Brilliant Brainstorms is 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.

The current Ubuntu homepage looks far too static and shows off very little of what Ubuntu can do and what Ubuntu is. A new homepage with news, applications, and links to the many various Ubuntu sites would both be more useful and helpful in promoting Ubuntu. It is important that the homepage remain professional, though.

Anyone that has attempted to use Gnash, the free Flash Player alternative, will know that is does not work for everything, but it does work for some sites. If you have to choose between one or the other, you are basically forced to use Flash Player, but if you could easily switch between the two, you could use Gnash whenever possible.

The Fedora team put a big push into not just with the boot screen but with the entire boot experience to make it look more professional and less confusing to new users. Although it may seem like a small thing, small things do matter, so it would be much better if Ubuntu too eliminated text screens at bootup.

Although this idea may be very difficult or impossible to implement in practice, part of the idea of brainstorming is to come up with lots of ideas, possible or not. Sometimes there is simply not a .deb file for a piece of software and if newbies (and anyone wanting to save time) were able to simply click on a source package and have it install, it would be great.

In the past, the configuration for Compiz Fusion was always amazingly complicated, but now that there is a much simpler configuration tool, Simple CCSM, it should be included.

There are really two reasons to use the cube desktop effect instead of the wall effect. First, the cube is the one that is demonstrated more often, and therefore people are more likely to be familiar with. Second, even though Linux had it first, the wall could be thought of as a Mac rip-off by someone who was unfamiliar with Linux.

With the iPhone SDK starting to appear, a Linux.com article summarizes the concerns of the free software community: the licensing you have to agree to in order to use the iPhone SDK essentially prevent open-source applications. Although I agree this is unacceptable, I see no reason to believe this is anything more than a mistake.

For one thing, what does Apple have to gain from not allowing open-source apps on the iPhone? I suppose that theoretically they could prevent people from seeing the power of open-source and therefor continuing the FUD around Linux… Seriously, you think that outweighs all the bad press they will get?

Another thing: in the past few weeks, we have seen not one but two cases of a bad EULA (end-user license agreement) being pointed out and the company apologizing for it. One was the Photoshop Express EULA that stated that Adobe could use pictures you uploaded for whatever they wanted without your permission. The other was Apple’s own EULA on Safari for Windows which said you could not use it on anything but a Mac. What we are seeing now is most likely nothing more than another instance of a company not thinking carefully enough about their EULA or reusing standard parts and accidentally messing things up.

This is not to say people should not talk about the issues around OSS on the iPhone. It is important that this is brought to the attention of Apple, but I am confident this is no more than a mistake. I just hope Apple does not ignore the open-source communtiy.

Brilliant Brainstorms is 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.

Last week I mentioned that there was a new Brainstorm blog to enable better transparency between developers and users. Now we have seen the first real post on that blog. The post covers some recent ideas and suggestions and what the Brainstorm team intends to do about them as well as discussing how to enable other projects to create a Brainstorm-like site. I think the more open-source projects use a Brainstorm-like site the better. It enables the developers to communicate directly with users and there is clearly a need for it, since it is very common to see suggestions on Brainstorm that are really for other open-source projects, not Ubuntu.

As you can tell, I am very happy with how the blog is going so far and I like what Brainstorm is doing. I would still like to see more discussion on the blog about how Ubuntu, not Ubuntu Brainstorm, developers are reacting to the ideas.

Now on to this weeks ideas:

Anyone who frequently reads Brilliant Brainstorms or who watches the Brainstorm site will know that this is not the first of this type of idea, still it is worth bringing up, since it is a great idea. Basically, the idea is that there are lots of people who would be happy to help Ubuntu out, but are not sure how to get started developing. With a site to explain how to get started and what you need to know, more people would, hopefully, join the development team.

Again, this is an idea we have seen before, but it keeps  coming back. Backups are very important, since most people now keep their precious memories as well as their work on their hard drive, and so Ubuntu should have a good built in backup utility.

As new users transition to Ubuntu, they may want to be able to boot into Windows when they need to. To make this even easier, it is a great idea to have a GUI utility to let users configure what OSs are in their GRUB menu and which one is the default. This may not be something new users will use a lot, at least not without help, but it should be there in case it is needed.

