Contributor nathan_s

Presence systems allow users to set arbitrary information about themselves, such as Location:Work, Mood:Bored or Status:Out for lunch, primarily designed for online services like instant messaging.

These settings, however, could be used by the system as well, in a two-way arrangement. For example:

* A user can tell the system to turn off or tone down notifications when their status is set to "Busy"

* A user can tell the system that when a 3G network card is being used then their location should be set to "On the train"

* Power saving settings can be told to become more extreme when the user sets their status to "Away"

* If a screensaver comes on then status can be set to Idle or Away, and vice versa

* If the screen is locked then status can be set to Away

* The system could choose a network setup based on the current "Location" and could set a "Location" when known Wifi networks are discovered

There are far more possibilities than I can think of, but the presence system of this could be done with Telepathy. Since Telepathy is accessed over DBus it wouldn't be too difficult to integrate some of this functionality.

This is a very preference based idea, so should have a suitable default state and configuration tool.

On Windows pressing either Ctrl+Alt+Del or Ctrl/Shift/Esc brings up the Task Manager. If apps crash in linux many users will try these key combinations with no reward. Mapping these key combinations, by default, to the the Gnome System Monitor will help a large number of new users.

Most of the planet uses the Metric System. So why does the system default to imperial units? Make A4 the default paper size for printing, only two countries don't use it. Most people don't know what inches are so cm or mm should be the default.

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

[....]

Archives are opening in applications like File Roller. Why? When you thing about you realize that archive is nothing less than special type of folder (and folder is special type of file with defined structure dependent on filesystem). But archives can be presented as compressed folders and opens in same windows as regular folders. Why do we need to confuse user with different windows?

Working with archives will be easy as in Midnight Commander or in Total Commander or in Windows XP. And if it will be implemented like VFS (zip://path/archive.zip/subdirectory/file) or as kernel driver it will be easier due to be transparent to any application.

Update: If gvfs is not possible, mounting the archive could be another possible way to implement this.

Archive managers should be used only for creating archives with non common attributes, e.g. encrypted, splitted to multiple volumes (to fit DVD, CD, ZIP drive, Floppy)...

Note: When you try to drag big file out from the archive from File Roller you need to wait to fully uncompress file before releasing mouse button (once it started to uncompress it). It's bad and very annoying.

(Idea copied from: http://chabada.sk/better-desktop/)

Hands aloft, who's still running a machine with 32-bit CPU? Make the 64-bit compile the focus, dump Gnome and make KDE rock solid.

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.

When someone wants to unmount a volume and the mount point is used, he gets a message telling him that the volume can't be unmounted because an application uses it. The user has no idea which application is actually using it and can't remove the device.

I propose that the popup tells him which application(s) is(are) using the device and propose to terminate them (that list should be kept up to date when the app. dies).

There should be a single, low cpu app that displays all the notifications for all programs in a corner of the screen (bottom right)

It should say:

[App Title]
-----------
[Notification]

It is much better than popups and notification Icons.

Eyecandy would also be nice here - fade effect, etc.

Hi!

I'm a big fan of Images like .iso.
But it is not very easy to mount this Images.
I think there must be a Tool in Nautilus and Dolphin wich alows mounting Images with a double Click. (This feature exists int MacOS). Or with a right click on the file and then there must be a poit "Mount Image". I thick that would be a very use full Tool for every one.
A good example for this is CDemu.

I know there are some ohter good programs, but I think that would be the easyest way and very confortible.

Nanotron

gtk applications especially openoffice, mozilla firefox, mozilla thunderbird, ...

need an advanced & unified printing dialog which is comparable to the ones offered by microsoft's windows' printing drivers

they at least should include support for several pages per sheet (4 pages on 1 paper; 2 pages on 1 paper, duplex, etc etc)

apps like evince already support it but it's definitely missing on openoffice & firefox (where it obviously is needed the most)

a good example for offered printing options is kpdf

sorry if that functionality is already planned for the next upcoming versions of the mentioned apps

thanks ! =)

A lot of packages are not accessible via add/remove. This is ok, but maybe there should be a button like "extend search to synaptic" with an explanation what this means. Hitting the button would then open synaptic with the exact same search terms.

