Contributor pepperpupper

Recently I had to setup a new user account on my computer, when ever I logged into that new account it came up with a blank gray screen, the reason for this is at some time in the past my video driver became corrupted and desktop effects were turned on by default for the new user account, even though my existing account didn't use them (they make this computer run too slow). So I think by default desktop effects should be turned off, even if the system can support them, and not turned on until the user does so.

I am shocked at the Intrepid beta as I saw - what I thought to be - a blatant digression with the wallpaper and the login/logout sounds from Hardy to Intrepid.

I see for the sounds they made the packaging more freedesktop-friendly, but it still doesn't mean I like it.

Hardy
wall: http://staging.altonlabs.com/ubuntu/hardy.png
login: http://staging.altonlabs.com/ubuntu/hardy-login.wav
logout: http://staging.altonlabs.com/ubuntu/hardy-logout.wav

Intrepid
wall: http://staging.altonlabs.com/ubuntu/intrepid.png
login: http://staging.altonlabs.com/ubuntu/intrepid-login.ogg
logout: http://staging.altonlabs.com/ubuntu/intrepid-logout.ogg

(Feel free to use the links (temporarily) for your blogs. For the wallpapers, see ubuntu-wallpapers or /usr/share/wallapapers. For the sounds, see ubuntu-sounds /usr/share/sounds)

I personally - as a computer nerd - don't care much about the default wallpaper in an operating system as I know it can be changed, but first impressions mean a lot to others. It does mean a lot to me, however, as someone who is in marketing and who has been trained in design for a number of years.

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I like to use a web browser Opera, and I would like if at least one Linux distribution to the Web browser. It would be best, when the installation was a choice between Mozilla Firefox and Opera.

In Ubuntu the taskbar is using both text and icons to display the buttons for windows navigating. A operating system should never use text for functions thats is commonly used, and is possibly to have without text. The text does it hard for the brain to quickly search the taskbar and choose the right application, it's also makes it look messy.

A taskbar with only icons would be very good i think, also tabs is being implemented in almost every application, making taskbar text useless since there often only be one instance of every application. to not loose the text entirely. A mouse over could be used to display the text. (or using compiz effects to display a thumbnail of the window)

I have not taken the time to figure out how it would be implemented in Desktop Enviroment.

When I install ubuntu I must spend time installing hardware drivers as wifi, video card, and touchpad.

For nvidia and ATI users could be useful to install envying drivers if them are detected automatically when we begin ubuntu instalation.

A button in Ubuntu would say "Restart and boot to Windows", maybe on the desktop, maybe on the log off/shut down menu. There would be something equivalent to that in Windows (or more realistically, just shut down and let GRUB take over and boot to the default)

It used to be that when you opened Network to change settings, you were prompted to input your password and then everything works.

Nowadays, you enter your password after it opens. You have to "unlock" the program before you use it.

It takes just a wee bit longer to do things the new way. I don't understand what was wrong with the old way, and personally I prefer it. I wish you brought it back.

Having Daily/Weekly Pop-Up Tips with screenshots (images very important) will be helpful for Windows users to explore Ubuntu faster, and will help them get stuck to Ubuntu once they see a neat feature that amazes them.

In my opinion, Windows users aren't very familiar with the concept of forums when they change to Ubuntu, because of which they may not be well informed about Ubuntu features like Compiz.

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For example to send a file into an USB drive.

Cheese should have a face recognition feature that only takes a photo when:
1) Nobody is blinking
2) Everyone is smiling

The Samsung omnia smartphones (which are only 600mhz) already do this, and apparently it works quite well. Face recognition could then later be used in other libraries.

And this would make profile pictures and such closer to "one-touch". It also helps polish linux to the point it doesn't demand user for feedback to operate, instead it is able to identify in these cases when the photo is bad, and delay the photo until it is good.

Thumbnails should be easily able to be re-created.

2 reasons:

1) Sometimes image changes are not caught by the listener and the thumbnail remains as one of the old image

2) Unsuitable moments for the random video frame. In my case, it was part of a nude scene of a movie, but there can be other reasons such as wanting a frame that can be used to identify the movie

I think that somewhere (either in a right cick menu on the desktop or in Nautilus preferences) there should be an option to hide all desktop icons. This seems like it would be an easy extra little button, particularly if it were to be added to Nautilus' preferences. The functionality is available in gconf via Apps > Nautilus >Preferences > show_desktop.

This would be in addition to ideas such as this: http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/5316/

It would be great if there was a way to adjust the brightness of the screen depending on the ambient light in the room. One way of doing this, that is widely accessible is taking 3 or 4 low resolution webcam snapshots every 15mins and doing a simple check of the light in the picture. Using low resolution reduces the CPU to less, whilst improving accuracy of the ambient light detection.

Those of us with larger or very bright monitors, often find ourselves having to turn the brightness down during the night so our retina's do not burn out. This would provide a means of doing so automatically.

Note: it would probably only by default be set to make minor adjustments in the brightness, in ensure maximum compatibility. And it would not be on by default.

Apple actually used to build ambient light sensors into their computers, however, have now stopped doing so (probably because they care more about profit then quality now). It did work quite well though!

Ubuntu's default boot splash screen doesn't say anything about what the OS is doing during the boot, except when the fsck utility does a complete check of the filesystem of the root directory. It could be useful to know what the OS is doing (e.g. reading the files needed to boot, starting database services etc.) during the boot, so that if the boot is long, the user knows why it is so long and eventually he/she can do something to make the boot sequence faster (such as, for example, uninstalling some unneeded database services, asking in a forum why a certain phase in the boot is taking longer than usual, etc.). This could be also useful in the case of a system failure, because an unexperienced user should be at least be able to know in which phase the boot fails without having to edit the grub's (or LILO's) command line disabling the splash screen and enabling the verbose boot

Make hardy the last Ubuntu release ever and from then on work on merging remaining Ubuntu developers, changes, ideas, bugs, users etc back into Debian. Don't work on Ubuntu, just work Debian instead. There was no need to fork in the first place, please fix this. Canonical can make money Debian fine, they don't need a forked distro and forked community to make money.

With elections coming up, it might be fun in 8.10 to include a panel app that would show the currents stats of the election and polls and maybe let users vote on the candidate they like.

Possibly in the future this could be expanded to allow users to make their own polls for it and such for other users to vote on.

During that season in which one heats their home power saving features of a desktop PC don't actually reduce energy consumption. The energy that we considered wasted is given off as heat which would have to be generated anyway. As such, it would make sense that during the local winter the home desktop PC might as well remain in normal on state to eliminate the delay in resuming from a standby or hibernate state.

I think that it would be great (and a lot more user friendly) to combine the "Add/Remove" program and Synaptic. It would default to the Add/Remove interface (for beginners) with synaptic under an "Advanced" tab. On the advanced tab there should be an option to make it the default tab to open on launch.

Most users do not have a PalmOS PDA. For some reason, Ubuntu developers decided to install support for PalmOS devices by default in Ubuntu (you can access it at: System / Preferences / PalmOS Devices).

I think it's not a good idea to by default install support for one specific brand of PDA's which only a tiny fraction of the users is ever going to use. Those people who do have a PalmOS PDA can easily install it afterwards.

So: Please remove support for PalmOS devices from the default install. This includes the packages: gnome-pilot, gnome-pilot-conduits.