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9 features Ubuntu should implement


This post came from this  (in Spanish), ran it through Google Translate, and posted it on his blog and it looks like this Spanish translation came from this  (in English) and claimed it had ten features.  Anyway, The original one is kumailht


Ubuntu is a great operating system, but a small modification and adding here and there will make the ubuntu desktop a  enjoyable experience. These include:
1. Weather on your desktop
Time is very important to us. For example, an application like atmosphere, we can show or hide with a simple button and allows us to obtain weather forecasts and know the temperature of different locations we select.
atmosphere22-2-1
2. Wallpapers which change over time
It is a kind of idea of having kind of wallpapers from photos taken of different environments or at different times and showing one or the other.
timewallpaper
Read more .. here 


65 comments:

Melissa Yeuxdoux said...

Icons already show whether the trash is empty or not; look closely--but what could it possibly mean for the trash to be full? All the file system is taken up with deleted file? I think you're pushing the analogy way too far.

Anonymous said...

Well, 8 pathetic features for me ...
Ok for well organized iconbar !

In my mind Ubuntu should include :
- iso,bin,dmg,mdf, etc ... mounting support with only a double click !
- Application directory support like rox-filer because it's the best way to share application between basic users.
- Better graphical search functions than tracker, much like spotlight or google-desktop (I still use grep and rgrep for now !)
- More java apps in repositories
Try these for a start :-)
## RoxApps Depots
deb http://download.tuxfamily.org/knosciences/deb/free ./
deb http://download.tuxfamily.org/knosciences/deb/non-free ./
deb http://download.tuxfamily.org/knosciences/deb/roxwrap ./
deb http://download.tuxfamily.org/knosciences/deb/ofset ./
- Better support for exotic mime-type and automatic launch of the application that can open the double-clicked file.

Je suis flâneur said...

There is an easily installable "weather applet" for the panel. (right click on panel +).
Changing wallpapers is accomplished by the panel applet: Desktop Drapes (Applications/Add-Remove - Drapes).
All the others I'm too unfamiliar to comment on, except the animated intro. That would be smart.

Anonymous said...

It's not installed by default but there are a number of ways to accomplish the "weather on your desktop" function - one being the weather plugin for AWN.

Also Ubuntu specifically doesn't include certain media libraries by default because they aren't legal everywhere.

Anonymous said...

The ability to revert back to a previous update

Anonymous said...

- iso,bin,dmg,mdf, etc ... mounting support with only a double click !

Gnome does this with the Archive Mounter introduced in Gnome 2.24

- Better graphical search functions than tracker, much like spotlight or google-desktop (I still use grep and rgrep for now !)

Have you tried using Deskbar with the tracker plug-in?

- More java apps in repositories
What's so special about java apps?

Anonymous said...

No, no, no, no!

Ubuntu doesn't need this junk. We don't need bloatware and if anything, Ubuntu needs to REMOVE some of the useless junk from their package.

If Ubuntu starts to implement the above "features" , it'll just be another OS X / Vista clone.

Anonymous said...

Absolutely delightful post! Sure brought a smile to my dial -- especially the "aging" of documents in the trash (brilliant! just brilliant). Kinda sad that the other commenters are such "stick in mud types!"

It's humor, people. Humor. Chill ... have a laugh, enjoy a cold one

Anonymous said...

Idea 1 already exists, it is integrated with the clock/calendar panel app...

Anonymous said...

Ubuntu is not an operating system.

Ubuntu is a distribution.

Anonymous said...

That's nice, but that's just eye-candy. Ubuntu seriously needs true PNP monitor, printer, network and peripheral configuration before any of that, my god! Everything, no matter how big or small needs to be plug-n-play on Ubuntu.

Until your Grandma can get dual monitors working perfectly by just plugging them in, Ubuntu will never be anything more than a sideshow.

Anonymous said...

I prefer mac style
http://grigio.org/10_things_linux_ubuntu_should_really_copy_mac_os_x

Anonymous said...

So you want to turn Ubuntu into Vista? yea, I can see what a wonderful idea that is.

Anonymous said...

all of this can already be done with a few scripts. Matter of fact, Fedora 9 had a background that changed depending on the time of day. I borrowed that script and have it on my ubuntu box.

