Contributor kenden

would be interesting if the .Trash folders could use the Trash icon instead of the Folder icon.

Canonical currently has a big problem. It needs developers. Its a vicious cycle, developers are needed to improve development, yet to increase the number of developers, we need better development programs.

The sad reality is that whilst Canonical has a wealth of development tools available, they are barely officially supported, out of date, or have no easy way of using them (like systemtap).

We need Canonical to step up and make the development environment for 9.04 a priority, so that first time linux developers, and long time developers have a powerful environment, that is officially supported by Canonical. By improving the development environment to be easy to setup, and more updated, developers are more likely to jump on board. In fact, whilst many developers consider coding on OSX to be a privilage, I have never heard the same said of Ubuntu.

Current areas we are severely lacking include:
- Eclipse is out of date in the repos and has been for ages.. Why?
- Sun and Apple have Dtrace officially supported, with a GUI frontend that really makes things easy. We don't have any support for systemtap nor have we got any comparable profiling gui.
- Windows and OSX has a fully supported out of the box development environment with the most popular languages in 2 clicks. With ubuntu, we have to manually work out which gui's we want, which tools, etc
- Debugging? Ha.. its actually quicker to port the code to OSX and use OSX's development tools in some cases then debug currently, because it supports step-backs and such.
- QT can compete against Cocoa. GTK even with Glade is a joke still. I'm not asking you to fix this, but if you want to encourage GTK development, at least have glade/eclipse integration in a developers metapackage
- Developers centre. Ubuntu has none, so developers aren't given a simple list of changes that might affect them next release, such as the change from Alsa as backend, to Pulse, so we can prepare in time. We don't even have a centralised way of really working together with other ubuntu developers.

Some may say developers can help themselves, but first impressions count. If it takes 3000 clicks to get your development environment to the standard provided by Apple in 5, whilst requiring you to also search for equivilent tools (such as dtrace which are considered standard for many OS's now) by yourself, you certainly wont prioritise the OS. By rewarding developers, with a better development environment, the end result will be a higher quality linux environment.

[....]

There are many great ideas here on brainstorm that have gotten a lot of votes, but no official Ubuntu feedback. I think whenever an idea reaches a certain amount of votes - lets say 500 - it should warrant feedback from the Ubuntu team. Something short like
'yep this is a good idea, we'll seriously consider it'
or
'that is an awful idea, forget it!'
would suffice, so one can better tell if popular ideas have a realistic chance of getting picked up or not.

Some ideas already have this kind of feedback (or even more detailed) but I think a high number of positive votes should always warrant official feedback.

My idea is to implement some functionality to be able to change owner of a file/folder using "Properties" under right-click of a file/folder. As it is now it only says "You are not the owner of this file and can't change permissions" (might differ depending on language, this was a rough translation from Swedish). I would like to be able to change owner of this file/folder and have policykit or gksu ask for permissions to do this if I'm not already root. Sometimes I fiddle around in console and leave stuff on my Desktop that isn't owned by my user account. This would be a nice solution to my problem, and any other problem which involves changing owner of file/folder.

Now that I think about it, I think the same could be applied if you try to empty your trashbin and you get errors because some files were owner by another user.

Currently when a program falls into an infinite loop and hangs, grabbing nearly all the cpu cycles when it does, what's the current procedure for the end user? The computer will most certainly be painfully slow to user input (assuming it's responsive at all.) We need to kill the offending process ASAP. This can be daunting for new users, and frustrating even for seasoned users. Currently the options include xkill, killing from the System Monitor, ps then kill, or (one of my current favorites) pkill. Sometimes X is so slowed down, I even Clt-Alt-F1 into a fresh tty. In the 21st century can't we do better?

What about this instead: When a runnaway process grabs nearly all the CPU cycles, 3 seconds later a 'ballon' notification should appear in the taskbar informing you that the system suspects this, and offering you the option to 'click here to kill the program'. Offer this functionality as an option that can be turned of if the user so choses.

