Installation process should give people the choice to select some standard programms.
Someone using Thunderbird as mail client doesn't need Evolution...
It is not about installing all kinds of programms during the installation process, but about selecting the most common programms easily.

The other thing is that a lot of people don't know that ubuntu can play DVD videos, because they just don't know about libdvdcss2, “ubuntu restricted extras” and how to install them.

Example: my parents cannot install libdvdcss2 without my help. This should change!

Sometimes something goes wrong with my Ubuntu installation. Generally this has occurred when I have added lots of programs which I believe are useful. Later, an update will take place and, when I reboot, something (sometimes many somethings) no longer function, the most important of these being the wireless networking.

In the absence of any other means of repairing my installation, I am thus forced to re-install Ubuntu, thereby losing the configurations I have had. (I do always back up my data so that, thus far, I have never lost any of that.)

I wish there were some sort of "repair" option on the installation CD which could test to see if all necessary programs were functioning as they did originally and automatically fix the Ubuntu installation, perhaps removing or inactivating (or at least identifying them) the program(s) causing the problem, setting all the "defaults" necessary functions back properly, I believe that this would be very useful to Ubuntu users.

In conjunction with this, if the problem program(s) were merely identified by the installation CD, I should hope that there would be some way to deactivate these programs, either temporarily or permanently.

Backing up the MBR before installation using the "dd" command can save a lot of trouble in case of boot problems.
Why not offer an optional MBR backup before installation?(would require backup media like a USB key for example of course)

If there are several partitions already, it could backup all start sectors. This is easier for people who have no idea where their boot partition is.

In general, it would be nice to have a GUI utility to backup/restore MBRs.

If you think people would panic and stop installing if they see such an MBR backup dialog, just deactivate it by default.
A simple checkbox or GUI utility on the LiveCD could be used by users that want to play it safe.

edit:
As indicated by Warbo, a very easy solution would be to automatically create the MBR backups and those that care about them would just have to save them on an external device. :)

Well, there are a lot of people who try the Live session once or just a few number of times.
And go for the new release directly.
If you have some unsupported hardware, then comes a lot of debugging.

The Ubuntu forums are filled with threads where users installed the new release without checking if all components of their system are supported by it.

Seasoned users easily find solutions to most problems, but the newbies are a bit rattled by the process.
How will new users know if the new release is actually good for their hardware?

Your solutions and comments are greatly appreciated...

I, like many others these days, run an small organization that accept donations of old computers for the purpose of refurbishing and donating to those who are without. We wipe every hard drive that comes through our doors with DBAN; mostly for the ease of mind given to folks who donate a computer; but also because we have, in the past, found ourselves holding a hard drive with questionable content on it.

I think that the slide show on install is great, and I would love to see more slides in it, but on some slower machines the install will take longer then the slide show.

I think that splash is just to make linux, ubuntu in particular, more attractive to beginners. But it does not allow the user to read the kernel messages during boot up.

The first thing I do after installing linux/ubuntu is to get rid of it.

I would love to be asked if I want this piece of software to be installed in my computer during the setting up of the OS.

The live-USB-creator allows the user to create a flashdrive with Ubuntu as the default system admin (no password) If you create another user, the system doesn't allow you to force login when Ubuntu starts. There are several other issues like this with the live USB (Persistant install), there is no encryption, even if you want to install on one of those external hard drives, so you can carry Ubuntu around from computer to computer.

It is frustrating to set up keyboard settings, language settings, location etc..

We have now this nice installer made in 7 steps. Very nice indeed, and simple to use it, but it installs a system for a simple newbie user, and that is all. We should have an option to switch to a more advanced setup/install procedure.

What I am missing now? Let's see:
1. possibility to create LVM.
2. possibility to create and use encrypted FS.
3. possibility to set up multiple users, with everyone's home on different disk.
4. possibility to set up Raid during the install.
5. possibility to review and eventually override hardware settings. (for ex. for my wireless card intel 4965 I have to use qos_enable=0 option to get reasonable speed...It would be better if we could have a step for setting up the hw options eventually needed. Like this we will not forget to set up things.)

This are the most important things for the moment. What do you say?