These are 8 pathetic features. Who wants crap slowing their box down

Anonymous said...

How about 3 features: Make my Canon flatbed scanner work, Make my Avermedia TV card work and make video editing as easy as Windows Movie Maker. I think Linux is great but until all my equipment is supported I have to use Windows. And no, I don't want to run a virtual machine or duel boot operating systems to complete windows only tasks.

Anonymous said...

Yes, but at a quick glance you would be able to see that your trash has not been emptied for awhile, and might as well empty it.

Anonymous said...

I like 2, 3, 4, and 7!!!

Vectoor said...

What about a right click and choose "Open as super user" in the drop down menu function. Having to bring up the terminal scares the windows folks...

LinuxCanuck said...

Weather. You can do that now. Ever heard of Widgets, Screenlets, or Google Gadgets? Some people like them and others hate them. If you make them default it will tick some users off.

Wallpapers do change over time if you add a utility such as Webilder or better still use KDE. It does it without adding anything.

BTW, the desktop is GNOME and it would have to change for Ubuntu to enable these wish features. You should really consider trying KDE 4.2 if you want eye candy. GNOME users like simplicity.

What I would like to see is an active desktop, for those who want it. You can get this somewhat with some add-ons, but it isn't a worthwhile experience.

LinuxCanuck said...

These are not Ubuntu things, but parts of the desktop environment, Gnome. Many are already available in KDE 4.2. Switch to it if you want eye candy. Gnome users like simplicity. Ubuntu supports Gnome and until Gnome adds features you must be content or get add ons such as Google Gadgets, Screenlets, etc.

What I would like to see in either Gnome or KDE is support for the active desktop where you can have streaming video or web pages as wallpaper.

Anonymous said...

0 useful features. Some (most?) use their computers to do work, and shining flickering features are just annoying.

Unknown said...

Love the post and the 9 ideas but the only one I would really use is the icons functionality. I would see it as a huge advantage to be able to know the space occupancy of the units.And maybe also the weather. Check out some of my tricks at http://www.jackiesjungle.com

Anonymous said...

Just go put them at brainstorm.ubuntu.com and be done with it.

Harold Fowler said...

If you are a Windoze user and you TRY Linux you will never go back!

RT
www.privacy.at.tc

seweso said...

Well that's all very nice, but first:
- Keep copied (or cut!) items to the clipboard when you close the application.
- Include a fast/stable office system (OOo is buggy as hell)
- When installing updates, do not destroy the grub file, (please).
- Activate wifi network before logging in
- Keep ubuntu responsive even when a task uses 100% cpu (or more if you have more than 1 cpu, what's that about?).
- Make sure you can remove evolution (buggy and cpu-hogg)

I use ubuntu every day for 12 hours. It works much better than windows, but please start with the basics.

Anonymous said...

Good list.

Anonymous said...

laptop wireless card support and wifi management that doesnt suck

Stephen Mc Gowan said...

Already have the weather reporting in Ubuntu 8.10, right click the clock/calendar in the taskbar and select preferences....then go to the weather tab to enable it.

Amir A said...

two features i can think of that are in windows that i miss in gnome are. clicking on a filename to rename it without having to enter properties, and a notification area that allows you to hide some icons, set some icons to always show, and set some to only show when active, then when you wanted access to certain icons you could click a little arrow or something to expand the notification area.

Unknown said...

Maybe this is more of a productivity thing, but I would prefer having dynamically openable/savable virtual desktops. Right now, you can select a fixed number of virtual desktops, and when you log out and then log back in (many of) the applications will start back up in their respective positions. Unfortunately, I use different desktops for different tasks at my job, and I would like to be able to save off the state of a desktop and close it... in order to be able to re-open it later, as some of the tasks go to the back burner for several weeks/months.

I only wish more applications would restore such state, such as the bash history in a konsole, or the variables/history in octave sessions. Plus, many applications only store one state per user (corresponding to whichever instance closed last).

Anonymous said...

easy internet connection sharing, and multi-seat

Anonymous said...

