Contributor shadowfirebird

Better way to set monitor resolution and refresh rate. Majority of the new monitors are LCD type. User should be able to specify the native resolution and refresh rate during install.

Then Ubuntu/X must do WHATEVER it takes to stick to that resolution and refresh rate.

In case of multi-monitor setups, must be able to specify the configuration at time of installation.

Also, the login GUI must use same resolution as X. Why different resolutions?

Rant:
I have nVidia NVS440 card with Viewsonic VP2290b monitor. Video card must be set to 1920x1200 @13Hz or @41Hz refresh rate for each of it's four outputs. Desktop must be arranged in 2x2 matrix. Then monitor displays 3840x2400 @13Hz or @41Hz.

This worked very well in Ubuntu 6.06. Installed Ubuntu 7.04 and ended up with something like 800x480, even with nVidia binary drivers. Tweaked xorg.conf for weeks to get this to work. BulletProofX kept messing with my hand crafted xorg.conf file; which did work with 6.06. Eventually gave up and started using Windaz again :-( Will try again when frustration level has come down.

This is one for the folks at Canonical, I guess:

The number one cited reason for your average non-techie or only slightly-techie user not coming across to Ubuntu, or any non-Windows distro, is that the backlog of games that they have invested in over the years won't play on it.

(well actually, the main reason is that most have never heard of it, but amongst those who have, this is the reason)

But it's not about the latest and greatest, mention Elite, Dungeon Master or even some old spectrum game to a grown man and you might just glimpse a tear of nostalgia in his eye.

Would it not be in everyone's interests for the companies who have a vested interest in linux (Canonical, Novell, etc) to get together and buy a few licences for some retro games that everyone else has forgotten about and then open source them?

This can then maybe lure in folks who can't play these games on windows...

In todays computer systems the main bottleneck is not CPU but disk access which is several orders of magnitude slower than CPU and memory. In such circumstances the way to improve application performance is to prefetch data it needs from disk before it even requests it and it is the point of prefetching techniques. This speeds up boot and decreases the time needed to start programs. This replaces and it is faster than the currently used readahead.

Ubuntu is never really going to take off until the average user can do everything they need to do with their PC without ever having to see the command prompt.

All OS administration etc needs to be possible through the use of dialogs rather than obscure configuration files.

Add classification to brainstorm like: Very good, good, bad, very bad

I think it would be neat to have a screen saver display the latest headlines from RSS feeds. I think there is a screen saver like this for Macs.

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Because the Text is very long here a short summery:
In my opinion it is senseless, that there is so much competition inside of open source. There are many projects which are very similar and I think that cronical and the ubuntu foundation as the developer of one of the most popular Linux distributions should plead for the support of communication between the open source projects to give open source a more efficient structure.
Inside of open source there should be no competition, microsoft is enough, and I think if the open source developers would work more efficient together they can produce a very beautiful Linux desktop in the future.
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First of all I really love the idea of Open Source. It is much simpler to communicate with the developers, submit own ideas(e.g. Brainstorm), or to help active, to form his own desktop. Because of this close relationship to the user, I feel much more involved to this project and feels in duty bound to give something back. So I produced an icon theme and submitted some ideas.
It is great to have the freedom to start something new and that there are possibilitys to find people who helps you, but I also think it would be very helpful for open source to make a new structure for more productivity.

I do not understand why there are done so many things twice or more?
When I would look at Open Source like at a company there are so much things which could be done more efficient.

1.Why so many applications of the same categorie. For example the IDEs. There are many IDEs for different programming languages, but either they are complicated (anjuta), have no standard gui builder (eclipse), or are very unstable (mono on my ubuntu desktop). I think it would be more productive if all this IDE developers would work together to build one simple IDE which includes many programming languages and an easy to use gui builder. I know Kdevelop tries that, but I hate the unclear interface structure of many KDE Applications like Kdevelop. I would prefer something more like mono.
A category which also must be mentioned are media players. I do not try to count all the open source media players because there are to much. On a wikipedia side I found a list with ca. 30 audio and video players, but I think there are much more. I know a small assortment should be there, but company's like microsoft or apple has just one media player, Linux not countable. When the developers of some similar media players would work together it would be much more efficient, and would open up so much new possibilitys for the Linux desktop.

[....]

In this age of ever-increasing amounts of system RAM, the (relatively) small size of the Linux kernel makes it feasible to load the entire OS and most installed apps into 1 GB RAM at boot up, especially if compression is used.

Many Linux distros do this already. With some, it must be specified at the splash screen (e.g., "knoppix toram"). Distros which do this run remarkably fast. There is no reason this cannot be the default for ubuntu on systems with 1 GB RAM or more.

I have ubuntu 7.10 installed to a 4 GB RAM disk (Gigabyte i-RAM) and you should see how it screams! Ubuntu and all standard apps ship on an 800 MB CD-ROM disk. Seems like people with 1 GB systems or more could enjoy the same speed, without the fancy hardware.

