Contributor johno

When running off battery its useful to minimise waking up the hard disk. For reads, this can be accomplished by caching in RAM, but for writes caching risks a loss of data if there is a loss of power or crash. Instead, writes could be cached on a USB flash device until the next time the disk needs to be spun up for a read.

With this approach available, it should be possible to get very long periods between spinning up the hard disk, but still have the security of being able to save work.

Once a fsck has been started, there seems no safe way to abort what can be a long procedure. This is a problem on boot where it can mean waiting 15 minutes for a boot with no way of bypassing a filesystem check which is only precautionary.

Idea 11, "Avoid Fsck Forced Irritation", has been marked as "done", on account of being able to prevent the fsck starting on boot under hardy, but its easy to miss that and still be stuck - so it only partially mitigates the problem, and isn't a solution.

Regardless of whether the fsck is at boot time, shutdown, or somehow a background process, there should be a way of aborting it cleanly after it's started - in case of imminent flat battery or other similar requirement.

It's currently difficult to free up the interface dead space for applications that can benefit from more content space. Often the panels and title bar of the application serve little immediate purpose, but take up a lot of the relatively valuable vertical space. This is especially relevant with Ubuntu defaulting to having top and bottom panels that stay on top of windows.
One way to free up this space temporarily is to enable full-screen mode for the main application, but it's quite intrusive, and doesn't allow any way for notifications to show at all. You can enable hide/auto-hide on panels, but there it's difficult to switch quickly between compact and full mode. Even there, if you want a notification area, you are still stuck with losing a full panel height and titlebar height from the whole screen- just for 50x24 pixels of icons.

The rounded corners on the default Human theme make a big difference in UI responsiveness, especially on systems without good graphics acceleration, or in a virtual machine. There is little visual difference in going to a square-edged theme, but a big improvement in feel for a lot of installations.

Many people new to Ubuntu would get a better experience of it being fast and responsive if the default theme were more suitable. For example, Mist or Metabox.