Brilliant Brainstorms is a weekly summary of some of the best/most interesting brainstorms from the Ubuntu Brainstorm site.

Suppose that every time you opened Add/Remove programs, it has a list of programs you might want to install based on how you use your computer. This is not really that hard. If you have lots of Music, suggest a music management program; if you have a lot of video, offer a video editing program. The only issue is protecting the users privacy, which would be solved if the feature was made opt-in.

While some hardware does not need any specific software, such as RAM, others, such as web cams, TV tuners, and more, often take software to use them. After all, your webcam is pointless if you have a driver, but no software to view the video. The simple solution is to prompt the user to install recommended software when they plug in new hardware.

In addition to the free-form suggestion approach already available from Brainstorm, it would be great to have frequent polls to get input from users on specific issues or general preferences.

Imagine if every application you use had the same standards for storing the same type of data. If this were the case, you could easily switch between email programs or music management programs without worrying about exporting or importing or anything like that. Plus, you could give other applications access to data that they might not use directly, but could still make use of. For example, you could give your calender program access to your email, so that it could automatically schedule meetings based on your emails.

Live USB drives are great, but what if you want to transfer between a USB drive and a standard computer? Syncing between a LiveUSB drive and your computer should be made easy, so you can take your current install anywhere. It should also be easy to exclude certain files, to make things fit on your USB drive.

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