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

This week I am going to start something a little different. In addition to the ideas I think are best, I am also going to talk about some ideas that might seem good, but have a less obvious negative side to them. Feedback is appreciated, as always!

Not All Good

While at first it may seem that more artwork is better, and it usually is, I am not always in favor of branding the bootloader. After all, the bootloader is not part of Ubuntu. Right now, the bootloader on my computer is OpenSuse’s, but I run Ubuntu as my main OS. In a situation like this, I find the branding slightly annoying. That is why I favor having a professional, but not branded, bootloader.

Really Brilliant

This is a great example of the kind of innovation Brainstorm-like sites should promote. The idea is to periodically (and optionally) restore everything except your home folder to a “clean” image. Sort of like a less-extreme version of Windows SteadyState.

You might be wondering why I am highlighting a “fix this” “idea.” The reason is that this has been the most popular idea since the first few days of Briainstorm. Yes, it is easier to stay on top once you are on top, but any idea that stays up there this long has to get some attention.

Being able to instantly install a package and have a new theme on your desktop would be really cool and it looks like work is already underway.

To help users (like me) keep their systems clean, it would be nice to be able to just look through your Applications menu and say, “hey, I don’t need that anymore” and just right-click and uninstall.

Believe me, if you have lots partitions, it is a pain to try to figure out which is which based on their sizes alone, so naming them just a little better would help a lot.

As you know, I am absolutely against making the same hardware cost the same with two different operating systems that don’t cost the same price. So if you take a given PC or laptop, put a free OS on one version and a commercial OS on the other and charge the same price, that is unfair. You may wonder why I am making such a big deal of the same hardware. Obviously you can’t compare across two different PCs, right? Well, apparently not.

A recent Techworld article is titled “Windows same price as Linux in new Eee PC.” When I read this, I thought “Ugg. Asus is messing with prices again.” Then I read the article.

If you look closely, the end of the second sentence says “although the specs are different.” That makes the story completely different and makes the title very misleading.

Just to make sure I am very clear, there is nothing wrong with selling machines with different priced OSs, if there is a difference in the specs that compensates for the price. Please, no more misleading titles.

Companies like Apple and Microsoft are starting to create a web of products that are all designed to work really well with each other. Perhaps the clearest example of this is Apple’s iLife software package. It includes a number of applications like a photo organizer and a movie maker. Another example, though, is Windows, Windows Home Server, Windows Media Center, and the Zune. In fact, you could really put almost every product Apple makes into one “web.” As I said before, all the products in each web are designed to be perfectly integrated into each other. There may be some cross-compatibility, but the products  are “best” together.

What these “webs” mean is that you can buy into the “Apple experience” or the “Microsoft experience.” The question in my mind was, what is the “open-source experience.” The problem, if you call it a problem, is that there is no one company or group to create an Apple or Microsoft-like set of products. It just doesn’t work that way. That’s OK. These super integrated product sets are the wrong way of doing things, anyway.

As an example, lets take two of Apple’s products: Mail and iCal. In a perfect world, there are a number of things Mail and iCal, or any E-Mail program and any calender program, should be able to do together. For example, you might get an e-mail that had a date for some event and want to add that event to your calender. Apple’s solution (which they may have already done - I just don’t know) would be to make it so that if you use Mail you can send event details to iCal. If you did this on the Linux side, though, what e-mail client and what calender program would you choose? That is where the right way comes in.

Instead of making program X and program Y talk to each other, why not create an open protocol for any application of type X to talk to any other application of type Y. If these sorts of protocols were adopted, it would solve the problem of the best applications, presumably from different companies, not working as well together as all the applications from one company. All you would have to do is find the best application for your needs and you would know that it will work with all your other applications. This should be the “open-source experience.”

View the replay.

Whenever a new major distribution comes out, I am always curious to see how they handled the release announcement. These sorts of announcements are almost always followed by some form of feature list. In some cases, this consists of something like this:

• Linux Kernel updated from 2.34.23.23 to 2.3.43.4.3
• OpenOffice.org updated from 43.43 to 343.2
• Bug #4344059450 fixed
• Blah, blah, blah

Obviously, I am exaggerating some, but, unfortunately, not very much.

In other cases, however, the “feature list” is a straight forward explanation of what is cool or interesting about the new version. This later case, of course, is what I far prefer. Instead of pushing away new users, it pulls them in and tells them why <insert name of distro> is the OS they should be using.

I am very happy to say that OpenSuse did a great job with their anouncement. The technical details are still there, just down a couple of pages. At the beginning is an explanation of the cool new end-user features like Compiz Fusion, complete with screenshots.

It is true that there are some references in the beginning to GNOME, KDE, and Xfce, but they are fairly well explained and OpenSuse has never really seemed to target the “average joe” Windows user anyway.

Overall, I am very happy to see another distro doing their release announcement the right way. Good job OpenSuse!!!

Remember, live review of OpenSuse 11 this Friday at 3:30 PM EDT.

Almost every open-source project, no matter if it currently has ten or a million users or even more, would like to grow and have more users. Few projects, though, are good at promoting their software. Strangely, the same ideas are talked about over and over again, while there is an incredible example of an open-source project that has volunteers spreading it very successfully in all sorts of creative ways. This project, as you may have guessed, is Firefox.

