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.
In short, an ubuntu-specific SDK is a good idea, should provide help debugging, making GTK forms, and managing dependencies and making packages. Also, the parts need to be either replaceable or services that could be used by any IDE that wishes to. So we could keep having plenty of IDE choices, etc. The dream is to be able to take a form designer, code stuff in some C++ IDE, compile the form and programs, debug it with step back and break points and then do a menu command that will immediately make a working .deb package for that project.
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