Ubuntu 9.10 is coming in October, and, in addition to some new features, it will also feature 100 fewer “papercuts”. Papercuts are minor bugs that cause a usability issue. For example, a confusing icon or a badly positioned text box might be considered a papercut. To give you a better idea of what to expect, here are five common and annoying papercuts that should be fixed by 9.10.

5 – What the heck is “Auto eth0″?

Auto eth0

When you plug your computer into a wired network, you get the notification shown on the left, saying “Auto eth0 – Connection Established”. What on earth does that mean, though?

Many of you will know that eth0 is nothing more than a technical term for the default wired connection, but how should a new user know that?

Although the exact text has not yet been decided, the wording used in 9.10 will aim to be far more user friendly than “auto eth0″ is.

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4 – Workspaces flying by

Desktop Wall plugin

Anyone with a trackpad can, I would guess, relate to this issue. Placing the mouse over the desktop and touching the scroll bar placed on the right side of so many trackpads causes your computer to shuffle through your workspaces like a magician going through a deck of cards — faster than you can see them.

The effect is actually quite like a magician’s trick in that it leaves you completely confused as to where your work just went, what workspace you were on, and what you were doing.

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3 – Adding an icon to Ubuntu’s file system and to other OS partitions

BSOD Drive

Ubuntu provides no easy way for a new user to tell which drive holds Ubuntu and (if applicable) which holds OS X, Windows, BSD, etc. Most people don’t have to worry about which drive holds what OS, but someone who dual boots between Ubuntu and Windows might want to copy files between the two operating systems. Labeling them with an icon would make it easy to tell which is which.

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2 – Clear icons for “wait to remove” and “OK to remove”

Removable Media

After clicking the eject button next to a mounted removable drive, you may be told that you need to wait before you can remove the drive. During this time, write operations to the drive are finished, then you get another message saying you can remove the drive. In order to prevent confusion, the icons for these notifications should be both clear and different. Hopefully, by 9.10, they will be.

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1 – Document title instead of job number in print notifications

Which job?

Unless you keep track of everything you print by its job number, knowing that job 179 just finished is not very helpful. A more helpful notification would be that paper.odt just finished printing.

In Ubuntu 9.10, the document name will be in the header of the notification. In case you do manage your printing by jobs, the job number will probably remain in the body of the notification.

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