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

Suppose that every time you opened Add/Remove programs, it has a list of programs you might want to install based on how you use your computer. This is not really that hard. If you have lots of Music, suggest a music management program; if you have a lot of video, offer a video editing program. The only issue is protecting the users privacy, which would be solved if the feature was made opt-in.

While some hardware does not need any specific software, such as RAM, others, such as web cams, TV tuners, and more, often take software to use them. After all, your webcam is pointless if you have a driver, but no software to view the video. The simple solution is to prompt the user to install recommended software when they plug in new hardware.

In addition to the free-form suggestion approach already available from Brainstorm, it would be great to have frequent polls to get input from users on specific issues or general preferences.

Imagine if every application you use had the same standards for storing the same type of data. If this were the case, you could easily switch between email programs or music management programs without worrying about exporting or importing or anything like that. Plus, you could give other applications access to data that they might not use directly, but could still make use of. For example, you could give your calender program access to your email, so that it could automatically schedule meetings based on your emails.

Live USB drives are great, but what if you want to transfer between a USB drive and a standard computer? Syncing between a LiveUSB drive and your computer should be made easy, so you can take your current install anywhere. It should also be easy to exclude certain files, to make things fit on your USB drive.

With the popularity of Linux netbooks, 4 out of Amazon’s top 10 bestseller list for notebooks now run some form of Linux. Another four run Windows XP, not Vista. The final two (which are 2nd and 10th) are MacBooks.

I think this list says a lot about the current state of laptops. First of all, 8 out of 10, all except the Macs, are netbooks. Additionally, it is worth noting that the Macs have an advantage, since there are a very limited numbers of Macs, compared to the number of Windows or Linux machines, so if you disqualify the Macs, all ten are netbooks. That says a lot about how popular netbooks are.

Then, if you look at the netbooks in the top 10 notebooks (so really the top 8 netbooks), you find that half of them run Linux and half run Windows XP. None of them run Windows Vista or Mac OS X. In my opinion, this is a strong indication that both Windows and Apple are missing the rise of UMCPs. Microsoft has at least had the sense to extend Windows XP’s life, while Apple has done nothing except the Air, which misses the point, at least in my opinion, due to its price point.

Finally, the list also tells who has the really popular UMPCs. Out of the netbooks in the top 10, Asus makes two of them (1 Linux, 1 Windows) and MSI makes 6 of them (3 Linux, 3 Windows). I should note that Asus’s ones are number 1 and number 3, while MSI’s are lower down, and that MSI’s Wind was released a lot more recently than Asus’s Eee PC. Still, though, it is interesting that MSI’s Wind line is doing so well. I would have predicted that it would be the HP MiniNote or the Acer Aspire One, but I guess not.

Certainly Amazon’s bestseller list cannot be viewed as a perfect indication of what products are doing well, but it still provides some interesting insights into what is going on.

A recent Linux Journal article point to Apple’s selling of heavily discounted Macs to schools and asks what Linux is doing to attract the young, and more tech-savvy, generation. It is very important that Linux does target this group, because they are the generation of the future and the generation others are increasingly turning to for solutions to their technology problems. So what can we do to target this group?

I propose a competition, sponsored by individual donations and contributions from as many Linux distributions as possible. This competition could also be done in connection with college software development classes.

In order to compete in the competition, developers would have to create an open-source application for Linux that targets any segment of education - particularly high school and college students. This would spur true innovation and, hopefully, turn out some incredible Linux applications for students.

For example, what about an application that provides a collaborative platform for note-talking and group projects? Additionally, with a good plug-in system, the functionality could be expanded practically forever. Or how about a better system for handwriting recognition? How about a system for communication among students, and between students and professors? How about a specialized Linux distro for elementary schools (yeah, yeah, I know that some already exist)? The possibilities really are virtually infinite.

Especially if this competition was run together with colleges and universities, in addition to whatever prize was already being offered, winning applications could be pre-installed on top of a Linux distro on laptops, and the participating colleges would recommend these laptops to students.

This competition would give universities a chance to get their names on some really cool applications, give students a chance to show their coding and design skills to the world, promote Linux and open source software, and create a wave of new college students using Linux laptops pre-installed with cool applications. In other words, everyone wins.

We have already seen that this sort of model works with Firefox’s Extend Firefox competion and Google’s Adroid Developer Challenge. Now all we need to do is apply this model to Linux applications designed for students.