This list is stupid. These are all features you can impliment on your own with third party software quite easily. Some are even easily found in the ubuntu software repository and the ones that arent can be gotten with apt-get. Alot of these features are crazy "wouldnt it be cool" that no OS comes shipped with. Nothing listed here is anything that will suddenly jump Ubuntu lightyears ahead of any other OS and neither are they features worthy of support. Theyre eye candy, but not even the kind of eye candy people want. A trashbin that gets worse the longer you leave it? Thats hardly a killer app. Honestly I find this list laughable.

"9 Features Ubuntu should implement

1. Instant DVD ripping with only a single click.
2. Can jailbreak any iphone without bricking it.
3. Automatically downloads torrents of all the latest games as soon as theyre seeded.
4. etc etc etc"

The features in this list are just as laughable as what I have above. Yeah, itd be sweet but its useless, already available and easily found. If you really want the features youve listed here - GO MAKE IT! Ubuntu is open source so get off your butt and make it happen.

Anonymous said...

This is ridiculous. My full response.

Anonymous said...

I don't entirely agree on this.
Some of those features are just useless bloat.
Especialy features like weatherwidgets, iconfunctionality, etc are unneeded and unwanted on lowend systems.
The Visual Folders hierarchy however would be greatly apreciated.

Shantanu Kumar said...

Very cool suggestions. These ideas will definitely make Ubuntu attractive to masses.

Anonymous said...

The visual folder hierarchy is a great idea and would certainly help the adaption of users switching to a linux based OS from Windows.

The desktop/wallpaper ideas are incredibly silly. Those kind of aesthetics should hardly be considered "features".

Anonymous said...

2 features Ubuntu should implement:
1.Make my Canon flatbed scanner work.
2.Make my Avermedia TV card work.
I will continue to use Windows until all my hardware is supported.

Anonymous said...

1. Weather: Pretty sure there is about 150 different desktop widgets for this.
2. This has been done on Enlightenment and it is actually really cool. They change depending on time or hovering the cursor over a particular spot. Implementing it on Gnome would be interesting to some, pointless to others.
3. Cant remember if it does this for CDs yet, but I know that Mac OSX does and it is rather handy. As for trash it does if your icon set supports it but not for >3 days & >7days. Could be handy.
4. Yes, just yes. This would be handy especially for administrators who organise the directory structures. Also if you need to move quickly between many many embedded directories.
5. I'd just use Tomboy to make notes
6. Everyone wants cleaner taskbars, but making it cleaner while ensuring you haven't changed so much that some older applications don't show correctly, or don't show at all can be quite difficult.
7. Putting this is by default may cause the size of ubuntu to blow out, and there may be issues with codec licensing that make it more practical to leave this as an optional extra to install later. Look for MythTV and Elisa
8. I personally don't care about these but as long as when it starts up it has a button saying 'No thanks' I'll be happy. Or maybe just leave a shortcut on the desktop so that you need to choose to run it rather than have it assume you're an idiot.

Unknown said...

java apps? thats exactly what is NOT needed. java desktop apps are the fucking worst

Anonymous said...

more java apps? wtf? java desktop apps are the worst. who the f likes java apps?

kewsh said...

sorry to leave a negative comment but these ideas are horrible. the weather thing is the only thing useful. all of these other suggestions are just changes to the appearance that really dont need to be made. maybe ubuntu could release a media center edition but then it would seem that they are trying to be like microsoft. i mean, you don't see Mac OS X media center edition do you? i like the suggestions that Anonymous made about simple image mounting and better support for mime types. those are functions that make sense rather than changing the way ubuntu looks.

Claitom Sega said...

Tank you for best comment

Anonymous said...

Most of them look like what you'd get if you started first with Mac OS X's Aqua desktop environment and simply took things to their logical conclusion. I really like them. Whether they should be there "by default" or presented to the user for post-fresh-install installation can be debated (and is over at UbuntuForums), but they are good ideas.

Unknown said...

For them weather part, there is already that feature. I have the current weather in my system tray.

Melvin said...

Excellent article. My favorite one was the folder hierarchy. That is the greatest "Desktop" feature I've ever seen, it would be good to use it on the "Home" folder too for those like me who find icons on the desktop as obstacles for the wallpaper view.

Anonymous said...

