Contributor heavyal

It would be nice to have a one stop place to look for the many available education books available. I think lack of awareness that free books exist is slowing their advance and it would nice for Ubuntu too.

One of the first things new users comment on when trying linux is the lack of "smooth-scroll" in applications. Although it is a relatively minor point - smooth scrolling has come to be expected these days. Some of the advantages of it are,

* Looks more modern and professional,
* Allows the user to read while they scroll with the mouse wheel,
* In (for example) a Pidgin chat window the motion of a smooth scroll when you receive a message draws you eye: our brains are configured to respond to movement,
* Smooth movement is natural - jerky movement is not,
* Everyone else is doing it!

What would be required is for enough Ubuntu devs to discuss this on the Gtk mailing list, to show there is a demand for it. Once implemented this would include all Gtk applications, including Nautilus, Firefox and Pidgin.

In Firefox, it isn't possible to copy images. In the Windows version, you can right click on an image, select copy, and then paste it into your OpenOffice document. On Ubuntu, you have to save the image somewhere, and then import it into your OpenOffice document. I'm not sure if this is just Ubuntu, or the whole GNU/Linux version of Firefox. I do know, though, that it is possible in Konqueror!

At the moment Ubuntu uses DejaVu Sans Book as the default UI font. Although DejaVu really looks great, it wasn't built to be a an interface font which is very apparent when comparing the letter widths with those of real UI fonts.

http://img514.imageshack.us/my.php?image=fontcomparisonzu7.png

Verdana: Isn't used anywhere as the default UI font afaik.
DejaVu Sans Book: Almost identical to Verdana, used in Ubuntu.
Lucida Sans: UI font on Macs.
DejaVu Sans Condensed: An interesting alternative for Ubuntu?
Trebuchet MS: Used in the title bars of Windows.
Droid: Used in mobile phones with the Android SDK. An interesting alternative for Ubuntu?
Arial (and it's copies Liberation Sans and Free Sans) are quite popular, but not used as UI fonts.
Tahoma: Used as the default UI font on Win 2000, XP and 2003. What's remarkable is that it is the font with absolutely smallest width of the whole list.

In my opinion it is absolutely striking that no vendor uses such a "wide" font for UIs. Even if we choose the condensed variant we are still on the top half of the list.

Droid looks much better than both Tahoma and Lucida when rendered on Linux which might fix the problem of people trying to "emulate" their Windows/MacOSX rendering on Linux.
Therefore I propose to evaluate alternatives for "application font" which can give ubuntu a more polished look:

- Droid Sans
- DejaVu Sans Condensed

Thanks for your time!


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The restricted driver manager is a quite good utility, especially for new users. But often the automatic driver installation process gets useless if the used video card is not supported by the old driver in the ubuntu repository. The User has to download the new driver from the vendor's website and install it manually. This causes several problems, most irritating might be the required reinstall on kernel updates, not to speak of the lack of comfort for the average user.
And it's not only the support of new hardware, also new features are introduced with newer driver versions (e.g. AIGLX in the fglrx one).
So I think, these drivers should be updated by the update manager, too.

There is a number of ideas which are readily commented with description of how given problem has already been solved - of which, obviously, submitters were unaware.

This ideas potentially burden the Brainstorm system and slow down review of "fresh" new ideas. They also get low vote count (if voters read comments and realize there is nothing new to be done about it), or are voted down.

Grouping them also makes a foundation for a good FAQ or a Help because they show there is a function some users need and would use, which is not readily documented or accessible - clearly a legitimate job for maintainers.

Commentators which know how to invoke, already implemented, asked for, function should have an option to suggest this kind of transfer (flag the idea for "FAQ-isation"), after they make the clarifying comment.

Each idea contributor should check that ("have been done") category first, then other, new, potentially similar ideas.

I'd love to see a simple, well-supported, "just works" (heh) KDE sound recorder similar to, say, SoundForge under Windows. After spending hours (unsuccessfully) trying about five different programs to record input from a microphone or line-in jack (lockups, silence, error messages), I finally got something that sounded horrible and distorted. Even then, this required closing down all applications except for the one doing the recording. Forums and bug reports proposed several different solutions/workarounds, none of which helped.

This probably ties into an effort to implement a unified, multiplexing sound server in (K)Ubuntu, which has been a long time coming and is sorely needed to prevent programs freezing/crashing because their audio can't be multiplexed in or out.