If you especially like any of these ideas, click on the image at the left and vote for it!

Brilliant Brainstorms is 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.

Today Brainstorm implemented an idea I wrote about last week, creating a blog to go along with the main site. Last week I said that “The idea behind Ubuntu Brainstorm is to get ideas and suggestions from Ubuntu users, but in order to expect feedback from users, developers must show how they are using that feedback.” Now, the first introductory post on the new blog says “But we understand brainstorming is not an one-way process: it is our duty to give you some feedback on the ideas you proposed. That will be the goal of this blog.” As you might guess, I am very happy about this new addition. Check it out here.

With videos being incredibly popular on the web and Ubuntu having tons of cool visual effects though Compiz Fusion, it makes a lot of sense to create an official Ubuntu promotion video.

Currently, if you want to create a custom theme for your desktop, you have to pick out individual pieces. This makes it so hard to create an appealing new theme for your desktop. Letting you just download one package would make it so much easier.

Open-source is about users contributing back, but far too often even users that want to help out don’t know how. Ubuntu needs an easy way for new helpers to figure out what they should do.

It is far too easy to accidentally quit out of X (essentially giving you a full screen terminal), which would leave a new user completely confused. It is essential that there are instructions on how to get back into the GUI.

I don’t know what the title is supposed to mean, but the idea here is to add links to various useful sites for new Ubuntu users to the desktop. I think this is a great idea, because the desktop is what the user first sees and so it is the most easily accessibly place for help. Once the user is more familiar with Ubuntu, he/she can delete those links.

One of the most annoying things about installing Windows is that it keeps stopping the process to ask you more questions. This basically forces you to sit there the whole time, unless you want the process to take a whole day. I have never had this problem with Ubuntu, but I certainly don’t want to start having it.

Ubuntu Brainstorm is one of the best ways for Ubuntu users to get themselves heard. It would be so simple to put a link to it on the front page of the Ubuntu site and it would give so many more people a voice.

Brilliant Brainstorms is 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.

I don’t think anyone likes making backups or checking on the health of their disk, but it is important. Having one GUI to do all of this and more would be great, as long as everything is presented in a way that non-geeks can understand.

Every few releases of Ubuntu, Canonical puts out an “LTS” (long term support) version. These releases are supposed to be more stable and are supported for longer. Unfortunately, you cannot directly upgrade from one LTS to another. That must be fixed.

Although I don’t know anyone who has actually lost data due to pulling out a flash drive too soon, that is not a good reason not to try and prevent it from every happening. I don’t know if it is technically possible to implement this idea at all, but, if it is, it would be great.

One of the best things about Linux is the ability to use a separate partition for /home. If Linux is going to expand, that feature must be available for the average user.

This is just a small thing that bugs me, but I hate it when a distro overwrites my bootloader.

Yes. Yes. Yes. I do not want to know that Linux Kernel 2.3.4.2.3.4.34.232.3.23.2.3.2.3.2…5454. was included in the latest release of Ubuntu. I want to know what that means for the average user. (OK, yes, I am exaggerating and Ubuntu is pretty good about explaining things, but still.)

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.

With the increasing popularity of free web mail, more and more people are bound to be looking for a way to get their web mail on their computer. If you look at my tutorial on using GMail with Evolution, you can tell just how difficult it would be for a new user to figure out how to get their web mail on their PC. If GMail, Yahoo Mail, Live Mail, etc. were an option in Evolution (the GNOME default email program,) it would make it so much easier for new users.

The idea behind Ubuntu Brainstorm is to get ideas and suggestions from Ubuntu users, but in order to expect feedback from users, developers must show how they are using that feedback. Both of these ideas provide methods for users to see what is going on behind the scenes, without having to look at the source code :-).

Although the example files could be much worse, they could also be much better. Showing off impressive formatting in office files and high-quality videos promoting Ubuntu (there are plenty user made Ubuntu ads) could make a good impression on a new user.

Although the reliability of SMART seems to be in question, as far as I am concerned, any chance of warning a user before a crash should not be ignored.

This is almost more of a bug-fix than an idea, but currently when you put in a disk that was not removed properly you get a big scary error message that directs you to execute a command in the terminal. Come on. Windows users often don’t bother to unmount their drives at all, they just pull.

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.