Contributor komputes

I ran into a guy who did something to screw up his security settings and couldn't find out precisely what. he eventually had to reinstall. A "System Restore" option would have been a good idea for him. I don't think it wil be useful as it would be under Windows, but in the event of a lockout or something getting seriously broken, it would be a godsend to new users. It could be as simple as a cron script that takes snaphosts of the system after every logout or administrative change and allows you to rollback the changes.

Ok, this is a challenge for all Ubuntu-developers.

I hate two things:

1. Printers
2. Backup

My dislike for printers and configuration is already targeted in Intrepid Ibex in the joint venture Ubuntu/Linux Foundation with OpenPrinting.

I would LOVE to see increased efforts around my second point: Backup.

I want a backup routine that is as seamless as anything else in Ubuntu. Perhaps something like Apples time machine.

Is it possible to make doing backup easy and fun?

network-manager should more options to create shared or ad-hoc connection.

I suggest the following options for internet sharing:
1) wifi w/time-out (which we currently have)
2) wifi w/o time-out
3) wifi presenting itself as AP instead of ad-hoc
4) sharing internet connections (bridging two networks or "internet sharing") and deciding weather the client computer is NAT'ed with its own DHCP server, or given an address through DHCP on the same network as the host computer.

The default gnome games for solitaire, minesweeper, etc are really the best out there, but I hate that if I remove one game through "Add/Remove Programs" it removes all of them! Why?

This will not only confuse, but also really annoy most users. A reason should at least be given. I know there are easy ways around this, but most average users are going to want to use the easy package manager... I mean, that's what it's there for right?

The point of ubiquity-preserve-home is that it's supposed to work smoothly behind the scenes using Ubuntu's Installer "Ubiquity".

This feature seems to be missing from the Alternate CD, which means that people who cannot boot from the Live CD cannot do do this kind of recovery. I propose we create an alternatecd-preserve-home initiative to create the same recovery options.

What you can currently do with a Live CD
If you choose not to format the partition assigned to "/", then everything on that partition that would cause problems for an Ubuntu installation should be removed (e.g. the contents of /boot, /etc, /lib, /usr, etc.), but /home and other unknown directories that might contain data will be preserved.

Doing this does not require an explicit action by the user, other than choosing manual partitioning and *not* formatting the partition assigned to "/". This may be used as a last resort to restore Ubuntu to default at the point of installation but will preserve the /home directory.

This is very possible on the Live CD. When trying this from the Alternate CD I get the following errors:
1) Debbotstrap Warning - Failure while configuring base packages.
2) Unable to install busybox-initramfs

Ubiquity should detect the hardware automatically and ask me to install for example nvidia driver. I do not want to install this driver after reboot and then reboot again.

My idea is to integrate compressed archives to that they may be viewed & expanded/collapsed within nautilus. Files could me moved to another folder (decompress) or moved to another archive. For archive types (different compression standards) make it easy for people to install packages like rar and 7zip to add that functionality.

Add/Remove has multiple bluetooth entries that should be displayed to the user as one metapackage containing: kbluetooth, kbtobexclient, Kinputwizzard, kbluemon, Kblueclock, Bluetooth Obex Server

Ubuntu ships with GIMP as preinstalled graphics program. GIMP is a really impressive tool, once you figured out how it works. But there are a lot of people out there, who only need a fraction of the things GIMP can do. There are a lot of simple image editing tasks which can be done with simple programs:

John needs some help to do certain things on Ubuntu. He takes a screenshot of a program and tries to mark his problem with a hand painted error and some text.

Mark has been on a conference trip. He want's to remember the people he met, so he pulls a group picture from his digicam and marks everyone with a name tag.

Under MS Windows MS Paint fills this gap. Don't lough, I know a lot of people who use this program quite often. It does exactly what those people want to do. Nothing more, nothing less. For linux there are some mspaint alternatives [1][2]. But they could need some makeover (in the case of gpaint) or a targeted at a different users (tuxpaint is a program for kids).

[1] http://www.gnu.org/software/gpaint/
[2] http://www.tuxpaint.org/

Pressing CTRL+Z on Desktop and Nautilus undo the last action.
for example when moving a file, CTRL+Z move back that file.

on both of my ubuntu 7.10 boxes, tracker search tool does not work per default. They find nothing.
My suggestion is to make it work, or else remove it.

when you have used search to find a file in nautilus you can (like in WinXp) right click and open containing folder. as it stands i have to go in properties and find where it is then copy and paste this into the address bar.

Everyone by now has seen the world famous mockups of what Ubuntu apparently should look like. The problem is that what is shown in those mockups is not yet possible with the current way gnome works.

I worry with everyone clambering for this mythical theme and with time running out before 8.10 ships, what will end up happening is Ubuntu will ship with the same old problematic brown and orange theme that is so hated by a lot of people.

