Contributor buggyman

You know what's really obnoxious? When you're looking for the semantics of a command, say "basename", and then fire up "man basename" to get the manual only to find a cruddy shell of a man page that refers to a TexInfo manual and explains that you'll have to use "info" to get at it.

I appreciate the passion of GNU folks for creating robust documentation that is nicely segmented, but in most cases, it's just much easier to have everything in a single file that is searchable. Also, have you ever tried to explain "info" to a new user. If they've never used emacs, they're screwed. Even if they have used emacs, they're in trouble..."What's the key combination to follow a link again?" "Now how do I go back?" It's time we recognized GNU Info for what it is, the Edsel of the documentation world. Let's give it the boot and provide a nice common interface to everything through "man".

In a bid to make new users feel as though they can 'contribute' to Ubuntu, and give them an opportunity to discover brainstorm, I suggest a menu linking to sections of the website.

The menu would be added underneath the 'About Ubuntu' item and link to the options of the 'Get Involved' page on the website like this...

System
>Get Involved
>>Development
>>Design
>>Documentation
>>Brainstorm
>>etc...

The icon for the menu should be the from the 'Get Involved' link on the Ubuntu home page, and the sub items their icons from the get involved page.

This should get more people involved in development, and give none technical users, like me, the chance to contribute on brainstorm, making Ubuntu a bit more personal.

Autoscrolling is a Firefox feature, which has to be enabled in settings (Edit > Preferences > Advanced > Use autoscrolling) and with this feature enabled, you can scroll the page easily after pressing middle mouse button and moving the mouse up and down.
I think this should be enabled by default, as it is in Windows. If there exists some reason why it is better to have it disabled defaultly, please post it in the comments.

Some people in the comments said that middle button click should be used for pasting content. But you can do that even with autoscrolling enabled, you can paste previously highlited text into input fields. What won't work is pasting text *outside* input fields - if you do that with today's default settings, Firefox will think you pasted a web address and try to load it. But this is rather confusing than useful - users who don't know this often accidentaly middle click somewhere and they get confusing message "Can't load the-text-user-highlited-before".

It's useful if you can set gmail or yahoo mail or other web mail program as default mail client.
I don't use from a long time Epiphany er/or outlook similar mail program

Support for Zoomable User Interface (ZUI), as a different way of having virtual desktops.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zooming_User_Interface

This could be implemented as a compiz-fusion plugin.
Compiz-fusion already has a plugin for zooming in while still being able to use the input (mouse/keyboard), but none for zooming out. This would be extremely useful in low-res devices (the eeepc for example).

Having a way to "set zoom level to fit selected window" (maximize it) Would make this easier to use. Just zoom out, overview your virtual desktop and zoom in on what you want to work on next.

I don't mean this suggestion to be a duplicate of http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/388/ "Multitouch support and zoomable interface". That idea mixes two notions: multitouch and zoomable user interface. While both are a good idea multitouch support will be limited by hardware support and by Apple's patents on the subject.

What we need is an application which centralises security. I'd like to think of it as "Security and Stability". It should monitor the following in a centralised location:



- Track system crashes/unclean shutdowns of applications and make it easily accessible. If apache has never crashed except the day a server was compromised for instance, it may provide a clue about how it was hacked.

- Firewall status. No IPtables enabled = insecure

- Show all security updates. Users should be informed when there are updates available specifically targetting security (in addition to the applet currently present).

- User rights. If the user is running as root, they should be told the risks.

- Anti-virus. There should be integration with Anti-virus here, or a one click means of listing various versions of anti-virus. Integration should also allow a one click option to start scanning, and an indication if automatic scanning is enabled. It could also offer an easy way to install rootkit detectors and anti-virus. Its better for us to get ahead of viruses, and make sure people don't pass existing ones on (I believe ClamAV is an example of a free one?)

- Rootkit detection. There are lots of Rootkit detection systems out there. I suggest that users be able to click a button and run a quick test.

- Permission checker, Use information from APT to identify changes in permissions to system files. Many newbies do stupid things like change the permissions on a config file so they can access it via gui. Lets make sure they have an easy way to fix it.

- Identify if your network is broadcasting everyones traffic to everyone (ie, hubs, not switches). Maybe not easy, and not really neccessary.

[....]

Allow users to right-click a photo and left-click "Set as wallpaper" in Nautilus.

