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

One of the exciting features of Ubuntu 9.04 is the new notification system that will provide system-wide alerts to the user in an unobtrusive way.This new system could be used in even more ways, though. For example, the progress of burning a CD, copying files, and anything else could be displayed through the new notification system.

Ubuntu’s quick release cycle helps it to keep on the bleeding edge of things, but it doesn’t necessarily help with keeping bugs under control. This is the job of the LTS release, which is supposed to the the stable, well-supported version. Unfortunately, it is not always so and the LTS is often a bit neglected. It would be great to put more attention towards maintaining the LTS releases as a way of ensuring stability.

What is a new user going to do while they are waiting for Ubuntu to install for the first time? The live CD lets you surf the web or play games and, of course, you can always leave and come back, but why not “entertain” the user with a quick slideshow during the installation that introduces Ubuntu.

With more and more ISPs implementing bandwidth caps and charging extreme amounts of money for every bit after that or just plain threatening to shut you off, it is now important to limit your bandwidth. In addition, if you have a slow internet connection, limiting the bandwidth available to certain applications can vastly improve your experience with other applications. Unfortunately, there are very few good utilities for this, so why not build something into the OS?

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

For most Windows users, the first thing to do when anything freezes or goes wrong is to press Ctrl + Alt + Delete. Since this keyboard shortcut is already known by so many people, there is really no reason not to map it to the system monitor or something like that.

One of the (few) nice features of Adobe’s own PDF reader is that you can view PDF files from within the browser. Unfortunately, this functionality is not available in most or even any of the alternative PDF readers. It would be great to allow Evince to work this way.

Continuing the theme of making the “Open With…” menu simpler, why not sort the list of applications by relevance. For example, if I had a JPEG photo, there are a lot of applications I could open that with. I would be more likely, however, to open the JPEG with GIMP than Firefox.

One of the obstacles facing open-source software is that people sometimes don’t trust it, taking the view that it can’t be good since it is free. While there are obviously so many flaws in this, it is important to assure the user that their software is working. In other words, don’t just blank the screen, but give a progress bar at all times.

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

Many mice now have six or more buttons plus a mouse wheel. While many people just use the left and right mouse button, being able to take advantage of every button on the mouse can be quite useful. Many mouse manufacturers ship a custom utility for setting up the functions of each button, but it would be great to be able to configure mouse buttons from the built in mouse utility.

Your desktop serves a number of purposes. In addition to displaying an image, it holds application shortcuts, files, and shortcuts to removable media. The problem is that these types of icons mix together, even though they are not related. It would be great to be able to define default locations for each type of icon.

A lot of Linux users dual-boot their machines, either to run multiple Linux distros or to have access to Windows when they need it. The current process for switching between operating systems is to restart and then choose the correct operating system, but it would be much easier if you could choose the operating system to boot in to before you restart your computer.

Rather than having the Disk Usage Analyzer utility as a stand alone tool, it would be great to integrate it in to Nautilus, the GNOME file manager, so that you can see what is using up sapce in a particularly directory and view files in directories that seem to be hogging space.

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

For a lot of people, the desktop is the computer equivalent of their inbox. That means that it eternally needs cleaning. Unfortunately, like cleaning out your inbox, cleaning and/or organizing your desktop is quite difficult. Furthermore, there are different types of stuff you keep on your desktop. There are files, folders, shortcuts to applications, drives, and more. An easy way to keep track of all this stuff would be an incredibly valuable tool.

With the rise in web video and web TV through sites like Hulu, more and more people are experiencing the pain of disabling your screensaver every time you want to sit back and watch a longer video. Having your screensaver disabled whenever you are watching video, even if the video comes from YouTube or Hulu, would be incredible.

While most people don’t bother, there are a lot of people who use external monitors, especially with netbooks and laptops. For these people, it would be a great feature for Ubuntu to correctly and easily detect and configure external monitors.

One of Linux’s strong points is customization, but, at this point, the options are scattered all over the place in GNOME utilities, third party utilities, and configuration files. It would be much better to have one interface for managing themes, with the option to go to a lower level and change every detail.