You have probably already heard that Firefox far surpassed their goal and reached over 8 million downloads of Firefox 3 in just 24 hours! This is not, by far, though, the only promotional project Firefox has succeeded with. Everything from crop circles to newspaper ads to volunteer “Firefox Campus Reps,” Firefox has tried it. Firefox is easily the most widely recognized open-source project that I can think of. The point is, Firefox is really, really good at promoting itself. Because of this, other open-source projects should look to them as an example of how to spread their software and name. Granted, Firefox has an advantage in that it can be used by anyone, no matter what OS they use, and in that almost everyone uses a web browser, but still, more open-source projects should look to Firefox as a model for good promotion. I don’t mean everyone should copy exactly what Firefox has done, just be inspired by it. If every open-source project followed the example of Firefox and other widely-known open-source projects, my guess is that the number of projects that are common-place names would skyrocket.

We have all heard the stories about how badly Windows Vista has been received by users and how slow they are to adopt it, but I was surprised, and I suspect many people will be, when I read that only 8% of developers are “coding with Vista in mind,” according to Electronista.

The truth is, I am not just surprised, I am wondering if the number could even be real. 92% of developers are just ignoring the latest version of the largest OS more than a year after its release? It just does not sound plausible, and it makes me wonder if there is some sort of misunderstanding.

Assuming, however, that the numbers are correct and there is no misunderstanding, Microsoft seems to have a huge problem. If the vast majority of developers are ignoring Vista, as more and more people start to use it, there are going to be tons of application compatibility issues. This means that, rather than everything calming down and people moving to Vista, as Microsoft would like, the issues with Vista are going to continue for an unknown amount of time. If Microsoft can’t even get the developers to move to Vista, they are going to have an incredibly hard time trying to get users to calmly accept Vista.

When people make the argument that open source software lets you make your software do exactly what you want and nothing else, I am sure lots of people think “oh great, now if I knew how to code C++ I could spend hours putting in and taking out features I do or don’t want. Recently, however, a clear example of why choice in your software is important came up.

As you know, Microsoft already has Windows Genuine Advantage, which attempts to verify that your copy of Windows is legitimate when you install and every time you update your PC. Now, Apple has filed a patent that appears to be something similar, according to OSWeekly. This does not mean that Apple will implement what is in their patent, it just means they are thinking about it.

The point is, if you rely on closed-source software, you have the threat of some form of DRM (digital rights management) that, as we have seen with Windows Genuine Advantage, has a high potential to mess up users trying to do completely legal things. If you don’t believe me, anyone that tried to update or activate Windows for several days a while ago was marked as non-genuine, because Microsoft’s servers went down. This was a while ago, but it could happen again at any time. In other words, whenever you update your legal Windows installation, you are taking a risk of losing functionality if Windows’s servers fail again. This is unlikely, but it could, and has, happened.

If you use open-source software, on the other hand, and the maker tries to put in some sort of DRM like this, you can expect that someone will simply fork (i.e. create an offshoot version of) the project and remove the DRM. That is why the choice of open source is important, no matter what your skills.

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.

This week I started using the bookmarking system built in to Brainstorm instead of opening each idea in a tab and it seems to work quite well. I submitted an idea to include tags for bookmarks, to which I received a response from a Brainstorm admin that they are working on tags already!

There are already tons of great user-created videos promoting Ubuntu. With a contest, even more people would be inspired to create great videos that promote Ubuntu.

Although the implementation would have to be carefully figured out, the basic idea, improving copy and paste with lists or stacks, is great.

As long as most of the desktop is already animated, why not make more stuff look cool? Seriously, especially if there are a lot of icons on your desktops, making the new ones glow could be very useful.

Add/Remove is arguably one of the things that differentiates Ubuntu from other distros and other OSs, so making it better should be a top priority.

For those of us who want to know what each update does, but don’t want to have to sort through highly technical gibberish, it would be nice to have, possibly in addition, a short one or two sentence description of what an update does.

Imagine clicking on your Applications menu and dragging Firefox to the top as all the other apps glide down to make room for it. If that sounds cool, you should support this idea.

Windows and Mac OS X are names from the history of early computing, from back when computers used big, bulky slow OSs. Technically, of course, computers still use OSs, but they are simple, small, fast windows to the cloud, rather than full OSs. What people used to call “web browsers” and now just “computers.” WiMax and other similar technologies blanket the globe, providing high-speed data access everywhere. “Desktops” are no longer used, just tiny pocket or bag-size UMPCs as well as the occasional laptop. Instead of using desktop applications, everyone uses web applications.

All of this could come to be reality in the future, perhaps even the not-so-distant future. Think about it. Web 2.0 applications are already competing with almost every desktop applications you can think of. UMPCs are taking off fast. After all, can you think of a major computer company without a UMPC? Apple, HP, Dell, Acer, Asus, and tons more all have them. And, finally, many of these companies are adopting an instant on Splashtop or Splashtop-like system. The technology is all here. And it runs Linux.