Contributor doan

Every day (literally) hundreds of translation suggestions and/or modifications are generated in Rosetta. Due to some current limitations in Rosetta, it is fairly hard for translation teams members to keep up with the flood of information or even know about contributions awaiting for review/approval. My intent is to describe a mechanism by which translation teams can better administrate the contributions sent by Rosetta users, provide useful feedback and take a first step toward a better relationship with upstream projects.

The System Monitor application is great - except that the Resources tab is a real pig. It uses a lot of CPU to do its thing - I have a quad xeon system and it uses up to 40% of one of the cores just for graphing!

That's not such a big deal for this system, but on a single core older system it could really bog things down when you're trying to see what's going on with performance.

Also, we sort of have a quantum effect where the observation affects what you are trying to observe. Not so great.

I propose trimming out whatever fancy stuff is making it slow, be it spline interpolation for the graphs, or whatever. Just scale back to drawing some plain old lines until the smooth graphing stuff is working as fast. I'd rather see plain lines than have the performance monitor be inaccurate.

When keeping the same /home/ for years, it quickly becomes an unmaintainable mess of hidden folders.

You can't even delete them without being sure because it might contain important data.

Freedesktop has issued a recommandation to solve this problem :
http://standards.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/latest/ar01s03.html

Implementing this would allow to easily reset your configuration to the default one without loosing any data. For Ubuntu beta testers or people that care about having the default config, it would be a big advantage. It would also solve a lot of upgrade problems that some people have and that cannot be reproduced because it's a particular preference migration bug.

The problem and its solution is described here for the GNOME desktop but it applies for any application : http://ploum.frimouvy.org/?184-cleaning-user-preferences-keeping-user-data


My suggestion is to make the FD.o recommandation an official Ubuntu recommandation, trying to lobby so applications in Ubuntu follow this spec, at least the one in main.

A suggestion for the GNOME desktop has also been issued :
http://live.gnome.org/GnomeGoals/XDGConfigFolders

I like experimenting with Linux distributions. Since I'm using a mac, I can only have 2 OS'es at a time installed. Wiping my Ubuntu or OS X install isn't an option, because I use them often. So I use VMware.

There are many Ubuntu deriatives. Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Edubuntu, Fluxbuntu, Gobuntu, Ubuntu Studio, gOS, gNewSense, ... They all have the same base, but I like trying them all. So, I open up VMware and attach the ISO to a new VM.

Now, the problem is the autodetector for the screen resolution. In VMware, you get a huge resolution. If you only have a 1024x768 screen and the VMware screen is 1600x1200, you can bet for sure it's annoying. The menu is on top, the installer window is in the middle, and the taskbar is in the bottom. So that means, get out of vm, scroll up, get in vm, double click install, get out of vm, scroll left & down, get in vm, answer question, get out of vm, scroll down, get in vm, click next, ...

There are very easy solutions to this. As it is detectable whether the install happens in VMware, the system can prepare for this. One possible solution would be, if the vmware graphics driver is autodetected, set the resolution to 1024x768. Another solution would be to put VMware tools on the CD and enable it when you are in VMware. Although putting VMware tools on the CD is better, it may be worser for some free software freaks that don't like the fact that VMware tools is closed source. And then I didn't start speaking about licensing issues.

So, I hope that I soon will *enjoy* trying new, Ubuntu based distro's in VMware!

To me, the loud intro sound and system beep are very annoying on the LiveCD!

It happened a couple of times that I used the LiveCD in the middle of the night on my notebook, and the loud intro sound and system beep at shutdown are just very annoying if there are other people sleeping in the same room or even home.

Or even if it isn't at night, these sounds are useless and you can't adjust the volume before the intro. Maybe delete the system beep and lower the volume of the intro?

The default gnome games for solitaire, minesweeper, etc are really the best out there, but I hate that if I remove one game through "Add/Remove Programs" it removes all of them! Why?

This will not only confuse, but also really annoy most users. A reason should at least be given. I know there are easy ways around this, but most average users are going to want to use the easy package manager... I mean, that's what it's there for right?

PGO ftw:)
Use it to build the kernel and most packages, there will be some 5-15 % improvement.

The live CD is the first thing many people see when trying Ubuntu and it can be a turtle even on the best systems. This is hardly putting our best face forward.

The Live CD needs to be better optimized for responsiveness to make for a better user experience.

Addendum:

The constraints of a Live CD are hard to work with especially all the different hardware out there. I think with the Live CD less is more.
Most people that take it as a test drive are going to look through the menus for things that look familiar to what they know and try browsing the net. For the most part they are not going to be doing anything intensive. I think one option is reducing the memory footprint and services loaded. I'm sure there are other suggestions that you and the developers may have.

OpenOffice.org is quite sluggish with its default settings. Every time I install Ubuntu, one of the first things I do is change the OpenOffice.org settings.

I usually change the settings as follows:
MEMORY - 30 steps, 128MB, 20 objects, 20MB per object
JAVA - Do not use Java
VIEW - Open GL, optimized output, dithering, refresh during interaction and hardware acceleration all ticked.


Without the View settings changed, running old powerpoint presentations in slideshow mode literally brings a dual core processor to a halt.


I'm not sure that the default settings should be exactly as described above because I'm not sure what ramifications that might have for other computers, but it seems to be that there is a lot of room for improvement in performance.

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?

Improve the boot sequence to reduce the number of mode switches and jarring look and feel changes. While our current boot sequence has evolved beyond a verbose scroll of text on the console, it is still not as elegant as it could be. Increased elegance would result in a much improved user experience, and increase user confidence in the distribution.

While the default Ubuntu theme in Gnome is OK, there is room for A LOT more refinement. I would like to see things like:

- Beautiful icons like those in OSX
- Cutting edge, highly readable fonts

I would especially like to see tremendous attention to detail paid to all kinds of small things, such as default icons, etc. Much of this may come in the form of enhancements to the default Gnome/KDE themes.

There is just something incredibly pleasing about the look of OSX, and Ubuntu deserves to look at least as good.

With the right input from top designers, this is possible.

example from duplicate idea 5581 :
http://fc02.deviantart.com/fs22/f/2007/321/2/f/Ubuntu_Theme_Mockup___Light_by_b radwjensen.jpg

More support for more wireless chipsets out of the box and "Windows style" ease of set up.

I have spent may a day trying to configure wireless cards on Ubuntu, often without much luck!

Please also deliver more support for what they are both wireless PCI cards and USB, as it is currently very low base of drivers for such devices

Unlike Epiphnay, Firefox is not a real GNOME application, even with the enhanced native look which has been introduced by Firefox 3.0.

Epiphany is a very simple browser, more conforming to the spirit of GNOME, which lacks a lot of the features of Firefox. However, I think most people will probably not need Firefox' extra features and plugins. Those who do need Firefox could easily download it when Epiphany becomes the default webbrowser included out-of-the-box in Ubuntu. Ubuntu should aim for consistency, and Epiphany certainly is a better candidate than Firefox if consistency is the goal.

Epiphany currently uses the Gecko-engine for rendering, but will probably feature WebKit - http://live.gnome.org/Epiphany/WebKit - soon. WebKit would probably do a better job than Gecko.

Because somehow Ubuntu brainstorm says the Blueprint URL I gave isn't valid, I give it here in the text: https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/epiphany-default-browser

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

Use SQLite for big data files instead of xml files. This could be a huge improvement. Only config files should be saved as xml. Xml-parsing is very slow and the biggest bottleneck.
Edit: I meant data files such as file history instead of preferences.