Because sometimes things don't sound like nearly as good an idea when you've thought on it a while. :-)

I have a laptop that I have Kubuntu installed on. It works great when I'm using it as a laptop. But at the office, I have a docking station that hooks my laptop up to an external keyboard, monitor, power supply, network, speakers, and basically turns my laptop into a desktop computer. However, my external monitor is 4:3, while my laptop monitor is widescreen, so every time I plug in, I have to change my monitor settings (resolution and screen size), and then change them back when I switch back to laptop mode. It would be really nice if it could do this detection automatically, or be able to set up settings for a second monitor that I could switch back and forth.

I'm sure a similar problem occurs with projectors, but I haven't had a chance to confirm that.

The search and incremental search functions in gedit are a bit clumsy to use because a) doesn't always scroll to view appropriate place, b) doesn't positively tell you if a term is not found, c) requires another window which gets in the way of the document.

Can all these be improved? A quick find inspired by firefox would do the trick.

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:

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
Preferred Applications
Remote Desktop
Removable Drives and Media
SCIM Input Method Setup (What is this?)
Screen Resolution
Screensaver

[....]

Screenshot program that can:

1) Draw Rectangular box
2) Screen shot of an individual window (or content in window)
3) Draw Custom shapes
4) Capture full motion (screencap)
etc...

Merge with a multi-image clipboard, ability to upload directly to web or transfer to other program.

Additional file formats .bmp, .jpg, .gif, (.flv, .mpg for screencap) etc...

Program should be native, not part of Compiz.

Currently you can only set Super by itself from the System -> Preferences -> Keyboard Shortcuts dialog. It is possible to set, but you have to start gconf-editor from the command line. In gconf-editor -> / -> apps -> metacity -> window_keybindings you have to manually type the combination, instead of pressing the desired key combination.

I just read this comment on ubuntuforums:

"I love how in Vista I can press the Start key and instantly type in stuff to find such as files or apps. Is it possible to do the same actions in ubuntu? I know there are search features and some program called Beagle seems pretty popular, but is it possible to get that same action on ubuntu?"(http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=997650)

So I thought, why not? Would it be possible to include deskbar on the gnome menubar, so that you can start searching just by clicking the apps menu or press F1?

I made a mockup to see what it would look like: http://img246.imageshack.us/img246/4394/pantallazo1zm0.png

As for not forcing it on the user, we wouldn't have to. It could be enabled or disabled, very easily, from Alacarte. So it would depend on the distributions (or the users themselves) to show it by default or not.

http://img246.imageshack.us/img246/2087/pantallazouk1.png

Using lzma compression algorithm for deb packages can save a lot of traffic and fit more packages on a DVD. I think that most users care more about download size rather than decompression time. For example, openSUSE already use lzma for rpm packages.

Some information and benchmarks about this:
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel-discuss/2007-December/002702.htm l
P.S. Sorry for bad english

Mostly of newbies, and even on long-time Linux users, and even the Linux-purists ones, used to have their home folder plenty of messy-looking documents, which seems to be important for the classical Unix file structure, which maybe must not considered bad at all.

Most of this confusion is because mostly of the applications, by disaster, uses to consider the Home folder ('~') as default folder to save documents, and not, for example the Documents folder ('~/Documents')

When '~/Documents' folder became more usual than '~', maybe most of the newbies and the older users can get more organized, and not being so disturbed about the classical Unix filesystem arrangement logic.

Automatically disable the touchpad when you are typing by specifying a number of seconds the touchpad stays inactive after you hit a button on the keyboard. This is very useful on laptops where it is very easy to accidentily touch the touchpad while typeing.