Ten Brainstorm ideas I wish more people would vote up

Ubuntu Brainstorm is a mess. There are literally tens of thousands of ideas posted up there. How can you make any sense of it? Well, you can’t. I thought I’d just draw some attention to some ideas I think are worthwhile in the hopes that people will vote them up or at least discuss them.

Here’s my top ten along with quick blurbs as to why they’re important:


Not everyone has broadband internet access at home. So-called “Linux for Human Beings” should focus on accessibility.


One good SVG takes up less disk space than seven PNGs of various sizes, and it also looks great no matter how big you make it.


I don’t think this requires a justification. I’m using the latest Ubuntu 10.04 alpha, and the problem still requires a workaround (deleting and recreating the keyring password with “unsafe storage”).


Why ask a user to paste a command into the terminal when the program could just run the command by itself?


Privacy should be the default with sharing as an opt-in.


Why give new users the option through the GUI to accidentally remove admin access?


For the last time: if hiding asterisks or dots is “a security feature,” then you should be voting up Idea #11136: Remove visual feedback from GUI password dialogues. If it isn’t a security feature, though, then you should vote this up so as not to confuse users who are expecting visual feedback when they type passwords. This happens a lot.


Lots of widescreen monitors out these days. Why waste vertical screen space with a second panel? A lot of people seem to think moving the window buttons from right to left is no big deal, so why would it be a big deal to just remove one Gnome panel by default. And the defaults-don’t-matter crowd (which I am not a part of) can just add it back with a few clicks.


I take a lot of screenshots for tutorials. I know a lot of others folks do too. It’d be great if gnome-screenshot didn’t keep prompting for a file name. Just create the file… or allow an easy preference option to do so.


I understand why Ubuntu doesn’t include various codecs and software by default in Ubuntu, but apart from pasting in cryptic code, new users don’t have an easy way to access the Medibuntu repositories. It’d be great if they could check just one more box (as they can with the Partner repositories).

2 comments

  1. +1 to all of them, and especially No. 1

    If we require/assume broadband internet access, we are essentially saying that Linux is for an elite – mainly wealthy first-world-country urban dwellers.

  2. If you are concerned about accessibility, as you say, then you should have alternative texts for the images. Especially as they include words. The content there is completely inaccessible to someone who can’t see.

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *