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

Hardware support and, to a lesser extent, application alternatives are probably the biggest issues for new users of Ubuntu, or any Linux distribution. Ubuntu already has Wubi, which lets users install Ubuntu from WIndows, so why not add some sort of hardware checker that checks if your hardware is compatible. (Yeah, OK, I know why. It would be really, really hard, but it would be cool.)

If you look at other operating systems, their release cycle is far slower than most of the popular Linux distributions. (Apple makes fun of Microsoft for being slow, you know. Ubuntu releases roughly twice as often as OS X.) Having such a short development cycle, it would make sense to focus on one specific aspect of Ubuntu.

Some smaller projects allow their developer to get paid and, in a few cases, earn a living, but a random Ubuntu developer stands little chance of ever making money on his work. It would benefit both developers and users if donations could be specifically targeted to a certain feature. A developer could then look at what features had the most money behind them and work on those. If the developer implemented a feature, he or she would get the money. The logistics of an approach like this would be very difficult, especially since many features might be worked on by many people and multiple approaches might be submitted, but it would still be very cool.

You might not realize it, but almost every file you have has some additional informaiton about itself. Many just have last modified dates, but music often has information about the song and artiist, and photos often have information about what camera took them, when, how, and, in some cases, where. It would be great if you could use a built-in search function to filter through these properties. Perhaps this could be the focus of a future Ubuntu release. It would probably have to be expanded to file management, though.