Contributor brownknight

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

Everyone by now has seen the world famous mockups of what Ubuntu apparently should look like. The problem is that what is shown in those mockups is not yet possible with the current way gnome works.

I worry with everyone clambering for this mythical theme and with time running out before 8.10 ships, what will end up happening is Ubuntu will ship with the same old problematic brown and orange theme that is so hated by a lot of people.

There is a solution though...

The Dust theme
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Artwork/Incoming/Intrepid/DustTheme

The Dust theme has gotten a lot of praises on Digg and is easily as sexy as anything I've personally seen for Linux (and I'm not usually a fan of dark themes), bust most promising of all... is actually possible with the current technology we have at our disposal.

It's time to be bold! Stop defaulting to the same brown and orange and make a big bold change. Embrace Dust.

Yes you will get a few idiots who will say it's too like Vista just because it's black, but ignore them people. The wider tech community will praise Ubuntu for finally ditching its dorky themes and becoming sophisticated and sexy. New users will be eager to try out this Ubuntu thing they have heard so much about.

The package management of Debian-based distributions is by far the best available; even better than Mac OS X. It's the best part about using Debian-based systems.

All the documentation still suggests people use apt-get to install things, and Synaptic and Add/Remove Programs, to my knowledge, are based on apt.

The good thing about apt is that whenever there's missing dependencies it's smart enough to download and install them itself. The bad part is that once you've installed something, if you choose to remove it you can still be left with programs or libraries that were installed as dependencies but are no longer required.

The reason aptitude is better is because it remembers what gets installed as a dependency, and if you go to remove a program and it has a dependency that aptitude knows is no longer required by any program installed on the system, it'll remove that dependency program also.

Because of that I think making Synaptic and Add/Remove Programs based on aptitude instead of apt would be an improvement.

Right now when an application is installed in Synaptic, all the dependencies of the application are automatically installed. However, when the same application is uninstalled, only the application itself is uninstalled by Synaptic; all the dependencies of the application that were automatically installed by Synaptic are left intact.

The only way to remove the automatically installed dependencies is to run sudo apt-get autoremove from the command line.

Synaptic should provide an option to remove the automatically installed dependencies that were installed with an application when that application is being uninstalled using Synaptic.

Having a user drop to the command line to achieve this is not acceptable especially for new users.

First of all: What is the difference between Preferences and Administration? For example: why do I see 'Encryption and Keyrings' in Preferences and 'Keyring Manager' in Administration? What is the difference between 'Default Printer' and 'Printing'? Why do I have to disable the Tracker under Sessions and not under Search and Indexing? And why are these menu's so large? I have 24 items in Preferences (they don't even fit on my screen!) and 18 items in Administration. To put all this stuff in a popup menu is bad interface design imho. Besides, the number of option should be much smaller. A few suggestions:

- Merge 'Screensaver', 'Screen Resolution' and 'Screens and Graphics'.
- Merge 'Network', 'Network Proxy' and 'Network Tools'.
- Merge 'Update Manager, Synaptic Package Manager, Software Sources'.
- Merge 'Encryption and Keyrings', 'Authorizations', 'Keyring Manager'.


Below are all settings I can visit via the System menu. This is just way too much.


-- Preferences --
Universal Access
About Me
Appearance
Bluetooth
Default Printer
Encryption and Keyrings
Keyboard
Keyboard Shortcuts
Main Menu
Mouse
Network Proxy
PalmOS Devices (I don't have one)
Power Management

[....]

sample: new mockup
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3123/2628928612_b2d5b3266d_o.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3123/2628110691_61a0162710_b.jpg

A center of Welcoming is a necessary tool for new users. Here you perform the main tasks and configure your desktop soon after the installation standard.

It would be very good that the next Ubuntu has this facility. The Ubuntu is a success among new users and many of them do not know that the possibilities included in the center of welcome there.

I hope that my idea at all like. I have developed a new mockup seeking to improve understanding of my mind. Thanks for the tip brettalton.

well so many of people suggested about gimp not use 3 windows.actually i and many i suppose(noobs) get scared when they see 3 windows all around desktop when they open Gimp(although there is a non official port called gimpshop but its outdated and not as good as gimp).
PS(photoshop) is setting web standards great piece of work but gimp too can compete with it.some needed changes:
*****single window.
****compatibility with photoshop filters .8bf filters,more support
****better documentation
**better icons and UI redesign(although i just saw feature planned for gimp next version 2.6) still deserves attention of developers.
**better support for pre defined key in photoshop also can be used in gimp
key combinations(keyboard shortcuts like ctrl+alt etc)
i am huge fan of photo editing software and web design somehow...usability in some software breaks barriers of commercial and free software.

I dont think Ekiga is used by many people, perhaps we should consider removing it from the cd in favour for other software or more drivers?

I made up a quickvote at the ubuntuforums to see if I was the only one not using Ekiga.

Check the thread posted here for information and discussion.

I think some of the screenshots on www.ubuntu.com are outdated.

For example, the menu screenshot on this page: http://www.ubuntu.com/products/whatisubuntu is not the menu we see in 8.04.

