Brilliant Brainstorms will be a weekly-ish summary of some of the best brainstorms from the Ubuntu Brainstorm site. In the beginning it may not always come exactly once a week or on the same day, but, if it becomes popular, it should become more regular.

There are many automated tasks that people have their computers doing all the time such as downloading a big file, doing a backup, installing updates, and other similar tasks.  But when a task like this starts while you are working on something, especially on older computers, it can bog down the computer and make it hard for you to do anything. If this idea were implemented, these sorts of tasks would take place while the screensaver was running, so your work would never be interrupted.

If you have ever been to a Linux support forum, you have seen the numerous threads asking “why does my <name of hardware> not work?” This idea would make it so that users would be told up front before installation that some of their hardware would not work, or that it would all work, which is much better than having them waste their time installing Linux, only to find it does not work. At least if they are told up front that their hardware is incompatible they will not come away thinking Linux does not work at all.

While guides for people interested in getting involved in open-source projects exist, they are usually not as newbie-friendly as they should be and often link to multiple long tutorials, leaving the possible volunteer confused as to what they should do. Improving a new developer’s experience could dramatically increase the number of people willing to help out with Ubuntu. This would be particularly helpful for non-professional programmers, such as high school and collage students who have taken courses, but never programmed professionally.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 13th, 2008 at 10:15 pm and is filed under Brainstorms, Hardware, Ubuntu. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.