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!

The ubuntu-restricted-extras metapackage includes a JRE, Adobe Flash and various video/audio codecs, among other things. These components are not installed by default due to possible legal problems.

However, for many, if not most desktop users, these componentes are essential and thus they install this metapackage right after the Ubuntu installation, if they know about it. New users don't, and this is bad for the initial user experience. For the more experienced users, having to install it manually feels like a chore.

I prefer to keep my operating systems on separate physical drives rather than on different partitions of the same drive.

When I setup dual boot on 2 of my laptops (Ubuntu 8.10 and Windows 2000) GRUB would automatically have Windows 2000 listed after Ubuntu was installed so I could select it from the GRUB menu. Both these laptops only have 1 hard drive, so Win2k was on one partition and Ubuntu on the other.

When I setup a dual boot on my desktop, GRUB did not automatically detect WinXP on my 2nd hard drive and I had to go through a lot of trial and error to get the device and partition right. I'm sure some people can do this easily, but for the rest of us it would be nice if it could be automatically detected like when separate partitions are used.

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...

99% of users dont check its instalation cd in boot menu and you get wrong installation when your installation cd had errors and stop write to disk in example at 29% progress time

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.

I'am a ecological person and i hate to order every sixth month more than ten new CDs to my clients. Specially if client is new and i havent latest cd avaible(Clean install is always better than dist-upgraded)

for many people they don't understand what is swap space, so they will give it too little or too much space.

for example a PC with 3GB or more will not use much of swap space, so i would waste 2*n (n= ram size) of HDD space on that, and for 1GB or smaller will probably need more swap space.

After OS installed, only / is auto-mounded during boot.Other pre-existing partitions are not auto-mounted.
File manager is able to auto-mount partitions when needed but actually this leads to a nasty issue.
Applications, including Gnome itself are failing to open files from such volumes after startup.
Actually, if you've used files from non-automounted partitions, many of programs getting "file not found" or similar errors.
Furthermore, Gnome's panel for example failed to load background panel picture located on another partition.
All this is pretty annoying and what worse there is no evident option to enable mounting filesystems automatically on startup like in KDE.The only feature I see is volume properties dialog in file manager, which however requires manual entering of mount point, path and specify features manually.No easy locations pickers with reasonable default values, no way to choose common mounting options manually, nothing.This is a way too complicated and uncomfortable.Average user will fail to set-up auto-mounting at all and others will find this way ressembles editing /etc/fstab and /etc/mtab manually a way too much.

I wonder why there is no good System -> Administration applet to set these things up.There is pretty useless "Removable drives and media" applet which can do nothing useful in this case for us.

When I downloaded and burned a Ubuntu iso, I wanted a nice-looking CD label to go with it. I searched ubuntu.com and the Internet for labels, but none of them were official.