Contributor blueglow

Canonical currently has a big problem. It needs developers. Its a vicious cycle, developers are needed to improve development, yet to increase the number of developers, we need better development programs.

The sad reality is that whilst Canonical has a wealth of development tools available, they are barely officially supported, out of date, or have no easy way of using them (like systemtap).

We need Canonical to step up and make the development environment for 9.04 a priority, so that first time linux developers, and long time developers have a powerful environment, that is officially supported by Canonical. By improving the development environment to be easy to setup, and more updated, developers are more likely to jump on board. In fact, whilst many developers consider coding on OSX to be a privilage, I have never heard the same said of Ubuntu.

Current areas we are severely lacking include:
- Eclipse is out of date in the repos and has been for ages.. Why?
- Sun and Apple have Dtrace officially supported, with a GUI frontend that really makes things easy. We don't have any support for systemtap nor have we got any comparable profiling gui.
- Windows and OSX has a fully supported out of the box development environment with the most popular languages in 2 clicks. With ubuntu, we have to manually work out which gui's we want, which tools, etc
- Debugging? Ha.. its actually quicker to port the code to OSX and use OSX's development tools in some cases then debug currently, because it supports step-backs and such.
- QT can compete against Cocoa. GTK even with Glade is a joke still. I'm not asking you to fix this, but if you want to encourage GTK development, at least have glade/eclipse integration in a developers metapackage
- Developers centre. Ubuntu has none, so developers aren't given a simple list of changes that might affect them next release, such as the change from Alsa as backend, to Pulse, so we can prepare in time. We don't even have a centralised way of really working together with other ubuntu developers.

Some may say developers can help themselves, but first impressions count. If it takes 3000 clicks to get your development environment to the standard provided by Apple in 5, whilst requiring you to also search for equivilent tools (such as dtrace which are considered standard for many OS's now) by yourself, you certainly wont prioritise the OS. By rewarding developers, with a better development environment, the end result will be a higher quality linux environment.

[....]

There are lot of people having troubles syncing their devices (pda, smartphones, etc.) with ubuntu. At this poing there is only one solution available, multisync, and works for only a few devices, and it's very limited on their functions.

And I think, this is a very important point for lots of people.

**Suggestions from duplicate idea 397 work on that idea :

1) Clean up the Opensync and SyncML plugin packages to work properly with Evolution by default.

2) Set up an official Ubuntu SyncML server for Ubuntu users.

3) Possibly clean up open source SyncML clients for the different mobile platforms.

Suspend and hibernate still seems to be a big issue based on forum posts. Really focus on fixing it, even with proprietary drivers.

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."

Ubuntu's bootloader is a stark black and white screen, filled with confusing options. It gives newbies a moment of indecision, as they try to figure out if they are supposed to choose something, and wonder why there are three or four Ubuntus listed. Then the timer finishes counting down (starting from 10), and the newb begins to feel like he's getting in over his head as his PC boots into Ubuntu.

Too much information up front, stark text-only display, painfully long countdown timer. What would be the alternative? Well, when a Fedora PC is booted up, the first thing the user sees is a graphical splash screen, and "Booting into Fedora (kernel version) in 4 seconds ... " The user can press a key to interrupt and select from kernel versions or alternative operating systems, or just let it boot into Fedora.

Can't we create our own attractive bootloader? Or, failing that, copy-and-paste Fedora's?

Summary:
Ability to download only changed bits of files and use much less bandwidth.
Scope and Use Cases:
Ann has slow internet connection. She sees that there are 150MB of updates and decides not to update at all leaving her with vulnerable and buggy system.
Implementation Plan:
Adopt it from Debian?

Previously discussed here, but still not implemented: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=409916

Replace initscripts with upstart events. Our boot sequence is currently slow, full of race conditions and poor interactions, especially with competition between the series of tasks run by sysv-rc, udev and sometimes just with the kernel. We developed upstart so that we could have a truly event driven boot sequence that would be fast, reliable and flexible; we should take advantage of it.

Hey,

Why do i need to restart my pc to get the nvidia driver working?

insmod nvidia and a X restart should be enough right!

So with that knowledge again: Why do i need a restart?
It's not modifying the base kernel which is about the only thing that requires a restart on linux and you can only get it that far if you install a new kernel or compile a new one.

My suggestion:
Kick out the restart demand and just restart X.

Edit//
If you vote this idea down tell me why because i can't think of a reason where a reboot would be better then my suggestion.

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

There should be a more efficient format for apt-get (or the update manager) to download updates. Firstly, it should only need to download the files that have changed in a package (not the whole package), and secondly, it should download a DIFF of those files.

My latest update contains a 34.2 WHOPPING MB update to the linux restricted modules. Here's the changelog:

* Fix broadcom Makefile to get correct objects from split-module.

I'm downloading 34.2Mb just to get a *Makefile update*??? I don't even use any broadcom stuff. Even if I did, I probably wouldn't care enough about a Makefile to make it worthwhile downloading 34.2Mb!

Show the gsm signal strength in the network manager gsm icon, similar to the wifi signal strength when connected to a gsm network.