I am a Comcast subscriber. Where I live, I get great speeds. Streaming content from Hulu (standard def) works just fine, downloading a Linux ISO image is fairly quick, web surfing is great, and so on. I have not always been pleased with the service, though. There are long periods where I lose connection to the internet intermittently. Worse, about once a year Comcast’s service (at least in my area) goes down for several days at a time. In other words, my experience with Comcast has been mixed. Sometimes it is fast and great, sometimes it is completely unreliable. Comcast’s recent move, though, just takes it too far.

Comcast has just announced that they are going to be metering bandwidth and putting on a monthly cap of 250GB. Fine. I don’t have a problem with that. I would have a problem with a 15GB cap, but 250GB is OK. What I do have a problem with, though, is how they are informing customers if they exceed the cap. Comcast provides absolutely no way of knowing where you are, until you go over. That is crazy! They actually suggest that I should go search for a utility to install on each of my computers and then add them all up! OK. I have at least 6 computers in my house accessing the internet on a daily basis. So I now need to collect everyone’s computers once a week and check what the numbers say? Thanks a lot.

Just to add to all of this, the first time you go over, you just get a call. If you go over again in the next 6 months, they terminate your service for a year? What? How about slowing me down or charging me more? Just terminating my service is going to make me furious and lose them revenue. It makes no sense. Plus, they don’t even let you pay for more bandwidth.

So where do I go? That is the real problem here. Comcast has an absolute monopoly on decent speeds where I live. I can go to DSL from Embarq, which is slow, even for DSL, or I can go to dial-up. Believe me, if anyone else where here offering fast speeds, I would have switched long ago. I guess there is just nothing I can do. Hey Comcast, why don’t you just double our fees and only let us use 1GB of bandwidth. It’s not like you have any competition.

Sorry for the off topic rant. Back to the Linux news on Friday - unless Comcast takes my suggestion.

For those of you not following the Psystar and Apple story, this is a brief summary:

1. Psystar (small company that no one has heard of) announces that it is selling an open Mac, meaning a computer running OS X not made by Apple.
2. Everyone wonders if it is legit or if it is a scam until the review units come in.
3. Apple, after a long delay, sues Psystar, Psystar says it will fight.
4. Psystar acquires lawyers known for having defeated Apple in the past.
5. Psystar announces it plans to counter sue Apple over complaints, claiming that locking OS X to specific hardware violates anti-monopoly laws.

Through all of this, the general consensus seems to be that Psystar is small and Apple is big, so they will be able to fight off the suit. I don’t agree. The fact that Psystar started selling the open Macs in the first place signaled from the beginning that they intended to fight the suit. There are only two possible reasons for this. Either Psystar is crazy or they have something up their sleeve and think they can win. I don’t think they are crazy. Apple is going to have to fight hard. I don’t think Psystar is “likely” to win, but I would give it a much better chance than others seem to.

So, supposing Psystar did win, what would happen? Just to clarify, this would mean that anyone could create and sell an OS X-running PC, just like anyone can sell a Windows-based PC. I think it is clear that Apple’s current bussiness model, which depends very much on hardware, would not work for long. The real question is how adaptable can Apple be? If Psystar wins, is all lost for Apple, or at least for their computer business?

Recently, I have written some posts about Linux’s marketshare and how to know what it is. Today, I want to entertain a completely different possibility.

I think everyone would agree that there is no definitive way to be able to say for sure what each OS’s marketshare is. It just is not technically possible at this point, as far I know. We do have a lot of evidence, ranging for statistics from the data web browsers report to web pages to people’s general feeling about how many people around them use Linux. Of the information we have, all of it has major flaws that essentially make the results irrelevant. Plus, none of it agrees with any of the other pieces of evidence.

What I want to suggest is that the fact that you cannot prove what the marketshare is, combined with general perceptions that computers are Windows, combined with Microsoft and Apple’s PR all make it perfectly possible that Linux’s marketshare is, in fact, closer to 15% or 30%, making it possibly more than the Mac. After all, a lot seems to suggest that the Mac is weak outside the US and Linux has cought on more outside the US. But hey, that is just a guess too!

The fact is, we have no real evidence and no way of getting real evidence, so, until we get some good evidence, we shouldn’t just assume no one uses Linux.

What do you think? Is it possible we are all underestimating Linux? Have you thought this all along?

Engadget reports today that Asus added to their download section a place for applications that will run on the Eee PC in the CNR format (more later.) Unfortunately, the CNR installer is not yet on the Eee PC, so putting the website up in the first place was probably a mistake (and they have taken it down now), but it is great to know that this is being planned. Here is why it is so important:

Until now, and for at least a few days more, the Eee PC’s default OS has been locked down (see all my stuff on Ubuntu Netbook Remix). This means that anyone who wants to do anything outside of the Eee PCs default applications (edit: easily - it is possible) has to install a new OS. Now, or presumably soon, you will be able to go to the Asus website (and probably CNR.com, too) and click a single button to install an application. This is what Click n’ Run (CNR) lets you do.

