Contributor tighem

Advanced power management currently cycles the hard drive once every few seconds even during activity on most laptops. This severely shortens the life of hard drives.

I've got two monitors, and right now if I use the wallpaper settings in gnome it stretches the wallpaper across the two monitors. It does this even for the default ubuntu wallpaper. This can look really bad depending on the image. In order to get around this I had to get two wallpaper images and join them into one large one with the GIMP and set that as my wallpaper.

There should be a way in gnome to set a different wallpaper for each monitor.

==== Merged with ideas of a similar scope: Different wallpapers on different workspace ===

Many workspaces option in Linux allows you to separate your work, why not allow users to have different wallpapers on each workspace. This allows for easier identification of which workspace you are on.
When used with compiz-fusion you can rapidly switch between your workspaces and the different wallapaper will allow you to quickly recognise what desktop you are on.

Currently this is natively available in KDE but not in Gnome. In Gnome you can't even let Compiz take over the wallpaper control because Nautilus doesn't allow for transparent backgrounds.

Other solutions like Wallpapoz are slow and when switching between desktops it takes too long to switch WP.

I've 2 distros installed on my laptop: Ubuntu Gutsy and Arch Linux! The feel with arch is that it's whippy. From the other side ubuntu is sluggish. Sure I know that my system is not so up to date (a 1.5 Ghz centrino 512 M Ram) but Arch work very well on it with the same services loaded as in ubuntu.

So I think Ubuntu can do something to improve performance.

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 :)

We have dual-core, and quad-core processors now, how much are we taking advantage of this additional power. Also we could provide better development tools to take advantage of multi-core processors.

OSS should lead the way in parallel processing, not just playing catch-up. We still don't even take advantage of the fact that most modern processors are now 32/64 hybrid. OS X can run 32/64/PPC(Rosetta) architecture all on the same box. Yes it is difficult, but a discussion should be started on what kind of work could be done in this area.


http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/20080318corp.htm?iid=pr1_releas epri_20080318r (Cred: jespdj)

I'm bored with dual-screen on GNU/Linux, it really has to have a graphic configuration, and better features.
I would like to move windows from a screen to another, but when I maximize I need it to be in a single screen.

Update: Xrandr GUI blog post by Bryce Harrington

When someone wants to unmount a volume and the mount point is used, he gets a message telling him that the volume can't be unmounted because an application uses it. The user has no idea which application is actually using it and can't remove the device.

I propose that the popup tells him which application(s) is(are) using the device and propose to terminate them (that list should be kept up to date when the app. dies).

First of all: What is the difference between Preferences and Administration? For example: why do I see 'Encryption and Keyrings' in Preferences and 'Keyring Manager' in Administration? What is the difference between 'Default Printer' and 'Printing'? Why do I have to disable the Tracker under Sessions and not under Search and Indexing? And why are these menu's so large? I have 24 items in Preferences (they don't even fit on my screen!) and 18 items in Administration. To put all this stuff in a popup menu is bad interface design imho. Besides, the number of option should be much smaller. A few suggestions:

- Merge 'Screensaver', 'Screen Resolution' and 'Screens and Graphics'.
- Merge 'Network', 'Network Proxy' and 'Network Tools'.
- Merge 'Update Manager, Synaptic Package Manager, Software Sources'.
- Merge 'Encryption and Keyrings', 'Authorizations', 'Keyring Manager'.


Below are all settings I can visit via the System menu. This is just way too much.


-- Preferences --
Universal Access
About Me
Appearance
Bluetooth
Default Printer
Encryption and Keyrings
Keyboard
Keyboard Shortcuts
Main Menu
Mouse
Network Proxy
PalmOS Devices (I don't have one)
Power Management

[....]

Ubuntu needs to go green. Powertop, Lesswatts and other tools have finally hit the Linux scene to pave the way for better power management. It needs to be said, "if you want your battery to last longest, or have your energy bill be the lowest, you better use Ubuntu Linux."

