Contributor nathan_s

Canonical currently has a big problem. It needs developers. Its a vicious cycle, developers are needed to improve development, yet to increase the number of developers, we need better development programs.

The sad reality is that whilst Canonical has a wealth of development tools available, they are barely officially supported, out of date, or have no easy way of using them (like systemtap).

We need Canonical to step up and make the development environment for 9.04 a priority, so that first time linux developers, and long time developers have a powerful environment, that is officially supported by Canonical. By improving the development environment to be easy to setup, and more updated, developers are more likely to jump on board. In fact, whilst many developers consider coding on OSX to be a privilage, I have never heard the same said of Ubuntu.

Current areas we are severely lacking include:
- Eclipse is out of date in the repos and has been for ages.. Why?
- Sun and Apple have Dtrace officially supported, with a GUI frontend that really makes things easy. We don't have any support for systemtap nor have we got any comparable profiling gui.
- Windows and OSX has a fully supported out of the box development environment with the most popular languages in 2 clicks. With ubuntu, we have to manually work out which gui's we want, which tools, etc
- Debugging? Ha.. its actually quicker to port the code to OSX and use OSX's development tools in some cases then debug currently, because it supports step-backs and such.
- QT can compete against Cocoa. GTK even with Glade is a joke still. I'm not asking you to fix this, but if you want to encourage GTK development, at least have glade/eclipse integration in a developers metapackage
- Developers centre. Ubuntu has none, so developers aren't given a simple list of changes that might affect them next release, such as the change from Alsa as backend, to Pulse, so we can prepare in time. We don't even have a centralised way of really working together with other ubuntu developers.

Some may say developers can help themselves, but first impressions count. If it takes 3000 clicks to get your development environment to the standard provided by Apple in 5, whilst requiring you to also search for equivilent tools (such as dtrace which are considered standard for many OS's now) by yourself, you certainly wont prioritise the OS. By rewarding developers, with a better development environment, the end result will be a higher quality linux environment.

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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 :)

New users coming from Windows are often disoriented and don't really know the real advantages of Ubuntu or even how to use some of its basic functions (Add/Remove instead of setup.exe). An orientation would help them.

A couple of ideas for how to help them have come up, including an idea about having pop-ups for every new application that's open. The pop-up idea has a few downsides, of course, not the least of which being that pop-ups are annoying to many users, both new and experienced.

One relatively unobtrusive way to introduce new users to the basic functions of Ubuntu is to show a slideshow during the installation process. New users would probably watch the slideshow (they're waiting for the installation to finish--what else are they going to do?), while experienced users might have the option to turn off the slideshow... or they may just get up and leave, knowing that the installation won't take more than fifteen minutes.

All the packages in the software repository should include a URL hyperlink to the official website of the software.

So when you read about the software, you can click on the link to get to the official homepage, for more information.

Mozilla-firefox-adblock (https://addons.mozilla.org/pl/firefox/addon/1865) should be replaced by Adblock Plus (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1865)in Ubuntu's repositories because the Adblock isn't developed anymore (since 2004).

This is concerning the graphical and the text based installer.

It`s a bad habit introduces by microsoft. Do not ask questions in the middle of the installation after you did already started to copy things.

(1) The user starts the installation.
(2) He is asked if he wants to install.
(3) Make as many hardware tests as you need.
(4) Now ask all needed questions.
(5) Install Ubuntu in one run. Tell the user he can no go away for perhaps X minutes.

Otherwise it`s annoying. Input answer, wait a bit, input answer, wait again over and over again. You can improve 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.

In Mac OS X when you try to copy/move a file in a protected folder appears a pop-up that asks you to insert admin password.

In Ubuntu the same thing become very difficult, especilly copying multiple files: you have to access to the terminal and write a command. This could be really stressing for a new user.

Could you implement the same function seen on Mac?

When you play 'corrupted' videos in vlc, it just skips the frames it can't read. Totem on the other hand stops entirely and throws an errormessage at you. This is annoying. I'd like to see this kind of immunity in totem...

I think Ubuntu could be better known and could help associations which recycle and rebuild old hardware and computers in order to give them then to poor people (I think to "les restos du coeur" in France as an example, but there are many other associations)
Thus, Ubuntu would be really human!

ps : Maybe xubuntu should be more useful for old computers.