Please consider modifying nautilus to enable drag and select multiple files in Nautilus list view. This is an incredibly annoying deficiency which is not present in virtually any other file manager I have used.

When I switch off my computer, sometimes it had a torrent client running in the background or some music player.

When I turn it back on later, I would like to have Ubuntu remember which applications it stopped due to the last shutdown and restore them.

I know there is an option to restore sessions over shutdowns, but in my experience this is buggy and not too configurable. I always switch it off right after installing an Ubuntu upgrade.

possibility to see more kind of documents as small images, like happens with photos but would be great if it's the same with PDFs, FH11s, AIs, and a lot of documents relationated with graphics.

also would be great see the images inside a folder before opening it, to have an idea of what is inside. It means: replace the folder icon and put small images.

whith tons of folders and documents, I think is a necessary idea for the future.

thanks for the forum

This should only apply if the logged in user has an entry in sudoers..

If I try to create a new folder, and I don't have access it should prompt me for my password (gksudo), and preform the action. This should occur for copy/paste, and all sorts of other functions that instead we have to drop to the shell..

I mainly 'sudo nautilus .' when I need to do this, but its a little clunky, don't you agree?

One day I'd like to see the feature where you can change the point at which your file browser takes its thumbnail, so if a really terrible thumbnail comes up you can change it.

I would like the ability to lock some icons into a location that does not get affected when I use the "Clean up by name" feature.

That way I could put my static icons (such as drives or special folders) on the right hand side and everything else would gravitate to the left.

I would also like to be able to choose which way the icons orient. It would be cool to have the option of making them group to the right, or the bottom if I so chose when "Cleaning up" instead of the upper left

Please make ubuntu package for enemy territoy cause i'm noob and i cant install it manually
please vote +1

One thing that drives me potty about Totem and Rhythmbox is that unlike all the other apps I've used (on windows) you can't simply click anywhere on the "timeline" to move to that portion of the song/video instead you have to actually click on the moving playhead marker and drag it where you want.

So if I want to skip to the last 30 seconds of a song I can't just click near the end of the timeline, I have to actually drag the playhead all the way across to the end.


Which do you think is easiest? ....

Click
or
Click + drag + release

I'll give you a clue. It aint the the process that takes 3 steps!

When you are activating a compiz effect, you actually don't know what will you get. So these effects (and perhaps tips for using them) can be previewed in a short flash movie so you will know what you are doing. Google Sketch Up already has something like this.

(Excuse me for my bad English)

When Nautilus is trying to display a lot of previewable documents (PDF, picture formats, etc.), thumbnails runs like a turtle.

Nautilus must be improved to do it faster.

An idea was suggested here : http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/2235/

Thank you.

Ubuntu is built on the philosophy that every user should be part of the community. Many users help out in various ways, however very few start programming because of the traditional difficulties.

1) Many people just don't know where to begin. Create a developer resource website and a "Beginner Developer Package" as mentioned in idea #4354.
The website should mostly contain articles aimed at new developers. It can link to external resources (e.g. the KDE and GNOME developer websites) for more advanced information.

Both the website and the developer package should be maintained by the general Linux community. Although the project will not be distro specific, The Ubuntu community will benefit greatly by sponsoring the project.

2) Bring back Canonical Code Bounties to motivate new developers.
Integrate them with community bounties as mentioned in idea 1295.

3) Create a Ubuntu Design Rewards website. (Idea 2961.)
Most developers coding for OS X and Windows have never even heard of Ubuntu. Mac OS X in particular has a costant stream of neat new apps. We need to capture their attention and bring them to Linux by way of contests and prizes.

In particular, Canonical should focus on attracting high school and university students. Google has been sucessful in bringing students to open source by using prizes and monetary incentives (GSoC and GHOP). We need to be more welcoming and do the same.

The current set of gnome dev tools are often said to be difficult for new-comers to work with. How about getting something along the lines of Delphi/Kylix built for rapid application development of gnome specific applications? Using C/C++ of course rather than Pascal but something visual that new developers could jump right into without feeling like they have to build everything from the ground up.

Maybe you know Microsoft's Visual Studio, a very nice program especially for programmer beginners.

We should clone this program (or make a similiar) to write Linux GTK/Qt apps with it.

I know this is a big work, but it's worth it I think.