Brilliant Brainstorms is a weekly-ish summary of some of the best brainstorms from the Ubuntu Brainstorm site. In the beginning it may not always come exactly once a week or on the same day, but, if it becomes popular, it should become more regular.

Nautilus, the default file manager in Ubuntu, is fine, but it offers very few innovative features. Bringing more features to Nautilus could really be an advantage over other operating systems.

Since I already suggested this, I, naturally, support this idea. Basically, since voting on features has worked out so well, why not also vote on which bugs should get fixed first?

Another idea I already suggested. Canonical already operates Launchpad, so why not just integrate Brainstorm into it so all projects can use it?

Ubuntu, and many other open-source projects, have tons of translations, but what about people who speak two different languages or who are trying to learn a second language? Enabling an instant language switch would be extremely useful to anyone who speaks two or more languages. In addition, it might even be a benefit to schools with students learning a non-native language.

Although most people will probably never use it, easy encryption is a nice thing to have ready and waiting for the time when it is needed. This would be particularly cool if it was well integrated into Ubuntu so that you could just right-click on a file or folder and choose to encrypt it.

Again, most people might never use it, but a PDF editor is the kind of program that you might randomly find yourself needing at some point.

By far the hardest part of installing Linux has to be partitioning. While I don’t know exactly what the right solution is, there needs to be a solution to make partitioning easier.

Unfortunately, updates in every operating system break things. If an easy way to uninstall updates was provided, people would feel safer installing updates in the first place.

When you finally finish installing your new OS, what do you want to do: use it or wait for it to install updates. It would be better to at least give everyone the option of doing the updates before the install is finished.

I don’t know if this is technically possible, but it would make WiFi card setup much easier if NDISwrapper could be automatically set up.

And finally, one idea I don’t like:

“Get the facts” is the name of a Microsoft advertising thing where they pretend Windows Server is more secure than Red Hat’s server by comparing the number of reported bugs and lots of other illogical arguments for why Windows is better. If Ubuntu starts doing anything like it, I will be extremely surprised and extremely frustrated.  Still, I understand that an advertising campaign promoting Ubuntu is good, just don’t call it “get the facts.”