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.

When installing the server version we can select encrypted partition but when installing desktop we dont have this choice. Since Desktop version are more subject to be installed on Laptop I dont understand why this feature is not availlable.

I don't know why you can't pre-order 8.04 Hardy Heron CD's from the Ubuntu ShipIt site given that it's less than ten days from its release date.

The site only allows you to order 7.10 Gusty Gibbon CD's. What's the use of ordering outdated CD's that will arrive several weeks later when they will be of no use anymore?

Please, allow us to pre-order CD's of the latest version of Ubuntu.

While requesting features to the open source community which consist mainly of free workers, we may often forget to say how much we like Ubuntu and look like costumers requesting.

So you can say thank you to the thousands of developers and users who gave their time by voting for this article :)

Right now, the most likely successful migrations to Ubuntu happen for *nix experts and total novices who have someone install Ubuntu for them, but the most likely people to try Ubuntu are Windows power users--those who like a lot of configuration options but who are also used to using the GUI for tweaking options and not manually editing a text configuration file.

The most popular requests for editing the /boot/grub/menu.lst file involve changing the default boot option (to Windows instead of Ubuntu) and changing the timeout before a boot option is selected. The other less popular ones would be just bonus features, I guess.

Ubuntu should take full advantage of all available mouse buttons.
Integrate this: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/146160

cdroms are slow, don't allow to modify their content easily, they are weak and not as easy to carry as USB keys.

It would be great to provide Ubuntu as a liveUSB just as Mandriva does. We should be able to carry our distribution on any computer, manage our preferred settings (do I want binary drivers enabled ? what is my preferred resolution ?), etc.

The thing is not to make something transportable, but really a nomad system that could be used just the best way as it could on any computer.

1. There are deeply invasive performance/scalability/latency fixes for CFS regressions (vs. 2.6.24) in the 2.6.25 tree. These fixes are too invasive to be ported to the 2.6.24 kernel without significant risk.

2. Many of the driver updates/new drivers in the kernel-ubuntu package are merged into upstream as of 2.6.25. (This is always true, but the smaller the delta against upstream the better on release day).

3. Fedora 9 is based on 2.6.25 which means that key RH kernel developers are aggressively working to get the feature and performance/scalability regressions vs. 2.6.18 & 22 fixed.

4. The kgdb patch will probably be merged at the start of the 2.6.26 cycle which means the delta vs. 2.6.25 kernel should be pretty manageable. This would be really valuable from an LTS ongoing perspective.

5. The RT patch will be better maintained (and smaller) against 2.6.25. (see #3)

6. Better virtualization and SELinux support (see #3).

Given the life-cycle of an LTS release (especially this one which will finally have a meaningful chance to enter the data center) these considerations are especially important.

Obviously 2.6.25 would have to be in addition to 2.6.24 for the Hardy 8.04 LTS release time-frame, but it does allow the aforementioned benefits to be propagated forward.

Instead of using the 'browse' button of the uploadbox to select the file to upload, make is possible to drag a file from the file system into the upload box. Somehow it already shows the cursor while dragging, but on release of the mousebutton the filename in the upload box stays empty

Drag&Drop is such a intuitive and simple action - it must be promoted.
There are many things that already work in Ubuntu/GNOME/KDE with Drag&Drop, but there is much that can be improved:

- DnD an image from Firefox to the Desktop should place that image there, not a textfile with the link to the homepage.
- DnD from the icon on the left side of the URL in the Firefox address bar to the desktop should create a .desktop file with a link to that URL.
- DnD of devices onto the Pastebin should unmount them (like OSX)
- DnD of a Desktop file into a mainmenu/submenu of GNOME should create a menu item.
- fix the Nautilus-in-list-view-doesn't-accept-DnD-files issue: Launchpad bug #61237
- DnD file from anywhere (e.g. Desktop) to a folder in the "file open" "file save" dialogs.
- DnD a file into an edit box should insert a file:// link - KDE has this; Idea #3027
from Idea #4105:
- DnD Attachement from Thunderbird to Nautilus
- DnD Files From File-Roller to Nautilus
- DnD Picture from Nautilus to OOo

...and many more, please submit your ideas, I'll put them into the description!


If you like this idea, also look at my other ideas