There is a solution though...

The Dust theme
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Artwork/Incoming/Intrepid/DustTheme

The Dust theme has gotten a lot of praises on Digg and is easily as sexy as anything I've personally seen for Linux (and I'm not usually a fan of dark themes), bust most promising of all... is actually possible with the current technology we have at our disposal.

It's time to be bold! Stop defaulting to the same brown and orange and make a big bold change. Embrace Dust.

Yes you will get a few idiots who will say it's too like Vista just because it's black, but ignore them people. The wider tech community will praise Ubuntu for finally ditching its dorky themes and becoming sophisticated and sexy. New users will be eager to try out this Ubuntu thing they have heard so much about.

1)small tree browser in the left pane( like the one in windows explorer, its convenient for quickly browsing the hierarchy'). The tree like structure in the "detailed" view on the right pane is very close to what i am talking abt. but, it needs to be on the left side with smaller icons so that it can fit into a smaller left pane.

2) Tabbed browsing instead of opening multiple windows

3) responsiveness, nautilus needs to render much faster that it currently does. Since the file explorer is one of the most frequently used app, ppl get easy frustrated when it doesn't work as expected.

4) There should be an option to apply a view setting (icons,details,etc) system wide( for all folders in the system) , that is, not remembering view setting for each folder and using a global view setting.

5) Dragging an entity should make it transparent. If not done, this tends to cover up the entity on which you are dropping it on. If transparency is not achievable due to some limitation in X server, show only the outline while dragging.

6) The shorcuts in the left pane, when right clicked should have context menu similar to that of a normal folder.

Nautilus could detect if a folder contains a majority of a certain type of files and adapt the type and number of columns to provide more useful details.

I think of pictures folders, where it could show exif informations about pictures like the resolution of the picture and its capture date (in addition to the modification date)

I also think of music folders, where it could show the bitrate,the length and the (ID3) tags of the music files.
I think this would be very useful.

In addition, the ability to add/remove columns should be available by the right click on the listview header.

Please see the comments for further ideas

From #6245 (merged):

Having an extra column in the list showing something like "23x456" would be ideal, because you could see the info for all the files in the folder at once.

Have the info in the status-bar would be better than what we've got currently (right-click->properties->image shows the info in Nautilus, but it's not very efficient)

Maybe lots of you knows how awful looks the Ubuntu 4x3 pictures into 8x5 displays, like the usplash, and even tried to replace or disable them.

At first i tried to replace their .so files by patching (instead of compiling sources), but finally i'm merelly disabling them from startupmanager tool

What would be interesting would be if any picture could be simply applied, can be the so beloved .xpm format (i really love .xpm!), or any other like .png, .tif, .bmp, .gif, etc.

(i don't know if usplash is related to grub or kernel)

As much as Ubuntu gains in uniqueness from its default color scheme, the theme is not necessarily going to be liked by everybody. I, for one, do not particularly care for it.

Since the default theme is not likely to be changed (more specifically, the "Human" color scheme), why not make an easy way for the user to optionally change it after installation? Of course, it is possible to do this now, but it takes a significant amount of knowledge and time to manually modify:

-GNOME theme
-GNOME wallpaper
-GNOME icon set
-GNOME splash
-GDM theme
-Boot splash (Usplash)
-GRUB theme
-etc.

There should be an option to click ONE button and have all of these things change to another theme/color scheme. Furthermore, Ubuntu should include at least one built-in alternative theme to Human (to maximize the potential of the one-click theme switcher idea).

If Ubuntu truly wants to be the "Linux for Human Beings," it needs to maximize the ability for the user to choose his or her own options. Creating a facade of earth-tones and calling it "Human" is a bit questionable and misleading. Rather, it is this one point--the ability to make choices--that is the quintessential characteristic of being Human.

Usplash (the spash screen shown during startup) currently bows out once gdm flips the vt. It would be better if it continued to display while X started, and only switched when gdm is completely ready for login. And when autologin is enabled, it should continue until the desktop is fully loaded and ready to use.

ubuntu usplash background is very dull, just dark black.
Why not make it brown or any other suitable color?

Take a look on Fedora and OpenSUSE
http://media.arstechnica.com/news.media/450/opensuse_boot.png
http://media.arstechnica.com/news.media/450/fedora_boot.png

Right now we have three package managers: gnome-app-install, Synaptic, and the .deb installer.

Why can't these be one application?

give gnome-app-install a backend to handle .deb files, or give it an administrative mode where it has all the power tools that synaptic has. Start somewhere. But end with one spot to manage every application installed on my system, no matter how it got there.

As a side note, another idea was automated install of tarballs. I know this will never be a perfect system because not all tarballs use the generic install method. But maybe push for some way to seperate and deal with those who do use the generic method.

There should be absolutely no reason for anyone to say that its easier to install, manage, and update apps on any other platform than Linux!