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

Sorry there was no Brilliant Brainstorm last week. To make up for it (sort of) there is a bonus idea this week.

Being able to easily identify file types just by looking at the icon makes it easier to find your files without adding unnecessary complication. In other words, it is basically a win for everyone. Of course the icons would have to be designed to be easily recognizable, but as long as that was done, it should work well.

Ubuntu has already made the system menu much easier to understand relative to what is in Debian, but it can still be improved further. Most advanced users probably recognize what preferences and administration mean, but to a non-techie it might not be obvious. Thus, personal settings and system management are more logical names for the two groups under the system menu.

I feel like this idea has been proposed in different ways about a thousand times, but there are tons of advantages to have Ubuntu-certified logos on products. Not only is it highly useful, but it serves as easy promotion too. Whatever numbers you can spit out about Linux’s compatibility, the fact remains that actually verifying that something works with Linux is annoying. Ubuntu-certified logos would solve this problem.

OpenOffice 3.0 brings one really important feature: partial OOXML compatibility. It may not be perfect, but it is much better than not being able to read OOXML files at all. Quite frankly, it really doesn’t make sense to keep shipping releases with software that is not compatible with the latest format. I understand why it has not been included so far, but now is the time.

One of the really cool features of OpenOffice is the ability to add extensions, similar to how you can add plugins in Firefox. Unfortunately, this is not super well known. If you could add extensions for OpenOffice right from Add/Remove programs, that would alert many more people to this cool feature.

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