Contributor natureflow

let's vote and discuss whether it would be good if we can see who and how voted our ideas. i think this after i have read http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/11020/ "Admin - check that negative voted ideas not being voted by Other OS supporters"

maybe, it is better to make this optional: selectable by voter?. or may be make it selectable by idea poster: that he can refuse anonymous votes...

i forgot, but adding this to description (after some 20 minutes): i am going to vote -1.
and i am adding: it is also after i wrote an idea, but it has -9 votes now but nobody said why he votes down. that it is: http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/11098/ "make that "9gb drive"s and mounting them as "disk-1" other way"

This idea works along with Idea #80: Clean up Preferences and Administration. (http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/80/)

But it's not a dupe because what I suggest is that all this should be merged into 1 Control Center - this is much more user-friendly and less confusing - especially to those who are new to ubuntu.

Many ideas posted here suggest that Ubuntu should look and|or feel like WindowsXP|Vista|OSX arguing that if so more Windows|OSX users would switch to Ubuntu. Often the suggested methods to achieve this are simplifying and|or even modifying Ubuntu in such a way that functionality, customization or adaptation get removed or limited. I don't think that this is the direction the Ubuntu development should follow. Because:

1. Creating a fool-proof system too often results in creating a systems for fools only. I personally think that Vista is the best example for this. By trying to make Vista more secure they made Vista more annoying. Starting to protect the system and the user's files from the user himself brought the system one step closer to foolproofness but also tends to be most irritating to the rest of us. Also by making everything as easy as possible alternatives, customization possibilities and adaptation are often eradicated.
2. By imitating Windows you most likely will attract Windows users. They will work with Ubuntu for a while then change back to Windows because you can't work on Ubuntu like on Windows and it also doesn't behave like Windows.

Windows and OSX might have some nice|useful features. And most of them are implemented into Gnome|KDE by now. So I think that we should stop with copying but start creating. Of course useful features should still be made available to Linux but the creation of new features should be more important. And by implementing new features, copied or created, functionality, customization and adaptation should never be limited. Also if it means that that particular feature might not be that "easy" to handle. e.g. providing a simpler GUI for apt is okay but replacing the package manager with a setup.exe like system would limit functionality.

Ubuntu should attract users with innovation, stability and possibility and not by providing "just an alternative". Constantly coping from Windows|OSX also demonstrates a certain inferiority. And Linux|Ubuntu are no more inferior. We slowly but surely caught up by now, so now we should start to overtake.

I don't want Ubuntu to be like Windows or OSX!
I want Windows and OSX to be like Ubuntu!

[....]

It seems to me(someone who has just recently acquired some limited knowledge about Linux and FOSS in general) that one of the most difficult fights within the community is ver the value of cool features vs bloat.
There are many middle grounds that allow the community to satisfy both sides including settings customization and program diversity but the one that is possibly the most useful is the ability to add and remove large features. Also in many ways a plugin system makes it easier for 3rd party developers and help speed up open source development. I think that plugins ad related feature flexibility models are close to fundamental parts of open source programs. I think it's no coincidence that Add-ons became such a big part of Firefox. That said many programs don't seem to have an easy way to work with plugins or maybe they have a way to edit plugin options but no easy way to add new ones.
I think that it would be nice to develop a universal plugin system for all programs that don't have time to create their own or wouldn't interact well with a native system(either because they are meant to be extremly lite or maybe they don't have a good place to attach an add-on menu button).The programs that wants to use it could have "hooks" to attach it to attach it to a menu or could let the manager run outside of the program.
The best part of this is that we could have the manager manage adding new plugins for all the standard ways of adding plugins such as moving directories and compiling(the way plugins of different types work on the program, where the program should download them from, and what it should do to get the plugin working with the program would be based on a configuration text file for that program), also we could have a very nice interface for finding/downloading new plugins. I'm thinking of a mix beetween add/remove and the Firefox add-on manager.

instead of gdebi pakage installer ..
.deb files should use some glade files inside or and file to have an interface, and as soon as the deb file is clicked the backend of gdebi should run and and the interface in the front and the interface should be given only minimal information about the installation and stress should be given on features.. this not only will make installation appealing and user friendly but also gives user more clear picture of the software while looking through its features.

Keeping in mind that more advanced/new applications require more juice from our systems, on old hardware this generally results in an ever more slow responding system with a low ammount of Ram.

Buy a new pc you may ask? That's juist evading the challenge. :)

Why not treat the old system as a low end portable device?
Low end devices like say Apple's ipod Touches and iPhones only permit one app at a time to run in foreground.