This can be implemented by installing 'nautilus-wallpaper'.

Please include this as a default.

Add a plugin support inside nautilus, exactely like Rhythmbox or Totem.

By doing this, many useful G-Script (Nautilus File Manager Scripts) can be rewrite in Vala and "bundle" with Nautilus.

Useful plugin can be for example :

-> Automatic file renamer (like the one in Thunar)
-> Mounting Iso file
-> Audio file converter (wav->mp3,wma->ogg)
-> Video file converter (flv->avi)
-> Tab support (like PCmanfm)
-> Picture sorting (by resolution, etc.)
-> Duplicate file searcher...

etc..

One of my favourite features in Windows, compared to Ubuntu, is renaming files in Windows Explorer. In Windows, you click on a file, wait a bit so it doesn't register as a double-click (and thus, run the file) then click it again. Doing so allows you to rename the file.

In Nautilus (not sure about other File Managers), you have to right-click then go to Rename to rename a file. This is slow and cumbersome.

User directories on ubuntu are easily a mess at the moment. They need more standardisation and more sense to remain clean. If you go to terminal/bash you may discover that your directory looks something like:


/home/auzy/Documents
/home/auzy/.Azureus (Hidden)
/home/auzy/.gnome2 (Hidden)
/home/auzy/Desktop
/home/auzy/.bashrc2 (Hidden)
/home/auzy/readme.rtf
/home/auzy/.Trash (Hidden)
/home/auzy/iffy.rtf
/home/auzy/delete me.rtf
/home/auzy/argggggg.c
/home/auzy/fgdhgfdhd.txt
/home/auzy/Music
/home/auzy/.ooffice (Hidden)
/home/auzy/friendsassignment.c
/home/auzy/friendsassignmentCopy.c
etc.


While you may note that anything with . is hidden normally, what if someone wants to delete the settings for a program? They need to manually unhide it, and sort through the dozens of directories in the home directory to find it. The problems with this is that:

a) Its messy, and certainly not a clean solution
b) Users cannot easily access their settings.
c) Everyones home directory is normally trashed with hundreds of other files, making it difficult to navigate.

[....]

Please add removable drives to "Send to..." section.

The "About me" utility provided with gnome should be integrated with Pidgin and Evolution. The avatar set there should work as a "global" avatar. The utility should be able to manage the main E-mail address, IM accounts, signatures and everything that is related to the user.

I know, maybe time's not ready for such a pervasive control, but we actually have a lot of identities: let's start thinking about an easy way to rule them all.

Pleeeeeease make an Ubuntu Media Center. I'd love to move my server over to Ubuntu but there are no good Media Center for it, so I'm stuck on Windows. :(

Audio/Video/Pictures support would be the bare minimum needed, but TV Tuner support/Web Browser/RSS Reader/whatever else you guys want would be excellent as well.

I know theres already an Ubuntu MC project (which is dead I think?), but it was going off in more of a FrontRow direction, where as I was kinda hoping Ubuntu could implement a proper MC like MCE or MediaPortal.

Currently, each time when my Ubuntu install is messed up, I have to reformat my partition and reinstall Ubuntu. Next I have to set up everything again. That's very annoying. Other OS'es (Windows, Mac OS X, yes even SUSE, ...) have a "Repair existing system" option. This allows to reinstall the OS without having to reformat. All it would have to do is to manually check and repair dpkg/apt-get, next it has to reinstall every package present on the cd. Very easy, not too hard to implement, many users that would be very happy. Why not do it?

Automatically disable the touchpad when you are typing by specifying a number of seconds the touchpad stays inactive after you hit a button on the keyboard. This is very useful on laptops where it is very easy to accidentily touch the touchpad while typeing.

Improve the compatibility with the sounds cards, for example Realtek has drivers for linux you can integrate them like in ubuntu with the graphic drivers (restricted drivers of nvidia and ati).

http://www.realtek.com.tw/downloads/downloadsView.aspx?Langid=1&PNid=24&PFid=24 &Level=4&Conn=3&DownTypeID=3&GetDown=false#2

DVD support is still not so easy to get, due to
content scrambling. Scripts like automatix provide
this relatively easily, but it could not hurt to have
a straightforward path to get DVD playback support.
Stick in a DVD, and it plays. DVD players could also become
simpler. I use xine or mplayer but it would be nice to have
the simplicity of the DVD player in OS X.