Why not have the system realize what's going on, 'quaranteen' the damage by automatically renicing processes, and provide a notification with option to terminate the offending process?

In the new way I have suggested, the system monitors it's processes. If a process belonging to a currently logged-in user suddenly grabs 95% (just for example) or more CPU and keeps hold of it for more than, say 3 seconds, a few things happen. First, the offending process is automaticallly re-niced to the highest nice value. Second, a freedesktop.org - compliant singal is sent. Third, GNOME, KDE, XFCE, or whatever window manager / desktop enviro is running picks up the signal and creates an alert to the user. The processes for sending the signal, receiving it and displaying the alert have all been re-niced to the lowest nice value, effectively clearing the way.

Maybe the alert will take the form of a 'balloon' from the taskbar? Maybe a nice compiz fade-in popup? Maybe something like mumbles-project.org uses? Whatever method is used, the alert notification must supply a 'one click' to terminate the offending process.

What we're doing here is changing the paradigm. The question isn't 'How do we allow users to terminate a misbehaving program?' Intead its 'How do we ensure users's systems will remain responsive to input.'

[....]

Currently the System Monitor is sort of worthless as a Windows-style Task Manager. When the system is frozen because of a buggy application, System Manager won't take the screen back, even when a keyboard shortcut is used to try to bring it up.

And often the keyboard shortcut assigned to killing applications won't come up either.

Both of these need to be more able to take over control of the desktop and dominate buggy applications.

Windows Task Manager has this ability, and will almost always come up no matter how many things have crashed.

Also, add links to shut down, reboot, or restart the windowing manager.

It would be great if the GNOME Games set is split into separate packages, as out of the 10 or so games I only actually want 2 or 3 which means I have to hide the rest with the menu editor.

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'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?

I like Rhythmbox a lot! I love the cover art retrieving functionality, but I think it would be perfect if Rhythmbox use the cover art in the local HD (inside the album folfer would be great).

Nothing important, but nice.

Thanks a lot!!

Most gnome software that has tabs allow to extract certain tab into a new window just by dragging the tab into a free space of a screen. For example, gedit and gnome-terminal acts in this way. But not nautilus - it allows only to reorder tabs, not to extract them. I think Nautilus should support this extracting, in order to keep UI consistency.

Allow users to easily arrange and edit their gnome panels by locking and unlocking the whole contents of a panel at once. This idea is taken from the Enlightenment (v17) which has the feature.

This is a problem if I want to add a new shortcut to my panel and I want to put it in the middle of a set of other shortcuts which are all locked. I have to unlock half of them to be able drag the new icon to into place and then lock them all again.

It seems like it would be easy to provide a lock/unlock all option, perhaps it could be activated along with the new (in Intrepid) "Allow panel to be moved" option.

under "system settings" there should be an icon called "computer specifications"
and in there it would show for instance:

Pentium IV 2000Mhz
2GB 533mhz DDRAM
jadijadi video card with x mb of ram
etc...

Currently i find it not very obvious how to find my computers specifications.
I have kubuntu, by the way.

There are a lot of themes available for download from http://www.gnome-look.org/, but it would be nice if some of the best ones that are not currently included with Ubuntu WERE included by default. What would it hurt to include a few more?

When one starts Synaptics manager it takes a long time to be available for use (I am using 1.7GHz Dualcore/1GB RAM!!!).

After that we have to click on "Search" and then type what we want. But most of the time when starting Synaptic the first thing you want is to search for something.

So I suggest that "Search" should not depend on a click to show it's input text bar but rather it could show a large bar at the top with focus as it fires up, so we may start typing as soon as we see the program running.

After one search is complete it should focus the search box back so we search again without our tired mouse.