Long time readers can probably understand why I am so enthusiastic about this. I have complained about the Eee’s OS being too locked down (see link to Ubuntu Netbook Remix posts above) and I have talked about the merits of CNR and similar solutions. To me, this seems the perfect use of a good technology to fix a problem. It makes sense, too, since Linspire (the company that created CNR) was just bought by Xandros (who makes the Eee PC’s OS.)

It may be a lot late, but it is bettter than nothing. Hopefully, this will help to get people to more carefully consider the options and, perhaps, opt for Linux. Still many will want to install their own OS, but at least now the default OS is more flexible, as it should have been from the beginning.

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

This idea gathered a lot of debate around it. Some agreed that a new/updated website was needed, while others argued that adding Flash and similar content to the page just makes it take longer to load. To me, the issue is not about adding Flash or video or anything. The issue is about creating a home page that instantly tells people what Ubuntu is, why they might want to use it, where to get it, and where to learn more. Hopefully this issue will get some attention, now that Canonical is opening up their site.

Without developers seeing Ubuntu Brainstorm, there is little point to it. Right now, developers can respond to ideas and those responses are sometimes featured on the blog, but it would make sense to me to have a section dedicated to the ideas that developers like. This would help pull out the ideas that are both good and implementable. These ideas could then be refined and implemented.

Standard media centers are getting out dated. Why should it be that the only thing you can do with a remote is play your downloaded media and use some streaming services? How about browsing the internet? Writing down some notes or a list? Or anything you would do with a computer? Instead of just integrating a standard media center type application into Ubuntu, how about letting you do everything you already do with your PC, just with a remote. This, of course, includes playing media, but it also includes much more.

As you know, I am a big fan of the Brainstorm process. Because the theme is one of the first things you see and arguably the most important new “feature,” it would make a lot of sense to put the theme decision out to a Brainstorm system. This way, the theme could be chosen by popular choice.

In a recent MarketWatch article, John C. Dvorak suggests that, in order to counter pressure from Microsoft’s Silverlight, Adobe should port their software to Linux and design a specialized Linux OS that is optimized to run their suite of applications really well and really fast. Dvorak suggests this as blow to Microsoft, since it would promote Linux. It certainly would be a blow to Microsoft, but it would be even more of a blow to Apple, who makes some of the software that competes most closely with Adobe.

Right now, although I don’t have any real evidence, it appears that Apple has a huge market share among  those who use Adobe software as part of their jobs. In situations like theses, particularly where there are a bunch of computers in one building all running Adobe software, using a customized OS designed specifically for Photoshop or Flash or Premier or whatever you use. Naturally, this custom OS would have to run other apps, too, but I suspect that it could still be designed to feature significant speed improvements, too.

While I think almost every Linux user would support getting Adobe software on Linux, there are potentially some downsides. Once Adobe is in the OS business, why not get in furthur? If Adobe takes a big part of the OS market, they can use that influence to push their other products. In other words, if Adobe just unsteadies Microsoft, that could be great for consumers. If they replace Microsoft, they will probably become Microsoft.

Wishing for any big company, particularly those that already have their own monopolies, to expand is very risky. To some extent, this path of Adobe moving to Linux sounds great, but there are some hidden risks. Overall, though, I think the benefits outweigh the risks.

Most of the “early” netbooks/UMPCs include interfaces that are - quite frankly - bad. They are either the same interfaces that were designed for standard screens, just smaller, or locked-down highly simple interfaces with limited functionality. The trend now is definitely towards something different, but what is “something?”

The Ubuntu Netbook Remix takes one approach - an almost completely new interface. This means the interface is designed completely for small screens, making it seem ideal for a UMPC. This might seem to be the only option, but there is another.

The other option is to take the existing interface and make small modifications to it so that it is more suited to UMPCs. An OSNews article shows that with only very simple modifcations, a standard GNOME interface can work well on a very small screen. The advantage of this approach is that it is potentially more familiar to a non-techie who does not care to learn a new interface. On the other hand, it is unlikely that the modified interface will be as good as a completely new one, since it is based on the old ideas.

In the end, it will probably come down to personal choice. Those who want the best interface and don’t mind learning something new will choose the completely new one, while those who just want to get going with their UMPC will choose the modified old interface. Perhaps some middle-ground that combines the two could be reached?