Contributor lcampagn

I guess everybody has experienced the rather long boot up times in Ubuntu (particularly with laptops). I know they are already working on it, but the change from feisty to gutsy was a pain in the ass in terms of boot up speed.
A default WinXP installation beats Ubuntu's boot up time by far!! That shouldn't be allowed fellas!!

I therefore propose to the development team (both Ubuntu and by extension Gnome)to work on the improvement of boot up times in Ubuntu systems.

First of all: What is the difference between Preferences and Administration? For example: why do I see 'Encryption and Keyrings' in Preferences and 'Keyring Manager' in Administration? What is the difference between 'Default Printer' and 'Printing'? Why do I have to disable the Tracker under Sessions and not under Search and Indexing? And why are these menu's so large? I have 24 items in Preferences (they don't even fit on my screen!) and 18 items in Administration. To put all this stuff in a popup menu is bad interface design imho. Besides, the number of option should be much smaller. A few suggestions:

- Merge 'Screensaver', 'Screen Resolution' and 'Screens and Graphics'.
- Merge 'Network', 'Network Proxy' and 'Network Tools'.
- Merge 'Update Manager, Synaptic Package Manager, Software Sources'.
- Merge 'Encryption and Keyrings', 'Authorizations', 'Keyring Manager'.


Below are all settings I can visit via the System menu. This is just way too much.


-- Preferences --
Universal Access
About Me
Appearance
Bluetooth
Default Printer
Encryption and Keyrings
Keyboard
Keyboard Shortcuts
Main Menu
Mouse
Network Proxy
PalmOS Devices (I don't have one)
Power Management

[....]

It is very frustrating when you get caught out after 30 boots and the system does a full check. Especially if you are about to give a presentation or you just need to read one bit of information. The Ubuntu team have done a great job of speeding up the boot time but this irritation undoes all the good work.

Possible solutions and further explanation:
http://micrux.net/?p=52

I think Ubuntu should come with a really sleek media program. Rhythm Box is the best we have and it really just looks like a standard gray window. I would love to see some sleek design idea go into this.

I'm constantly frustrated by applications stealing my focus. There should be some way for me to ensure that when I begin typing somewhere, an overzealous application will never pop up in front of what I'm working on.

If an application needs my attention, it's task bar button should simply pulse so I can turn my attention to it when I'm ready. Pidgin does this; why not everything else?

On Mac OS X, Growl provides a system-wide way to notify the user that something has happened without getting in the way. I'd very much like to see Ubuntu adopt something like that.

Expansion of Add Remove Programs - show user-provided descriptions, feature lists, screenshots, comments, ratings, integration with launchpad. Initial page should be top-rated apps, or newest apps. Managed by a webapp?

Or... leave it as it is, but create a website displaying all the great software available for ubuntu including all the features mentioned above with apturl links to install.

From #4613 (merged):

It should be indicated how much I'll have to download to install something.

We have download limits here and well... quite often I exceed them. It would be useful to indicate how big the download is going to be.

There's a very old application called Xmove which does not work well at all. What would be very helpful, is to be able to SSH into a box, (ssh -Y) and run a gui application directed to the local X server (via ssh -Y), but have the X application **detachable**!! The 'screen' command is limited to shell-based programs, but this would be for gui applications that draw to the remote X server via 'ssh -Y'.

So, if the ssh tunnel disconnected, or if I wanted to detach and pick it up again later, I could simply detach it as simply as one detaches a bash shell using 'screen', but for a gui application. The way ssh works now, if I lose that SSH connection, the gui-application dies with the SSH session.

Of course, VNC and NX (nomachine) provide this, but they're **whole desktop** solutions. If one works often with remote-gui applications (as I do) forcing the WHOLE DESKTOP to the client really kills my real desktop, and I cannot easily run both local and remote applications without some creative sizing of the remote-desktop.

The versatility of 'ssh -Y' allows for single-application mapping over remote connections, but there's no way to safely detach it, and allow it to continue to run and then re-attach to it at a later time.

Perhaps this is more of an ssh request than an Ubuntu-specific request (though it is discussed in some Ubuntu forums). Regardless, it's one I've been trying to do for some time.

Cheers!

Should immediately shutdown/reboot without waiting any longer, basically like "sync && shutdown -f"

(This function could even be somewhat hidden by requiring something like ctrl-buttonclick)