Replace initscripts with upstart events. Our boot sequence is currently slow, full of race conditions and poor interactions, especially with competition between the series of tasks run by sysv-rc, udev and sometimes just with the kernel. We developed upstart so that we could have a truly event driven boot sequence that would be fast, reliable and flexible; we should take advantage of it.

Ubuntu's bootloader is a stark black and white screen, filled with confusing options. It gives newbies a moment of indecision, as they try to figure out if they are supposed to choose something, and wonder why there are three or four Ubuntus listed. Then the timer finishes counting down (starting from 10), and the newb begins to feel like he's getting in over his head as his PC boots into Ubuntu.

Too much information up front, stark text-only display, painfully long countdown timer. What would be the alternative? Well, when a Fedora PC is booted up, the first thing the user sees is a graphical splash screen, and "Booting into Fedora (kernel version) in 4 seconds ... " The user can press a key to interrupt and select from kernel versions or alternative operating systems, or just let it boot into Fedora.

Can't we create our own attractive bootloader? Or, failing that, copy-and-paste Fedora's?

In many cases, I can't configure my webcam or I have problems with the microphone. Now I can use my webcam but only with V4L2 and only 3 programas detect my webcam. It's a good idea can use my webcam in all programs as camorama.

I guess everybody has experienced the rather long boot up times in Ubuntu (particularly with laptops). I know they are already working on it, but the change from feisty to gutsy was a pain in the ass in terms of boot up speed.
A default WinXP installation beats Ubuntu's boot up time by far!! That shouldn't be allowed fellas!!

I therefore propose to the development team (both Ubuntu and by extension Gnome)to work on the improvement of boot up times in Ubuntu systems.

Bluetooth support is still a mixed bag in ubuntu. Ubuntu needs to do a better job of making sure bluetooth devices work with the operating system. Headsets are still an arcane science and Nautilus still can't browse a BT device.

Suspend and hibernate still seems to be a big issue based on forum posts. Really focus on fixing it, even with proprietary drivers.

On the desktop panel, in the locations tab, is a link to open 10 recent files.
Many last opened extensions are visible: pdf, html, the different picture extensions and the Microsoft office document extensions. From Open Office only the graphic ODG extension is visible.

I would very much appreciate the possibility of right clicking the link to
1. set the number of recent files, and
2. to set the extensions I like to open from within that link.

dotMac provides a (fairly) simple way for users to integrate with some remote services, have some webspace and synchronize multiple macs.

dotUbuntu could provide similar resources for users:

the ability to back up important files, have bookmarks and address books floating 'in a cloud' like the mozilla 'Weave' project
http://labs.mozilla.com/2007/12/introducing-weave/

drag-and-drop remote backup of valuable files

plain webspace or more structured 'blogspace' with preinstalled web apps

Wiki page: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DotUbuntu

Make it easy to join a Ubuntu Workstation to a Active Directory Domain. Like Windows does for instance.

At the moment the live CD allows you to manage the creation of partitions yourself before you install, or choose "everything in one partition". The alternate CD also has similar features, but also has the option of using LVM (Logical Volume Manager) to make post-install partition management easier, and MD (Multi-Disk) to do software RAID based installs.

These (LVM & MD) should be incorporated into the live installer (Ubiquity) and further there should be an easy option for having a separate root (/) and home (/home) partition on installation.

There are a few significant benefits to this, not least of which is the ability to easily reinstall the OS (or install a different derivative or even different distro) without losing the valuable data in /home.

Other benefits include resilience (from MD), easy partition resizing (from LVM), and better space management, making it so that a full /home partition does not affect the system as a whole (as / would not be full).

As far as I understand, when shutting down, Usplash still flickers a moment. In any case, for Xubuntu and Kubuntu (and perhaps other derivatives too), the Usplash still isn't displayed during the full shutdown. If this is possible without being a very hackish solution, it'd be awesome.