Contributor nazgand

The 'Open With...' option in the right-click context menu in Nautilus merely spits out a seemingly arbitrary list of program options to choose from. While there are no doubt ways of registering file extensions with a given program, it is not always the case that you wish to open with the same program. Sometimes Nautilus remembers which programs you have used and adds them to the context menu, but this is sporadic, and appears to depend on the chmod setting of a file amongst other things.

This dialogue would be greatly improved with intelligent ordering of the options - if I have previously used "Text Editor" to open a .pl file, then move that to the top of the list. Likewise, if I have used a custom command, give that as an option at the top of the list.

Furthermore, as Nautilus appears to do a small sniff of files anyway for its awesome 'mini preview' icons, it must be aware that a file is primarily text / binary etc. This could then be used as a factor in the Open With options as well (so I do not get Mplayer as the 5th option for my .pl files for example)

Imagine if Wine was included by default in your Ubuntu installation, and upon installation, as well as offering to transfer your users, documents and personal settings from Windows... Ubuntu actually offered to transfer your installed applications onto Wine.

This would be the ultimate, final and comprehensive step in making the transition from Windows to Ubuntu seamless. Not only does Ubuntu offer free software equivalents of everything you could want, not only does it allow you to install and use your Windows on Linux, but Ubuntu actually copies your previously installed programs on Windows for you, and configures Wine to run them.

With the coming advent of Wine 1.0 Ubuntu could start by just offering support for the top 10 applications on Wine's release criteria apps. Gradually support for more applications could follow.

From Pure Windows->WUBI->Ubuntu installation with Windows apps, this would make a painless chain of options that would finally allow people to be weaned onto free software.

Firefox extensions are a pain to maintain in the repositories, and very often lag behind when updating them. They should be removed as they are EXTREMELY easy to install from Firefox itself.

Ubufox may be an exception due to its nature though.


If you liked this idea, check out my other ideas.

it violates privacy.

At least make it possible to disable it

On Brainstorm we vote for things that cost developer time.

But the currency which we use to influence developers (our votes) costs nothing.

Since votes are not a scarce item, people are likely to vote +1 for things that are of little enough importance to them that they would never trade anything of value for. Also they may give a -1 to things that they don't really understand.

The idea is to only give each user, say, 4 new votes a day, but let them roll over. I believe this will cause users to spend their votes more carefully and give a lot more helpful comments and +0's.

It's kind of like Slashdot's moderation system. You only have so many mod points per day. This increases the value of modpoints so you give them out more carefully.

Yes I thought about people creating extra accounts. Consider though that is already the case. You can get more votes even on individual ideas TODAY by creating extra accounts.

Currently you can only select 16-bit or 24-bit color but not 32-bit color. Now I know that lcd displays can only support up to 24-bit color, even though video cards have been able to support 32-bit color for quite sometime. But I think its better to let the lcd display to dither the 32-bit color down to 24-bit color. It definitely looks better when playing back 1080p HD Video in Windows since it is in 32-bit. But it looks terrible when playing back the same 1080p HD Video in Ubuntu since it is outputting 24-bit color directly from the video card instead of outputting 32-bit color directly from the video card and letting the lcd display dither the color down to 24-bit.

The i386 ISOs do not have anything to do with Intel or the 386 cpus specifically just as the amd64 are not specific to AMD processors. Additionally these descriptors are practically meaningless to non-techies.

What matters for the decision between the ISOs is the difference between 32bit and 64bit, not intel and amd, so why not just call them that way, and thus take away the burden of having to be a cpu technician to understand them?

EDIT: As a compromise, to avoid confusion of the x86/IA ISOs with those for other architectures, descriptors like PC32bit and PC64bit might also be acceptable as that is likely the maximum a home user knows about his or her computer.

Sorry, I just realized where the edit button was.

Hardy has been released with Firefox 3, but many popular extensions are not yet compatible with Firefox 3. As the wide availability of extensions is a major selling point for Firefox, this is a significant regression from Gutsy. Providing Firefox 3 compatible versions of popular extensions would make the transition to Hardy much more pleasant.

For some reason [1] below does not mention the problem of toolbar addon buttons going missing in Firefox 3. In any case a work around for this is to instruct the user to manually add the button by right-clicking the toolbar and selecting Customize.

[1] http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Updating_extensions_for_Firefox_3
[2] http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Building_an_Extension

I know this have been prolly said so many times, but the only reason i do not completely go to ubuntu is because of Games for Windows.

I want them to work in Ubuntu, i really do, the moment that happens, you will get a huge amount of people leaving Windows.

I think Ubuntu should have some sort of simple programming language (like BASIC on the old Apple IIs) so that people can write generic gui frontends to command line applications.

What I imagine is one or more simplistic templates, which non-expert Ubuntu users can customize to serve as a gui to various and diverse cli applications. Templates would have any number of input file selectors, to each of which could be assigned by the author a particular cli program. The template would also have check-boxes to which normal language could be written to correspond to command parameters (IE, more easily understandable than cli parameters like "-jumppad" "-toc" and "-T").

The template could be designed to include other common functions, like previewing or choosing a specific output location.

I have no idea how difficult this would be to implement, but if it could be done, I bet it would be exceedingly helpful to the community at large. Guis would pop up like mad if such a template/language could be made to work well.

The default gnome games for solitaire, minesweeper, etc are really the best out there, but I hate that if I remove one game through "Add/Remove Programs" it removes all of them! Why?

This will not only confuse, but also really annoy most users. A reason should at least be given. I know there are easy ways around this, but most average users are going to want to use the easy package manager... I mean, that's what it's there for right?

I can't add this to the bug report as it's technically not a bug. When you try to upload a file to a website that is expecting certain files such as JPG's and other images, a user will be unable to upload images if their file extensions case is different.

My wife actually stumbled on this, so here's an example based on her issue.

First step: create 4 files on the desktop:
test1.JPG
test2.jpG
test3.Jpg
test4.jpg

Now go to MySpace and log in /* you know you have an account ;) */

Now, click Add/Edit Photos, then click Upload Photos. You should be looking at a file upload app, currently titled Photo Upload - 1.3. Click Browse and browse to the Desktop. The dialog box lets you select *.jpg, *.jpeg, *.png, *.bmp, etc, etc, etc. If you navigate to the desktop you will see the only file you are able to select is test4.jpg.

Of course I knew why this happens but being that Ubuntu is Linux For Human Beings, the average joe computer user demographic that Ubuntu is targeting won't figure this out right away. And to top it off, most digital cameras create capital file extensions automatically (ie, DSC0001.JPG), and this happens with any site that limits uploads to certain file extensions, not just MySpace.

Before the dialog box lists the available files to upload based on the predefined file extensions, it should conduct the initial search for those files as case insensitive. This way, even though the list of files is limited to *.jpg, a user should still be able to see test1.JPG, test2.jpG, test3.Jpg, test4.jpg all in his/her list of files to choose from.

./neco