Contributor j1mc

This may seem very special, but a lot of small companies (1 to 10 employees) would love to run linux because of the cost (a Win workstation has easily 500 to 1000 Euro of software on it - each and everyone of it).

The one thing that NOBODY gets done: installing an ERP/CRM. Be it Compiere, SQL-Ledger, Post-Books, TinyERP, LX-Office - you name it and I show you a million threads in all the ubuntu-forums "can't install/can't run XYZ after installation"

Most small business just want in, stock, out, furnisher, client, offer, invoice - pretty basic stuff that EVERY ERP can handle.

How about getting one of those into the repositories as an "easy to install" or "no brainer" package? I'd LOVE it - and reading the frums in German, French and English, there are literally several thousand users that would love it, too.

Now Xubuntu - as a Xfce based distro - uses many GNOME apps, then it is necessary. Replace:
File Roller with Xarchiver or Squeeze
GNOME Games with some pretty stuff without GNOME-dependency
GQView with Ristretto or Mirage
Evience with ePDFview (which IS Evience without GNOME-dependency)

if we must have screensavers give us some useful ones. Educational and Informational.

-- Clock and Weather Screensaver.
-- Alarm Clock and Weather Screensaver.
-- World Clock Screensaver.
-- Local Weather with Weather Around the World Screensaver.
-- Count Down to Specific Date Screensaver.
-- World Atlas Map (Countries and Bodies of Water) Screensaver.
-- Human Body (Muscles and Bones) Screensaver.
-- System and Network Status Screensaver.
-- User Photos Slideshow Screensaver.
-- Destination Photos from Around the World Sceensaver.
-- RSS Screensaver.
---- Word of the day screensaver.
---- Today in History screensaver.
---- Nutritional Health Tip Screensaver.
---- Screensaver with Collection of Jokes.
---- Various Dictionary Screensavers (Programming Terms, Linux, Mathematics, Science, Legal, Tech...)

I'm not giving a specific solution, but i'm pointing a fact that i think it's interesting to discuss:

Many people are suspicious about general quality of implementation, even when everything works flawessly. A good example is audio. Even when audio cards work well under Ubuntu, some (audiophiles, etc) think the sound will always be better with Windows because the oficial proprietary driver should sound better than the opensource ones. Other example: users usually choose Mac for multimedia tasks, because it's "powerful and stable" for multimedia. Although it may be generally true, there is a lot of marketing envolved.

So, let's "advertise" and give proof of the true potencial of Ubuntu and it's quality.

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.

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!


[....]

Most users do not have a PalmOS PDA. For some reason, Ubuntu developers decided to install support for PalmOS devices by default in Ubuntu (you can access it at: System / Preferences / PalmOS Devices).

I think it's not a good idea to by default install support for one specific brand of PDA's which only a tiny fraction of the users is ever going to use. Those people who do have a PalmOS PDA can easily install it afterwards.

So: Please remove support for PalmOS devices from the default install. This includes the packages: gnome-pilot, gnome-pilot-conduits.

At the moment, if someone wants to backup his documents or prepare a migration from a computer to another there isn't much more than file-roller to create a backup.
Ideally, the user should be able to run a graphic software which would ask what the user wants to backup and where (tape/usb key/remote).
Then the same tool would be able to restore the backup.

It would be useful for both backups and migration from a computer to another.

Update : See duplicates ideas which contain even more great ideas about that idea.