Contributor vexorian

I really hope for a day in which Nautilus, Konqueror and Thunar would have a good interface for making up your own symlinks, if you ask symbolic links are a very useful unix feature, specially if you are running out of space in one partition, make lending space easier, and some times you do need duplicated versions of the same folder in different places.

Just a "symlink" command in the "new" submenu would work, you can make it only work with folders if you want. Symlinks are SO useful, still in the GUI era, take a look at icon themes, for example.

Canonical must encourage work in making OOo and Java support GTK better, OOo should actually use GTK correctly and Java must be able to mimic a lot more GTK engines, or at least ubuntulooks since it is used in the default.

OOo has a lot of issues with GTK specially noticeable on custom themes.

So, the issue I noticed is that these things are not aware at all of how many files they are supposed to download, so for the first part it says downloading file 3 of 10, then it suddenly jumps to file 11 of 20 , then file 25 of 45! It is crazy and it is quite hard to predict when it is going to end... so can this be fixed somehow?

A quick comparison between Konqueror's way on icon customization and Nautilus' way:

When you decide to change a file's or launcher's icon in Konqueror, the first icons you find are a bunch of system icons that depend on the theme, and thus if you later change the theme the icon you picked can change as well.

On Nautilus, the story is different, you are given directly an open file dialog and you must find the icon file yourself. Even if you manage to find icons this way, it is simple not possible to pick a theme-dependent icon from the GUI. I have had to resort to hacking the .desktop file with a text editor to accomplish so.

Therefore, I guess it is not hard to guess what this brainstorm is suggesting to change in Nautilus' behavior.

So, let me tell you, in 2006 I briefly tried ubuntu breeze, well mostly kubuntu. It was nice, and one of the fun things to do was playing prboom. The problem was that sometimes it wouldn't start with sound.

I eventually figured out it had something to do with KDE using the sound, so I learned to just insist, and keep closing prboom and starting it back until sound worked.

Some time later, I upgraded to Dapper Drake, the issue was still there.

I moved back to windows XP, some time passed, and for some reason I tried ubuntu again, Feisty. I didn't really want to play prboom, but I still needed multimedia every once in a while, same problem, two applications that use sound cannot be run simultaneously, if you run one, the other will not be able to ever play sound, not even if the first one is not running sound at all, it happens with floola, with totem, firefox, it is crazy.

2008, Hardy upgrade, I got the issue of not being able to edit war3 maps correctly because both world editor and the game itself use sound, so I must either test stuff muted, or close world editor (which is painful since it often takes ages to open again).

So, I really wish next version(s) could focus on fixing this longstanding issue. I've searched the web and it looks like issues with Alsa.

So, my update-manager tells me I got 86 updates , some come from hardy proposed and some do not. I decided I would only download proposed updates for things that are not very important, like the kernel. So I'd like a way to uncheck all the updates that come from proposed and then just pick the ones that seem interesting.

It is way too hard not to download everything, requires you to uncheck every single package manually . Each repo has a header row in the updates list saying things like "recommended updates" I think the checkboxes should go there.

While we are on this, I sometimes wish the update manager got tabs, and every repo would have its tab, so you could easily notice when you are downloading from security or backports or from third party ones.

Has anyone else noticed that when you run an app from a launcher (gnome-panel menu, nautilus desktop). If the app is bugged or for example, you don't have XGL and the app is 3d. Nothing will happen, the user will wonder what's going on?

What's interesting is that most apps will return 0 on 'successful' exit yet they will return something else if they segfault, or exit with an error. Not only that, but some *n*x* apps might even write error messages to stderr, with a good error message.

The suggestion is, wouldn't it be wonder if when ubuntu's GUI's launchers could just detect if the exit code was a bad one? signal Segmentation fault is a good one, for example,

"/bin/lolipop/"
"The program has encountered an issue and needed to be closed"
"[Details>>]"

Press details and a text box appears with the contents of stderr (if there are contents).

Intro
==========

rpms abound some web sites, and it is easy for a new user to end up downloading them of debs, it is also probable there won't be .debs available where .rpms are.

Changes to nautilus-gnome
=========================
* Associate .rpm with gdebi

Changes to gdebi
================
* If the file is an rpm prompt the user "Are you sure this is the only available binary package? / Are you sure there is no equivalent .deb file?"
* If user says "yes, I am sure" proceed.
* If alien is not installed, prompt the user if he wants to install it, if the user wants to install alien, install and proceed.
* Call alien to process the rpm file.

