Contributor enigma_0Z

I have a simple and elegant solution to easily differentiate an application launched as root (Adept Manager, Nautilus, Konqueror, etc.) and an other one : I use the same color scheme for both users but I slightly colorize the "standart background" (the textedit/lineedit... background color) of the root color theme (salmon color for me).

This way, all my applications looks the same but I can immediately see which application is in root mode (and be carefull of what I do with them !)


I use KDE but I think this idea can apply to Gnome too.

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?

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.

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."

Last year Dell began offering Ubuntu preinstalled on a few of their laptops. Dell seems to really be embracing its users lately, and Ubuntu's Brainstorm is a derivative of Dell's IdeaStorm.

I'd like to see a more complete line of Dell laptop and desktops supported in Ubuntu more fully. I personally use a Dell Inspiron 9300, and while most hardware works out of the box, there a few quirks. LED Bluetooth and WiFi, and strange ALSA mixing come to mind.

Perhaps Canonical and Dell can come to some sort of agreement in regards to laptop compatibility for those laptops still being used today (Mine was bought in July of 2005 and is still a great laptop).

With that said, IBM and Sony if I recall correctly have kernel modules for handling ACPI and BIOS quirks in their own way. There is currently no such easily accessible kernel module for Dell laptops, or HP laptops.

Most new computers bought today are laptops, so being able to fully support the hardware is greatly important. It might also be easier to implement some of the power-saving features described in other brainstorm ideas once the full capabilities of the hardware have been exposed to the operating system.

At least when running on a laptop/on battery (but it would be good for a desktop on AC power too) it would be good to by default turn on all the things that powertop suggests. e.g. ALSA power save mode, increased writeback time, hald-addon-storage polling for the CD drive, USB autosuspend.

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

Show a counter of how many times ubuntu has been downloaded on the homepage

Place bookmark for this brainstorm site in Firefox bookmark folder "Ubuntu and Free Software links". This will bring more people and more ideas.

Ubuntu should take full advantage of all available mouse buttons.
Integrate this: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/146160