Also, some text is outdated as well. For example, this page: http://www.ubuntu.com/products/WhatIsUbuntu/kubuntu says "KDE version 3.5.5 is the current stable release".

There are lots of other examples on the website. I think to use up-to-date screenshots is very important. They would give new users a better and more accurate impression of Ubuntu compared with old screenshots.

Have you seen how much eye candy, and how professional openSUSE looks? The system requirements are very low to (I don't really know how low, but i thing it is about 250mb or RAM and 3gb HDD). So why not add more eye candy in Ubuntu and make it look more professional? I am not saying to rise the system requirements, but for the people which have enough RAM and big enough HDD can get more eye candy.

And as well I have so far never needed to use the terminal in openSUSE (I have one cumputer with Ubuntu and one with openSUSE). It would be nice if the user no longer needed to use the terminal anymore!

Just for fun...here are some pictures of openSUSE and Ubuntu: (those are pictures are just examples)

Boot Screen
http://decoding.files.wordpress.com/2007/04/boot-screen.jpg
VS.
http://media.arstechnica.com/news.media/450/opensuse_boot.png

INSTALLATION
http://imthi.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/ubuntu-installtion-on-vmware-300x25 8.png
VS.
http://arstechnica.com/news.media/opensuse_installation.png


[....]

View the idea:
http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3099/2631616390_a1c79cb507_b.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3102/2630811421_1ccd353665_o.jpg

The Ubutnu is a popular distribution, and the choice of their standard theme should be made by all by voting. And not by a small group. The community can elect the theme through the Ubuntu Brainstorm.


For the choice of a new theme that is the satisfaction of the majority that idea is essential.

---------------------
Edited:
Initially thank you all. This idea may help it to developers in the choice, and can have an extra theme.

Can serve as a basis for changes in the theme chosen by the team of Ubuntu, even if the popular themes are not adopted.

This idea will help.

The point here is that Drivers manager should not only download restricted drivers, but it should solve all hardware-related issues where possible. I mean, it should recognize your hardware and download all the drivers available in the repos for you - when the drivers needed aren't on the install CD.

Pidgin saves account passwords in plain text (check the contents of ~/.purple/accounts.xml )

Saving passwords in plain text is wrong! The Gnome keyring is a perfect replacement for this insecure method and should be used.

An OS, no matter how technologically or ideologically advanced it is, should also be visually appealing.
And Ubuntu, being one of the most beatiful (I mean the default appearance here) distribution of Linux still can't compete with Vista (not to mention Mac OS X).
Here I imly the following:
-icons. All the icons should be converted into vector graphics, so that they were scalable (so that they could look the same everywhere).
-fonts. Even Liberation fonts look better than default GNOME's dejavu, but still they leave much to be desired.
-screensaver. Currently, it's just a black screen. Enough said, I guess. Ubuntu should offer aset of nice screensavers, basic, or OpenGL-driven.
-applets. GNOME applets should grow in numbers and functionality. At least I would suggest a wrapper that could display a Web widget as an applet, so that user could simply paste BB-codes from YouTube, Jaiku, Vimeo or else and see it on his desktop.
-3D effects. There shouldn't be a vast number of them, but all of them should be quality-driven. Just look how bad is Compiz rendering as you make anything that drives windows borders into curves - they are edgy and twisted.
-wallpapers. I know, Deviantart contest is on, but here is also another point: Ubuntu should provide numerous wallpapers out-of-box, and all of them should suit the default colour scheme. The same stays for login screen.
-themes. Ubuntu should provide themes that change the appearance more globally. Not only GNOME's appearance, but all the apps, bootloader, login screen, screensaver.
-customization. Changing Ubuntu's appearance isn't really easy these days, since you can't tune up all the aspects in one place. I mean, you can change the theme, but you should work really hard to make your style as sole as the defaut one - Qt, GTK and other (wxWindows, etc) applications share different configs. Just try to switch to a darker theme and you'll learn how many elements would require tuning. Ubuntu can offer great means of customization, but that doesn' mean that an average user is able to make a cool-looking style.
-bootloader. That was already mentioned, but still. Ubuntu should show text mode at all. Currently, it can occasionally fall back to console for a while, which is discomforting.
-hibernation/suspend screen. The same.

[....]

We need to change the default screensaver. The problem with the current screensaver is that the first time you meet it is when the screen suddenly turns black during the installation. That is very confusing for most users, as the first thought always is that the installation has crashed.

I suggest a screensaver that helps brand Ubuntu, like for example the "Floating Ubuntu" screensaver. It could also be a textbased screensaver that could run on older machines witch doesn't support 3D.

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.

Currently,. it only shows the actual weather status. It would be a great addition, I wouldn't have to go to a website to check the weather anymore.

This can be done like that - when the user clicks the panel icon, a list shows under it with the forecast for the next 5 days.

Now is says that the currently loaded plugins do not provide means to burn such disks.

Marked as not an idea.

please delete.

After all, it takes up a lot of space, creates clutter and it's absolutely of no use for people that got just one user on the computer.