By heavily using the nice command to set priorities to the running app,
the user will get the feeling that his system is more responsive.

Background applications, or simply running applications which the user isn't currently running can be stopped allowing full priority to the app which the user has highlighted.

Ofcourse it's going to be tricky and not always be the best solution in all user cases, but I figure it worth thinking about it.

There is a Control Center that comes with GNOME. However, Ubuntu hides this easy-to-use Control Center by default. There is a way to make it appear, but that requires editing menus, which could make novices very uncomfortable. My suggestion is that Ubuntu put it on the desktop and on the System Menu.

Personal configuration in the first session.

Example 1:
Do you have Wi-Fi or Blutooth?
If don't use it, the system or script will be remove configuration to Grub or in the session initial make boot more fast.

Example 2:
Do you have HP printing?

Others configuration:
Splash Screen; PC or Lap Top; Questions about boot; initial programs that will be running in start; update System, configure ubuntu drives and codecs restrict, and many other configuration.

It wold be access in the Sistem/Administration when is will be necessary.

This system doesn't need a migration from plain text to xml.
About all config files of about all programs have a simple scheme: a key followed by a value.
This system should read a file, parse line by line, find a match of the key in an xml file and apply the change.
It will be useful to bring a system in defaults, to create gui for every programs, to upgrade a system without change users' customizations.
Cases:

- Lucas wants to configure Xorg, he launches this configurator and with a gui he will be able to change all the keys.

- William doesn't want to upgrade his system, because a major change will destroy all his customizations. But packet mantainer uses this system and will be added only the new keys, without touch the other.

- Meredith made a disaster. The configurator read keys and value from a special xml file and system will be reverted in an usable condition.

Ask freely.

Show a counter of how many times ubuntu has been downloaded on the homepage

Under the orange loading bar I think it should say what version it is loading. The writing can be quite small or even grey on the black background but I think it should be there.

I don't know if this is possible/worth it,but at least here in Romania,Yahoo Messenger is being used by absolutely everyone.It's a big pain in the *** to use Pidgin.Sure,it can send (and recieve!)files now,but webcam,photo share and other features are missing.GYachI looks promising,but it's interface scares the user out.

Can't Canonical make a partnership with Yahoo to at least get part of the code,in order to make a compatible Yahoo messenger client for Linux/Unix?

I don't really care if the final product(if it will exist) will be GPL'ed or not,I just want to use it(as I use Skype,but unfortunately that's not so popular,only 3 contacts in my list)

Sorry for my preety crappy english

Ban those corporate asshats from Microsoft and Apple from visiting Brainstorm.
They are uncreative and come here to take our ideas.

Like in Vista, they were like: "Thanks to the ground-breaking and security revolutionizing work of Microsoft Research, we are proud to present to you User Account Control (UAC)!". They even patented it.
I am like what? We've had sudo for 28 years!

Then they're like "We offer you Microsoft Research latest innovation the Windows PowerShell, a scriptable command-line shell!"
And I am like, yeah we've had that too. We've had bourne shell since 1977!

Then they're like "Microsoft Research presents you our latest innovation; Server Core will let you administer Windows Server 2008 directly from the command-line instead of from the graphical user interface!".
Hello? We've had that since the 60's.

Disable the IPV6 when installing, or at least give the choice to the user:
some Java applets don't deal very much with ipv6, causing the applet not to start / to crash.
To disable ipv6, the module ipv6 has to be blacklisted. And a reboot is necessary. Very bad experience!

Actually, we have 5 wallpapers, 9 themes and 80+ SCREENSAVERS!!!

WHAT THE HELL!

Who need that amount of screensavers?

I think we should vote five to the default installation, and the other ones comes with a optional package?

Isn't gnome "keep it simple"?

For me just a "dim screen" is enough for default.

In "Save As..." or "Open File" dialog boxes, add an easy-to-find option to hide Directories with names started with ".", such as for instance ".ssh" ".cpan" ".config"
(where users are not supposed to save anything into, anyway).

Over time, there are just too many of these directories getting added by lots of applications.

These days, when I go into my home directory to save a file, or to open a file, I have to scroll down a few screens full get to the first folders which are not .dot folders . Is there a way to add a checkbox for specifying "no .dot folders" (or similar), to hide these .dotted directories.

I know it is probably a gnome issue, but maybe it can be fixed easily.

Include Compiz Fusion Manager by default

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 :)

Helo
Please make it possible to hide file extensions.
Regards

the voting should be open for public, the registration process is short but it will shorten the voting in my opinion, I think ubuntu brainstorm will get more responses when it's open.