Contributor knb

In "Save As..." or "Open File" dialog boxes, add an easy-to-find option to hide Directories with names started with ".", such as for instance ".ssh" ".cpan" ".config"
(where users are not supposed to save anything into, anyway).

Over time, there are just too many of these directories getting added by lots of applications.

These days, when I go into my home directory to save a file, or to open a file, I have to scroll down a few screens full get to the first folders which are not .dot folders . Is there a way to add a checkbox for specifying "no .dot folders" (or similar), to hide these .dotted directories.

I know it is probably a gnome issue, but maybe it can be fixed easily.

There are already many free fonts available for ubuntu.
Unfortunately, many of them are incomplete. There must be an easier way to display and remove bad fonts from a system.

I know that there is the "gnome-specimen" software tool which finds most fonts installed on the machine, and which can display selected fonts on the screen. However, this little software tool is not good enough.

Here is a rationale for this, given in brainstorm mode.

Note that I am a German user, and my generic test sentence is not "the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog"
but
"Zwölf Boxkämpfer jagen Viktor quer über den großen Sylter Deich."

When you try a sentence like this, it is immediately obvious that many fonts don't even have umlauts such as "ä", "ü", "Ü", or sharp-s "ß" etc. Thus these fonts are completely useless to me. I would like to get rid of them. Or I'd like to annotate or tag them. Create something like a short-list of prefrered fonts.
Or maybe fonts should come with a rich set of metadata. Which can be browsed.

Moreover I would prefer to not even have such fonts installed in the first place.

I think this has quite a few implications for the Ubuntu and the Open Office installers. Perhaps it can be done, though.

I use quite a few wine applications, to test web pages in Windows-Specific web browsers such as netscape for windows, for instance. ;-)

I'd like to tag the browser icons on my gnome desktop with a label indicating "this is a wine application". So what would be more appropriate than the inclined little red wine glass, aka as the default wine icon. Sadly, there is no wine icon in the default collection of launcher emblems. So please add one to this default collection. It would make the emblems much more useful immediately (to me, that is).

In the ubuntu installer,
Please improve the page of the installation wizard that shows the selection of the keyboard type.

Autodetection works pretty well already.

However, most labels of keyboard types are either too generic and / or too cryptic to understand.
For instance I still have no idea what the -nodeadkeys suffix means.

On the other hand, there is no choice of a "windows keyboard" (the common keyboard that has two keys with windows-symbols and one menu-item-mouse-arrwo key) in the selection box of the wizard. Although many users might sit on a former windows PC, e.g. trying a live-cd, and expect a choice that sounds more familiar.

Adding a small description of the keyboard type to each item might be a lot of work, but it would reduce confusion of first-contact users and thus improve usability.

The Places menu does not have a "memory" as the "Recent documents" menu item. I've missed that feature a few times already.

So please add a "Recent Connections..." Menu Item to the "Places" menu, similar to the "Recent Documents..." Item (which is also in the "Places" menu.

The existing/previous Connections are in fact mounted drives, or drives that were mounted successfully in the past, but these connections/mounted drives are not in a submenu.

Maybe the UI design decision was made this way in order to make sure that only successful attempts to connect to a server are stored, and unsuccessful attempts are not memorized (cluttering the menu).