Modify Colors
One Hundred Papercuts: The Most Exciting Thing Since the Last Thing Canonical Did
Remember when Mark Shuttleworth announced Canonical was putting together a usability and design team? That team has announced their first major project, called One Hundred Papercuts. The idea, as described by David Siegel (member of the team and Gnome Do developer) is to select one hundred easily fixable bugs that are day to day minor annoyances to the user and fix them for the next release. Not big changes, just small things like how a file is named by default or where the cursor’s focus is put.
That might not sound like a big deal, but fixing one hundred little things is far more important than introducing a big new feature at this stage of Ubuntu’s development. Long-time Linux users often become blind to these problems, but first timers run into some of these issues like a street lamp (I would say a brick wall, but most of the issues are easily navigated around once you figure them out). Every release fixes some bugs, but Ubuntu will be the first distribution that I know of to make fixing usability related bugs a major priority. I certainly hope this will become a trend.
This project is probably the most exciting announcement for the Linux desktop since…. the last announcement Canonical made. As much as I wish other distributions would excite me, Ubuntu seems to be the only distribution that is really making progress in terms of creating a better product for the average user. Other distributions aren’t necessarily doing badly. In fact, many of them are on the bleeding edge in terms of technology. Ubuntu, though, is one the bleeding edge of usability and integration in a way that no one else can match. I’m sure that this assertion will trigger an endless stream of counter-examples, which I look forward to. There are certainly interesting projects going on in other distributions, but Ubuntu is consistently rolling out intersting plans that don’t just push the technology, they refine the technology and make it work that way it should.
Related posts:
- 1/10th of 100 Papercuts Selected Ubuntu’s One Hundred Papercuts project is aiming to solve 10...
- A Much Needed Push From Canonical The desktop, not just the Linux desktop, has reached a...
- Ubuntu's Papercuts: Usability in Little Things Ubuntu’s One Hundred Papercuts project seems to be progressing smoothly....
- A Feature List for Ubuntu 8.04 That Is Understandable AND Exciting One common complaint about Ubuntu, and many other open-source projects,...
- 5 Annoying “Papercuts” to be Fixed in Ubuntu 9.10 Ubuntu 9.10 is coming in October, and, in addition to...
1) Add “Screen Resolution” to the Desktop right-click popup. I know we aren’t trying to clone Windows 7, but it does that. It always takes me forever to find that on Ubuntu, and I seem to use that a lot.
2) In System->About Ubuntu, I want that to give me information about my machine, and what OS version I’m running. The wording now is goofy: “Thank you for your interest in Ubuntu 9.04″. The last item in the System tab should be About Computer (or put it in About Ubuntu) which gives CPU type, CPU speed, graphics card, audio card, and Ubuntu Version in a simple table.
3) I still can’t figure out what Totem is, nor why Firefox attempts (and fails) to play video streams with that instead of vlc. I think many people are confused by this and just give up.
4) I don’t like how my USB sticks have a /.Trash folder. Maintaining this takes a little longer before I can remove the drive. And I don’t like having things I tried to delete end up in there.
5) Sometimes when I try to Empty Trash, I click on “Remove from Panel” instead. Ack! Then when I try to re-add my Trashcan to the Panel, it can’t be moved the far right where it was before. It sits there to the left of my workspaces. Do we really need a “Trash Help” and “Trash About” tab?
The cuts fixed with 9.04 are greatly appreciated, so this project is great news! For example, my taskbar always stays at the top now. About once a day before, I would accidentally move it and have to put it back.
Cosmetic changes are certainly welcome.
Please don’ forget that Ubuntu suffers from some nagging (chronic) basic problems. Along them:
The sound management is a total mess, made worse with a smowhat hasty Pulse audio introduction. Every move aiming to simplify it will be most useful.
The rewriting of Intel graphic cards drivers failed miserably with jaunty. This failure has lasting effects.
This would be my first choice.
When a file is duplicated, i.e., copied into the same directory, it gets a “(copy)” suffix. An example would be copy “June 2009 Invoice” to “July 2009 Invoice”. The new file begins life as “June 2009 Invoice (copy)”. Then I have to rename the file to give it the desired name, and to do that I have to right-click the file icon. An improvement would be for Ubuntu to pop right into the rename function, the same way it does when I create a new file (File -> Create Document -> Empty File), and allow me to type in the new name right away.
First fix the biggest bug…make KDE the default instead of gnome!
Yeah, I’d love it if they fixed a few “little things”.
I don’t remember which version of Ubuntu started to have the incredibly loud pcspeaker beep on shut down, but before I found the fix in the forums, I’m completely convinced it was responsible for destroying the speaker in my laptop. Now my speaker is “blown” and it’s going to require a hardware fix to get it back to something I can stand to listen too.
So sometimes the “hundred papercuts” are just annoying, but sometimes they might cause real damage.
BTW, how in the world did that bug stay in from one release to another?!!!!
Great! I’ve noticed a few annoying things. I’m using Compiz and the nvidia driver (maybe this is nvidia-related)
1) Sometimes when I drag and drop a window , the window-toolbar disappears above the top ubuntu toolbar (so I can’t move the window again); I’m using effect jelly-windows
2) The text of the buttons in openoffice disappear, when I move the mouse over the buttons again, the text sometimes reappear .
biggest bugs i found were video related
ati and intel drivers had bad performance and/or flickering issues (dedicated hours to somewhat fixing them..)
and setting up 2 screens differently (not just cloning) in ubuntu (gnome) didnt work at all (except in kubuntu, which worked quite well).
well, Add/remove could also use some better advertising (like android market or apples app center..)
also a welcome guide and auto chat/irc support at first boot would do wonders (just like linuxmint 7 recently implemented)
unetbootin did not work (could not unmount unetbootin virtual cdrom partition) when i tried installing ubuntu to it’s own partition without burning it to a CD (the CD step should be optional)
sharing folders/files on network could actually work better
kubuntu needs more love (with kde4.3 and then 4.4 will actually be the biggest competitor to win7 in terms of features , eyecandy and transition)
a new icon set (like breath set ) and default theme would also do wonders for the time being
well i believe those would be my papercuts