(don't mark this as duplicate, the other idea combines wallpaper and sounds and is specifically against those sounds and wallpaper, this one is specifically about wallpaper and for continuing hardy's trend.)

Let me say this, every hardy review was complimenting ubuntu for the beautiful wallpaper. I personally loved it, and it was the first time the default ubuntu wallpaper actually made people interested in what OS I was running, I even kept variations of it for four months until just recently. Instead the beta ibex wallpaper is just ... well, I think plenty of criticism was told about it already, but I'll focus on my wish to see more wallpapers like hardy's one.

It would be very nice to let ubuntu always have an abstract wallpaper with a surrealistic painting of the version number's animal.

Ubuntu needs a personality, the idea to keep a brown-orange theme is a good one for this reason (as long as the theme looks good) cause we are not copying the competition. I really think that hardy's wallpaper was a step in a good direction and changing the direction now would be a bad idea.

Besides of the animal, I think the color choice for hardy's wallpaper was nice, with more live colors.

Some examples:
http://ubuntuarte.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/interpid_ibex_wallpa per_1_by_willwill100.png
http://ubuntuarte.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/la_cabra1600_06.png
http://gabuntu.wordpress.com/2008/08/25/wallpaper-para-intrepid-ibex/
also many examples here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Artwork/Incoming/Intrepid/Desktop_Background_Submission s#Ibex%20-%20a_lecture_and_an_ibex

[....]

I wish for ubuntu to have better support, I assume Canonical really needed to know that Ubuntu does not support all the hardware and I also assume that nobody is working on hardware support.

Try to work on hardware support before it is released, that should fix the issues. I'd like to see all my quite specific devices I got from very mixed hardware brands to work perfectly out of the box.

I am sure you will mark this as duplicate, either way, I think that there are small differences between this idea and similar ones.

First of all, I heard Canonical plans to invest in mainstream, let me say something, mainstream doesn't really need a lot more money than it has now and more work there would just be redundant. I think that if Canonical wants to make a difference, they should put money where it is really needed, there are weaknesses in our Linux OSes.

I think, we need improvements in the development platform, I am the kind of guy that really only needs geany and valgrind to do all his Linux development, however a lot of dev. people have been spoiled by the other parties. There are things like step-back and form designers that these people need. Novell as of now is pushing for Mono to replace native apps, and it is doing it by adding this sort of tools to mono development. I got to say, it would be terrible if developers stopped making native apps and we ended with a half-done OS in which most of the available applications are non-native, we need better tools for native development.

However, please don't focus on doing a monolythical app that does everything and can't be split, instead it would be better to make services that could be used by any IDE that's interested in using them. One part that has issues right now is debugging, in which the command line tools are powerful, but devs from this time are used to GUIs in the debugging world.

So, it would be nice to have some sort of service that could examine a program's execution at the same time it is communicating with an IDE that is using it. So the IDE can use information about the execution flow, contents of arrays, etc, and also the IDE would be able to use break points and step using this server program.

In the form designer area, an open format for GTK form XML files, that are then compiled by an extra app would be nice, well, I am not sure how good Anjuta is on this area so far, still improvements in form design will always be welcome.

Now here is the important section: We need a way to have programming projects compiled directly into .deb packages. Right now there are too many intermediary stages. The best for ubuntu would be to allow making ubuntu deb packages very easily, remember, the easier it is to make these packages the more applications easy to install in ubuntu there will be.

[....]

So, after analyzing this: http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/9637/ and seeing how some people really like codecs for proprietary formats, I think I must say this:

- Remix's codec licensing(tax) should be optional (Refer to the other brainstorm's link)
- As a matter of fact the same goes for flash and adobe reader.
- Now that canonical licenses codecs in remix, I think there should be a way to order online or purchase a download of a desktop ubuntu CD that comes with those codecs installed and legally licensed, so if some people really think it is important to have their codecs preinstalled they could put money where their mouth was. The condition for this not to be evil would be that the codecs were the only difference between these both variations of the desktop ubuntus. The OS would still be free whatsoever, but if people want to license codecs, they would be able to. In other words, they are actually purchasing the codecs, the ubuntu installation is a freebie that comes with that purchase.

This is the deal: I like to use compiz because:
- Its desktop switching method is different from metacity's so it won't crash some Wine app that loves to crash otherwise.
- Its shadows and transparency for inactive windows makes my desktop look very nice.

