Contributor gavintlgold

Ok so all of the other systems out there are now supporting Animated Desktops. Time for linux to support it. Icon animation as well as Images on the Desktop animated behind the Icons.

New users coming from Windows are often disoriented and don't really know the real advantages of Ubuntu or even how to use some of its basic functions (Add/Remove instead of setup.exe). An orientation would help them.

A couple of ideas for how to help them have come up, including an idea about having pop-ups for every new application that's open. The pop-up idea has a few downsides, of course, not the least of which being that pop-ups are annoying to many users, both new and experienced.

One relatively unobtrusive way to introduce new users to the basic functions of Ubuntu is to show a slideshow during the installation process. New users would probably watch the slideshow (they're waiting for the installation to finish--what else are they going to do?), while experienced users might have the option to turn off the slideshow... or they may just get up and leave, knowing that the installation won't take more than fifteen minutes.

I tried to install both 7.04 and 7.10 on an older pc, and found that the 'Forward' button in the installer was inaccessible. A scrollbar when necessary would be awesome!

Have a tutorial obviously available from the command line that hits the highlights of things that you might want to do, especially as a new user. This is for the situation where a new user, familiar only with the GUI, ends up on the command line perhaps because something went wrong. I'd like to see something that users would stumble into, maybe something that comes up if you enter a few invalid commands. You shouldn't have to 'just know' some command to get this option.

The current 'help' command is not a tutorial, and is not very friendly. When you type help from the command line, many of the commands scroll off the top of the screen. Nor are man pages a tutorial - help and man are both references for people who already can get around a bit on the command line.

The box that pops up when the admin password is required doesn't integrate with compiz and is pretty hideous and intrusive by default. It's pretty pointless for it to take over the whole screen and it could use some styling.

Perhaps a more peaceful way is to allow a "block" feature like digg's that automatically hides all of the posts from certain users. That way we can choose what we want.

"UBUNTU IS FREE AS IN FREE SPEECH AND ANARKEEE" ... if you want that, then people should also be free to choose what they want to see and what they don't want to see.

Please do this!

Because of the recent horrendous spamming of looooooooooong entries of newlines that have no use and really mess up the page (the newest ideas page for example), why not either limit the description entirely, or limit what's displayed in the lists, or not allow more than say two newlines at a time?

Please implement this... this site can really be taken advantage of otherwise.