OK, I'll give you for example my case:
An year and a half ago the government of my country (Bulgaria) accepted a new standard for the Cyrillic keyboard layout and it was included in Windows Vista (but not in Ubuntu). So I decided to report this to the developers and had no idea where to go :/
I reported this to launchpad - they told me this was not a bug, but a wish.
I submitted a question to Answers section in Launchpad but they required me to make a patch for this! I'm a f**in newbie, I don't know how patches are made...
I submitted an I idea here hoping that a developer would notice - few people voted it, so I doubt any dev saw it...
So I'm still stuck here and don't see how would this be implemented as I don't know how to get connected with a developer to tell them about it.

So I think we need documentation about how the development system works and how can anybody reach devs. This is NOT just for me. There are thousands of newbies that could help but they simply don't know how :(

P.S. Don't tell me that there is documentation about it - it is not in simple language, it's all dev terms...

You know when you get a pesky error message? You know how you copy it, search the error message on Google, then find out how to fix it? Imagine you didn't need to because the error message already told you how to.

By making error messages editable (or at least a section of the message which says "Possible Solutions from the Ubuntu Community" ,or something like that, editable), it would do exactly that. After someone asks Ubuntu Forums how to fix their problem, they can edit that error messege or section, so that other members with identical problems would not need to waste their own time, as well as time from the other community members on the Ubuntu Forums (and other Linux-related forums)

The same idea could also be used during crashes of some programs which provide verbose details on how it crashed (for example, a program may provide details though the terminal, or through a log) below while you are asked to submit a crash report.

Finally, on error messages, there should also be a way to submit a question to the Ubuntu Forums (either a link to the Forums, or a text field with a "Submit" button) or search the error message on Google, so that in case the suggested fix doesn't work, or there simply isn't one yet, it is still easy to find a solution.

In an ideal world, there would never be any errors, and even if there was, developers would find a solution immediately, but that is simply not possible.

There probably isn't an easy way to implement it, but wouldn't it be worth it?

In the new ubuntu 10.04 will be included manuals and how-tos that will help quite a setting of novice users. I thought of some ideas to improve this feature.

Why is it that when the update manager alerts you of updates, 9 times out of 10, you don't get a list of WHAT changed? Instead you see, "the list of changes is not available."

Why not get the changes list ready BEFORE uploading the new packages?

I understand that there are more important things to be done, but copying and pasting the list of what changed, should be fairly simple.

And while it is done sometimes, I'm asking that it be done more throughly.

I think Ubuntus help menu, needs a whole revision.

Often it has no or unsufficent answers, because the help file is to static. On the other hand a help section like this does not justify the endeavour of the whole community.

SEO awareness for package descriptions

There are lots of useful packages in Synaptic which are hard to find because the descriptions do not include even the most obvious keywords being used to search for them.

Example: The Gnome font viewer "gfontview" has recently been dumped by the Gnome developers and I was searching for another program to preview uninstalled fonts. I searched for "font viewer", "ttf preview", "font manager" and so on without success and posted brainstorm idea 15736 to bring back the gnome font viewer.

In http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/15736/ one of the replies said "Try fontypython!" and indeed there it was — the seemingly missing program to preview and manage uninstalled ttf fonts. However, the description of "Fonty Python" does neither include the words "viewer", "preview" nor "manager". Instead it is being promoted as a "GUI tool to manage ttf fonts on GNU/Linux system. It is written in Python and WxWidgets". This is doubtlessly correct, but totally useless for any user who searches for a program with the desired features of Fonty Python.

A simple list of user's-point-of-view tags and keywords in each package description would be a great benefit for the usability of Synaptic. Maybe there are tons of hidden gems in the package lists which remain undiscovered just because of their suboptimal coder-orientated descriptions.

The tagging could be done by the users themselves: see http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/14592/

There's a wealth of documentation on packages that are installed, in /usr/share/doc. This documentation isn't prominent.

Not counting that Ubuntu community has a lot good programming tools like IDE's, i'm concerned about documentation for people who want help our community but can't write programs. As we can see, most of Canonical software (and generally Open Source's) is written in C/C++ and Python. The easiest to learn and also very powerful is Python. Yes, there are books, but most of them aren't for free. One of them - Dive into Python - is for free but only for experienced programmers and isn't complete guide.

URL #1: http://diveintopython.org/
URL #2: http://diveintopython3.org/

The HIG document for Gnome hasn't been updated since 2001. Across message boards when developers are asking for clarity on the HIG documentation for gnome, most of the time they are told to just refer back to the documentation which doesn't help. I really think it needs to be updated so that developers know how their application in gnome should look and behave but first the following has to take place:

1. Easy to use API for sound that allows for powerful features as well as simple features
2. Easy to use API for controlling the graphics in your application such as drawing windows, menus, animations
3. A proper video card driver that is comparable to NVidia's closed source one so that the open source users who don't like proprietary will be happy. An example is that NVidia's is fully opengl 2.0 compatible, the open source one can use opengl 2.0 but all in software none in hardware.

Most new users do not read the release notes. They go straight for the download link. I notice I am constantly linking to the release notes in help threads. The release notes always contain known issues/workarounds for each release. Anyone else think it would help to show the release notes while the installer is installing, or maybe redirect Firefox/Konqueror to the release notes on first open?