But I really dislike that although there are three or four ways to do desktop switching, all of them are almost the same in that they use 'cool' animations. What's bad about the animations? In the best case scenario they make me lose time, and in the worst (if my CPU is in use for example), make my computer lag horribly.

It already has four ways to do desktop switching, so how about adding one that allows me to just use gnome panel's desktop switcher like the way metacity does? You know, you click the page and it is changed instantly, no animation involved. Wouldn't that be nice?

apt-get has had download-only for some time already, but it is hard to do selective updating through apt-get , it would be nice if update-manager had a check box or advanced option to do that. Basically, it would just download the packages without installing, it would be amazing just for dist-upgrades, but for your everyday updating it would also be helpful, some times, even though I would like unattended downloading, I don't want unattended installation, specially if the update is a new kernel version.

Sorry, I forgot to add word "button" to the title.

So, out of problems with the nvidia restricted driver having strange conflict issues in hardy I was forced me to use the driver from nvdia's site.

Yesterday, I updated the kernel, so I had to reinstall the driver... I think it was unnecessarily harder than usual (first time I do it with bullet proof X)

Old times:
- X crashed, I get thrown out to console and can just install the driver.

Now:
- X doesn't crash, I am given three options "Configure" (which would make me lose my X configuration and all hopes to have 3d acceleration since it will modify xorg.conf to use "nv" instead of "nvidia") "shutdown" (which would be unhelpful in this case) and "continue" (pretends everything is all right with that low resolution).

If I go continue, I still have to kill Xorg, since I am bad at memory I try thousands of things that don't work, (sudo gdm stop, doesn't work) So, I eventually have to get the browser and find out it is "sudo /etc/init.d/gdm stop" instead, so I then move to the terminal (ctrol+alt+f1) and type that (manually since cnp doesn't work).

To summarize about this procedure
- Need to login twice
- Time wasted trying to figure out how to kill X

To avoid that, I tried recovery mode, then nvidia's installer will complain that it is running in level 1, not 3, so it tells me to type "telinit 3" , which... drives me back to the first scenario in which I have to kill X.

Just a single button for console mode, so it gives up trying to start X would have been so useful...

[....]

So, let's say whenever a new version's cycle begins canonical makes a theme contest with some prizes. Of course, the entries must pass to some screening based on published guidelines, I'd guess canonical would be interested in enforcing ubuntu looks and some color spectrum for the team.

Then we have a public vote among ubuntu users to select the new theme, let's say when three months remain for the release, so there can be polishing done to the theme.

There should for the very least be a black line separating the line number and the document/config file.

It sometimes actually hard to me to notice the line numbers are not part of the file, in other themes it looks just ugly if not confusing.

"You cannot export to xhtml because you have not installed openoffice-java-common"

Hello canonical, it might surprise you but upgrades through the update-manger or apt-get after changing the repositories are almost never smooth, almost always break something, and are also quite problematic, nothing that can't be fixed with some patience, but still, may I suggest few things?:

- Don't suggest the upgrade until 2 months have passed from the release of the new version.
- Before doing the upgrade, encourage the user to backup his system, even better, back the system up for him.

I mean, update-manager is almost encouraging users to do the upgrade which to newbies is quite cruel... An upgrade is often harder than a from scratch install, specially if it is done too fast before the repos are updated with fixed packages. I think the update-mananager should instead discourage upgrades.

I'd like to explain the emblems I got in use right now, mostly thanks to the tango generator icon theme, and how this method should be the gnome standard and really a default for the human theme.

What emblems to include
-----------------------------

It's simple, when you click the applications menu, you'd see icons like "office", "development", "sound and video" (aka multimedia) , the first good thing about the emblems made by tango generator is that it uses those icons as emblems. So, for folders you can really categorize them correctly.

Another great emblem is the "star" tango emblem, firefox, gmail all are starting to use these stars to mark the more special things , a little star emblem helps me determine what things are priority, much better than such clock emblem.

So, the list of emblems to include would be:
special (the star icon)
trash/dump (This uses a mini trash icon)
multimedia (icon currently in use by sound and video category in applications)
development (The menu one, for example in tango it is a construction helmet)

art (The one used by "graphics" category in the menu)
office (idem)

system/gear (Again, from the menu, optional, but I found it useful)

download/web (I guess the one from the menu works)
fun (A smiley)
danger (A bomb icon probably)
urgent (I guess some people would want to use this instead of starred)
money (A human themed $$ sign could work)


[....]