Some time ago, I talked about the possibility that, if Wine was perfect, you could simply migrate Windows user’s applications directly into Ubuntu automatically. Obviously, that is far from reality today. Perhaps that sort of thing would be possible in the future, but, right now, there are just too many issues. There is another way to do something similar, though.

Although this idea could theoretically be applied to any installer, I am going to talk about Wubi, since it would work best in a Wubi environment.

One of the frequent complaints people have is that there are certain applications they always install and others they always remove. Advanced users can get around this problem by making a custom install disc that they use whenever they install Linux. There is really no easy solution, since it seems that no one can agree on the perfect packages to include – unless you automatically customize it to the user.

Let’s say you are installing Ubuntu with Wubi from Windows. The Wubi installer could look at your program files folder and identify the applications you use. Using one of the many online open-source alternative finders for software, an application that is capable of performing the same task could be installed. Conversely, if a particular type of application is not found that is usually included in the default Ubuntu install, it could be removed, saving disc space.

In addition to saving people some time, this would also ease the transition for new users, who would find that, seemingly magically, good alternatives to all of their software are already included on their system.

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