A lot of people only use add/remove and get stuck when not finding what they want although it's there (ready to be installed via synaptic). This could be improved with a simple button and a message in case no result is displayed ("you might want to extend your search in synaptic", clickable).

Since Brasero is being installed by default, and in order to keep consistency through the system, the "places → CD creator" menu item should launch it instead of Nautilus CD burner.

In order to avoid duplication, too, NCB should be removed altogether.

Check this out: http://thorwil.wordpress.com/2008/05/09/popup-scrollbar-concept-demo/

This would just give Ubuntu more edge and make it even more intuitive. Although for people used to the old style scrollbar it may be confusing at first glance, it would quickly become another reason to get hooked on Ubuntu :)

The package popularity contest is an excellent feature. I feel it can be expanded upon to raise awareness of useful packages without bloating up the install by adding more and more defaults. If you kept track of how long since install a package is added, you could offer new users a list of "Top 10" list of packages that most users add to their fresh Ubuntu machines. Basically, it would be the package popularity contest, but only for packages added within 48 hours of install time.

Credit goes to stevec in http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/2785/ for this idea.

When booting ubuntu, what do you do? You turn your computer on and then either wait for it to boot, or walk away for a moment.

However when the gdm login screen pops up, you type in your username a password and then sit there waiting for gnome to load. So, If gdm could automatically begin loading the default desktop environoment whilst waiting for the user to input their username and password, this extra waiting time whilst the desktop environment loads could be reduced or eliminated.

In essence, the main purpose behind this idea is to standardise the time taken for a particular user to boot ubuntu: ie is does not matter if you logged in immediately or 20 seconds late, your desktop will still be usable at the same moment.

If the user selects to load a different desktop environment at the login screen, then simply unload the default and start loading the next one when the user logs in as normal.

Under Gutsy the "/usr/share/gnome/help/" directory is 208 MB. For every application there is a help file in many languages. I only need English, someone else may only want Spanish or French. So only install help files for the Users main/native/primary Language.

--With more and more work to create more detailed help files the help file directory is likely to grow quickly above its current 208 MB.

--Under "/usr/share/gnome/help/rhythmbox" if you remove the non english languages you can save 2.9 MB;

Here is a sampling of what I found if you removed the non-english files (I randomly looked at 3 different ones):
/usr/share/gnome/help/rhythmbox 2.9 MB
/usr/share/gnome/help/windows 6.5 MB
/usr/share/gnome/help/about-ubuntu 4.3 MB

--Also since these files are XML files (with a few images), compressing them will greatly reduce the size further. You can use the GZ format which webservers use to reduce bandwidth which the browser auto uncompresses and displays.

I preformed a test by compressing the help directory with gzip "gzip -r --best help" the help directory went from 162.1 MB to 83.6 MB. Thats almost half the size.

When you press ctrl alt f1 ect you get a terminal indepenant of X and is wonderfull if you know what your doing, but say my mum accadentally presses ctrl alt f1. Not knowing really what she is doing or the cat lands on the keyboard and puts it into a terminal. She would think the computer is broken and be very confused on how to fix it I think we should put a discription as to what it is and how to get back to X

If the hardware changes to much, the graphic desktop doesn't start and newbies doens't understand a lot.
So the panic starts, because of the personal files...

It would be nice to have something like "repair modus" or "save mode", sth. really easy that newbies are not afraid and can fix the problem step by step.

Maybe a Menupoint "generate ultimate start-cd" would be helpful, too.

When many applications are installed the vertical menu becomes very long. It's not very easy to spot the right application and it's not very elegant. When it reaches a certain limit it should develop also horizontally. Maybe this is more of a Gnome problem though!