the search box back so we search again without our tired mouse.

Many people have trouble installing Ubuntu alone. I will list here some common problems people find and in the end I will propose some solutions.

Attitudes like: "If the user doesn't know how to partition he/she should ask for help from someone else more experienced" are not really the solution to attract new users (mainly people having their first Linux experience or without internet access).

Some problems:
1. One of the first things the partitioner does is to ask what kind of partition should be created. Well, more than 50% of the users would say: What is a partition ? (before even have to ask themselves "Why should I do it?").

2. People don't know they should create a "/" partition (does it sounds any intuitive at first glance ?)

3. People don't know why do they have to do it because "in te system X I don't need to do it ! Everything simply works out of the box". We should not think it as any natural concept.

Off course it has many more problems. Let us stop here and show some possibilities:

- An introductory screen with short and acurate information. One suggestion is:

First screen:
"Now you may choose to have your disk partitioned. This process can make your system more secure, responsive and easy to manage. "

Second Screen:
"Some advantages of partioning:
-Frequently people have their personal data (internet content, projects, documents under construction), system data (installed programs, configuration files, etc.) and some shared data (like music, video, documents, etc.). If you have more than one system you should use partitions to organize it. If you have only one system you may use partitions to separate the contents from each other. This technique permits, for example, one to erase the whole system data preserving your personal and shared data and allowing you to install a new system with your old content.

[....]

Right below the title f this brainstorm you can read:

"The Ubuntu community has contributed 10907 ideas, 49662 comments, 1064082 votes"

In the same way, how about counting the number of users?

Could be something like:

"The Ubuntu community has contributed X ideas, Y comments, W votes, from Z contributors".

Translations are way too important for the Ubuntu project. I see that many people proposing ideas for translations are always giving it different categories (not agreeing at all even when the ideas are similar).

Not to mention the many people who have to choose "others" as the category for his/her idea related to translation actually).

When copying large amounts of files (for backup for example) one wants to do other things and live it alone.

When the systems faces a problem(from the disk or enconding) Nautilus ask you (for each problematic file) whether you want to skip the operation, cancel it or repeat it.

It would be useful to have options like:

1- Ignore all
2- Show me erros at the end

In the option-2 the system could create a report file describing each file not copied/moved and the reason. This file might also be a shell script which whe executed could show the file list or even try again to copy the file to the original destination.

The general idea is to not to stop the operation flux and the high priority is to let the machine alone.

Five Reasons:

1. Because we can sort the ideas by the number of views. Doing so will give the ideas a better chance to compare to other, increasing the *fairness* (actually round robing the ideas by the number of views).

2. Because we can see how popular an idea is by the ratio K/V, where K = number of clicks, V = number of views.

3. Because if an idea has 2000 views, 1560 clicks and zero votes we could ask it's author to rewrite it because maybe nobody is understanding it (just look at the numbers!).

4. Because an idea with 150 views and 143 votes is better than an idea with 4000 views and 450 votes.

5. Because if an idea has a flag for each user who had already seen it we could show each user only the ideas he/she has not seen yet by default.

One could add more to this, but I think It's enough to expose the big picture.

I will just give an example:

In my personal systems I usually have a partition named "Multimedia" where I store audio, video and pictures. I want some users to have write access to it, so what do I do ?

I created a group named "multimedia" so everyone in this group should be able to write to that directory/partition.

1. I update my fstab (giving acl to reiserfs,xfs, etc.)
2. Remount the partitions with #mount -a -o remount
3. Set the permissions: #setfacl -m g:multimedia:rwx /multimedia
and then I use graphical tool to add users to that group.

It would be nice to make the process (3) using the properties dialog of the folder /multimedia or something similar through nautilus.

EDIT-----------

eiciel is not a solution because it will not let you make a mounted partition acl-enabled without having to manually edit your fstab and remount.

Besides it, eiciel does not integrate transparently in the properties context menu(ie, form Nautilus), which would make it more user friendly.

If you already have ACL's set up , eiciel is a good option.

A nice tool for that task would F4L (Flash for Linux) which you may find a deb on net (it will display but not actualy work).

Alternative tools like synfig are very poor documented. But if it's not possible to include fix F4L why not work on local documentation for synfig ?

It's really missing for web-developers.

Before voting, Please read the entire proposal.

Currently we can see in the dashboard the "Overall Quality of my ideas" meter. Based on it, your rank (as contributor) is calculated as R = P - N, where P = number of positives votes, N = Number of negatives votes you've got so far.

What is the problem:

1. If you have P = 1000, and N = 500, your rank R1 = 500
2. If you have P = 501 and N = 1, your rank R2 = 500

Actually User1, has 50.00% of positive feedback, while User2 has 99.80%. Does everyone agrees User1 has better quality ideas comparing to User2 ? So why do they have the same rank as contributors?

Proposition:

1. Make a new rank based on R = 100 x P/(P + N).
This solves the previous issue but generates some collisions:

A. User3 has P = 500, and N = 200, so R = 40%
B. User4 has P = 10, and N = 4, so R = 40%

This happens because, though User3 has contributed more ideas it show the same balance as User4.

How to give a higher rank to users with the same balance but with a higher number of ideas ?

2. Make R = I x Q , where Q = P/(P + N), and I = total number of ideas contributed.

This solution ranks people based on the number of ideas they've contributed and still differentiate them by their acceptance balance.


[....]

When we select more than one file and call the context menu, using the right mouse button for example, there could be an option called "Actions" which we could use to act on groups of files.

Here are some examples:
1. Diff the files: it would generate a report in the showing which files are the same, and which are not.

2. Generate MD5: It could generate a md5 list for the files we selected so we use it after downloading lots of ISO's or audio files.

3. Compress: This already exists and could be moved there.

I needed those features and had to use the terminal do accomplish it. I really don't care, I am used to it, but I admit it would be faster to simply click!

Diff is useful many times when you find those files with the same size, but you don't know if they are the same (mainly multimedia files) so you compare and remove the duplicates.

Diff is also useful when you have old backup files you don't remember, for example: xorg.conf and xorg.conf.1

There are lots of situations in which regular expressions are useful to search some text more than "word*".

Some advantages:
- Search pictures *.jpg
- Search audio *.[omw][apg][3gv]
- Find your name in a list (John Nobody = Jo.*dy)
- Multiselection on incremental search would be possible!
- If someone doesn't know R.E it would work the same way as before. So it makes nobody's life harder.

Furthermore, as Firefox updates, lots of addons simply stop working. So if it have this feature natively (which is simple do add, and not heavy to process) it won't be a problem as well.

When I read the ideas, most of the time I am curious to know where the users are from, so the idea is to:

- OPTIONALLY have a little flag attached to the side of your name specifying your nationality!

- In the future it could be useful to see where is ubuntu receiving more contributions from.

- We could see also which countries are having more problems with language, accessibility an so on.

Off course, if you don't want your country represented you may just hide it naturally.

-----------------------------------------
Hello, no need for more negatives here! I had already lerned the lesson that nationality is the worst thing in the world and very harmful for this forum even optionally.

Furthermore, once an idea gets negative, no way to recover since people see the negative number before voting :-(
-----------------------------------------