Pulse Audio is now in Hardy! The work is never over though and there are several remaining issues to be solved and enhancements to be made for 8.10. A new GUI is needed to replace the old one for audio control if the features of Pulse Audio are to be taken advantage of. It would be nice to see them accessible by default to raise the "coolness" factor as well as enhancing the usability of the current system. Currently, for example, there is no way to change Pulse Audio's default sound card through the existing GUI without installing extra packages, nor can you change ALSA's default sound card (you can only change the default for the sounds made in Gnome, but not for any other programs which use ALSA). These extra Pulse Audio controls should be merged with or replace the current system, or new ones should be made and merged with or replace the current system, or the current ones changed/enhanced. When other sound servers are selected, certain features could be grayed out if unavailable to keep everything sound system agnostic. This will also allow configuration of ALSA as well for those programs which still rely on it (and fix the above problem with ALSA as well).

Idea #2: There are still many programs that use ALSA, which is a remaining issue mentioned in the linked blueprint. If more programs were only made to be agnostic so that users can use whichever sound system they desire, that would be an ideal and much more permanent fix so that patching these programs later wouldn't be required. If some kind of standard is needed to help with this issue, the Ubuntu community could help take part in pushing for that standard "interface", and that would really help. It's sad when programs themselves have to be updated if a different sound server is desired, so it's a problem that should be fixed once and for all with a good, easy, standardized sound interface/language available for all programs to use if there isn't one in existence already. It's those kind of changes that will really make Ubuntu/Linux as a whole much more powerful and flexible and allow greater program adoption, competition, and use down the road. This, IMO, makes this idea more important than idea #1, or installing PA by default, or anything else on this subject, even though those are important too. :)

P.S., Brainstorm won't let me continue because it recognizes the Blueprint URL and won't allow an override, since this idea is a lot different. Overriding should be allowed, but for now I'm altering the URL.

In order to promote the gaming side of Ubuntu, it could be launched a "Games for Ubuntu" contest. This contest could be positive in two aspects:

-Attract game developpers to Ubuntu
-Provide more games to the gamers that use Ubuntu

The contest could have just one or several games categories (for instance, shooters, puzzles, strategy, etc.). This would not only promote the development of new games for Ubuntu, it could also encourage existing teams to finalize their projects in order to present them to the contest.

The price could be something material or something more symbolic (like a trip to the Ubuntu central offices) in order not to overcharge the organizational costs.

One interesting way for raising the quality of the games presented would be providing some kind of resources, like kits for developing 3D games, wikis about technical aspects, forums for contacting with programmers, musicians, graphic artists, etc.

In short, I would like to have the PCM volume for my laptop's built in speakers and the PCM volume for my external speakers/headphones to be treated differently.

The maximum volume of my built-in laptop speakers isn't very loud. Because of that, I wouldn't mind maxing out my PCM volume for my built-in speakers.

With my headphones or speakers, on the other hand, could blast my ears off if I wanted. The volume range I'm comfortable with for external audio is not nearly the same as my built-in speakers. With my external speakers, which with the exception of bass volume is solely controlled by the audio source, over three pushes on the volume up button on my computer from mute will make the neighbors complain with 100% reliability. Although some people enjoy louder audio, I honestly don't want my neighbors to complain

Because of this, I would want my PCM volume for external audio to be lower than it would be with the internal speakers.

In essence, I would like to control the master volume on a different scale for external audio than I would with my built-in audio. I switch between the two enough that it would make quite an impact to be able to maintain settings independently for each audio output device.

Currently, the gnome-panel uses an insane amount of RAM. Some users have reported it using up to 110mb of RAM! We cannot let something so small be such a huge memory hog!

(Note: This idea is different to #368 - excessive ram usage as this is an idea for a specific issue)

The notification area original goal is to notify the user. Sadly, a lot of applications abuse it and use it as a simple icon dock (like under Windows).

This is a violation of the HIG ( http://developer.gnome.org/projects/gup/hig/2.0/desktop-notification-area.html ), makes the notification area clutered and a lot less useful.

For people with no prior Windows experience, it also seems to be completely counter-intuitive and non understandable (why are some application there and some other in the panel).

I suggest to consider each abuse of the notification area a bug and that, by default, application use the notification area according to the HIG. (Gaim for example, can use the notification area only if you have a new message, which is the way the HIG recommands to use this feature).