It should be faster! (Use of indexing maybe?)

Sub-title #1: Leave default browser and apps as they are...

This is my first post on brainstorm, inspired by my attempt to comment on whether Firefox should be replaced by Epiphany (idea #229), which strangely enough mutated into this post.

I really don't understand why everybody flamed idea #229. Every OS has a browser default. In the case of Linux, it is not glued to the OS, so one can safely uninstall it (or just don't use it) in case he/she doesn't like it. I don't really care what _any_ default application any OS offers in its standard distribution, I will still find out and use the best there is, according to _my_ criteria and needs.

Things I consider:

1. Which browser (or application) has the largest developer base who fixes all the security, rendering and performance issues?
2. Which browser (or application) has the largest user base who identify bugs and inform the developers to remove them?

Regarding 1 & 2 the answers are obvious.

3. Do I want a fast browser (or application) or a secure one?
4. Do I want a fast inaccurate (in rendering) browser (or application) or a slow and accurate one?
5. Do I want a minimal feature fast browser (or application) or a full-featured slow one?

Regarding 3 to 5, the answers are NOT obvious to me. It's a matter of compromises that I have to make depending on my needs at the moment. That's why on Windows I find myself using 3 browsers: Firefox when I'm on unknown territory, Kmeleon when I want speed and Safari when I want colour corrected browsing (it's the only one supporting ICC profiles - thank god Firefox 3 will implement it).

To sum up: I refuse voting either for or against ideas proposing "the best" default application. However the defaults are making this world come round and much thinking should be attributed when deciding what to package in a distro.

[....]

Since I don't think many people would be scared of an extra button to configure their selected screensaver, it would be really nice if it could be included (like it is in xscreensaver-settings).

In a common desktop environment, it's pretty useless and kills usability of logging (punishing the user for their mistake).

All details and solution are in the bug report: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/pam/+bug/138654/

Expansion of Add Remove Programs - show user-provided descriptions, feature lists, screenshots, comments, ratings, integration with launchpad. Initial page should be top-rated apps, or newest apps. Managed by a webapp?

Or... leave it as it is, but create a website displaying all the great software available for ubuntu including all the features mentioned above with apturl links to install.

From #4613 (merged):

It should be indicated how much I'll have to download to install something.

We have download limits here and well... quite often I exceed them. It would be useful to indicate how big the download is going to be.

You can use tabs with any and every application if you switch to a window manager with tabs. You can also change settings for all tabs everywhere at once and all tabs behave in the same way. And you can mix tabs from different applications in the same window.

It could be a little inprovement entering the username and password while ubuntu is being loaded. Now we must wait for ubuntu to load, then enter the username and password and then wait a little more to load everything else.
My idea is haveing two textfields and an "accept" button in the splash screen so we can enter the username and password there. The checking could be done automatically once ubuntu is loaded.

Ubuntu is the name chosen for a global project and a distro based on Gnome. Kubuntu is another distro based on kde from the very same project.
I believe they deserve the same support from the project since Gnome and Kde are the most popular desktop manager out there.
It seems quite obvious to me, the project is very much focused on one and only distro, its first baby : ubuntu.
And it shows. Kubuntu web site looks quite poor and unprofessional compared to ubuntu. Most graphic choices like the kdm default theme (even if it's supposed to be a matter of taste) look, again, unprofessional. And finally the whole distro doesn't seem to have the same amount of attention when it comes to details (one example among others: the little thing on ubuntu warning the user about the existence of proprietary drivers for display which does not exist on kubuntu).
I've been told once, like a year ago, by an ubuntu dev that the situation is such because the project doesn't feel like fragmenting its market share.
Whatever is the official position of the project, I don't think you should do things half way.
The Kde project is itself in full evolution with Kde 4. It does deserve full support from ubuntu.

Thank you for reading.

Do we actually need both "Add / Remove Programs" and "Synaptic Package Manager"? --Surely not. And, it's confusing, even to me.

If we only have one, which should we keep? --Synaptic, clearly, since it's more featureful.

Can we make Synaptic more user-friendly to novices? --Yes, easily. Give it "novice" and "expert" modes; maybe tart up the graphics a bit.

Ubuntu (as of Gutsy) can not mount and read multisession cd/dvd's written in Nero or windows, or even by Brasero or K3B(Ubuntu apps).

This is such a serious bug. If a user (be he/her novice or advanced) can not access the cd / dvd he needs on his/her computer, then its an issue of paramount importance.

Please!

Replace the awfull NWF by GTK. (like NeoOffice with Cocoa) NWF is often unstable and inconsitent. A clean GTK version will also run on multiple plattforms like OSX or Win32! In addition it might be more portable for mobile devices like OpenMoko based ones.