But why - all that eye candy - Personally, I prefer a black background and nothing to distract me from my mission.
Let's encourage bugfixes before beauty; not that there's anything "buggy" about Ubuntu, but there are many third parties can do all the "dog and pony show" effects, while the Canonical folks should keep stability and security as Priority One.

Anonymous said...

um, most of these already exist.

1. The gnome applet already does this
2. This already exists and I am using it now
http://www.gnome-look.org/content/show.php/All+Day+Long+(Animated+Wallpaper)?content=83443
3. Trash bin!
4. Disk usage analyzer
5. Maybe but I thought that was what a calender was for.
6. I agree with that
7. Boxee, but I don't think it should enabled by default
8. This is being worked on
http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/17320/

Vinod Khare said...

The date/time applet can already show weather for the locations that you can add.

Steve Mould said...

Who said "Ubuntu is not an operating system. Ubuntu is a distribution"?

Come on, that's like saying "a frog is not an animal. A frog is an amphibian."

Steve

Anonymous said...

Magically Morph into PClinuxOS

Anonymous said...

Wow, it's a good list

Magnesus said...

Maybe add this ideas to brainstorm.ubuntu.com?

Anonymous said...

You people still have no clue. Do you live in the real world?

There are only two features that Ubuntu needs:

1- Become a desktop platform.
2- Find a way to be profitable and pour a lot more resources in their development that they're doing now. Being free and all it's nice, but software does not develop itself, and a modern OS is much more than just lines of code. Graphic artists and usability experts, anyone?

Since I know that nobody will listen, Ubuntu will fade into total irrelevance, as this was the fate of every other Linux-based toy OS out there. Don't say nobody ever told you this.

Anonymous said...

Ubuntu is to me best in every way. From their hopeful mission statement to the comprehensive online documentation and finally the truly amazing and I am sure very difficult release schedule.

Though Dell still still offers Ubuntu as an option it isn't making a lot of money from it. The long term support service is seemingly too expensive for many home users, and large corporations run windows on the desktop for compatibility with Microsoft. Gamers too. %^&* .NET, D.R.M. and DirectX. (sigh)

The only feature I would ask for The best operating system yet is financial success.

~

Anonymous said...

well, i did not take the time to read all the comments, so maybe i'm just repeating myself.
ubuntu (and most linux distros) are community build and driven. so... have u ever considered building any of these features and making it avaiable for ubuntu????

Anonymous said...

Ubuntu is to me best in every way. From their hopeful mission statement to the comprehensive online documentation and finally the truly amazing and I am sure very difficult release schedule.

Though Dell still still offers Ubuntu as an option it isn't making a lot of money from it. The long term support service is seemingly too expensive for many home users, and large corporations run windows on the desktop for compatibility with Microsoft. Gamers too. %^&* .NET, D.R.M. and DirectX. (sigh)

The only feature I would ask for The best operating system yet is financial success.

~

Anonymous said...

Oh no! I don't want to see any of this in Ubuntu! Unless there is two separate versions: 1. Eye Canydy and 2. Standard edition;) for healthy people;)

Anonymous said...

really I would like to see the Visual Folders hierarchy

Jukka-Pekka Keisala said...

I would like to be able to install Windows and Apple software completely transparent. Not even have to think about that an app is made for another OS it should just work :)

Anonymous said...

Built in Parental Controls.

Anonymous said...

all u tards that are stuck in the brown mud lighten up a bit. The Trash idea is brilliant. The active icons rock.

Anonymous said...

Great Ideas peeps. You know you can submit them all at http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/

Unknown said...

OK, this will probably get lost in the sea of replies, but here are a couple of features I believe should be borrowed from the Mac, and a couple which would beat the other desktop OS’s!

These i believe relate to fundamental usuability concerns which will put desktop users off, not silly bling to get them suckered in the first place…

1. Remote Filesystems - There are currently implemented through gvfs. This is great if you are using a GNOME program, but there is plenty of software which isn’t.

On OSX, any Samba or Appletalk shares are mounted under /Volumes, just like local mounts. They are *really* mounted, that is to say accesible from *any* process through normal file handling calls.

What should happen is that the user’s mount request is passed through to HAL which will then use the appropriate kernel support (or in the case of ssh or ftp, an appropriate FUSE module could be used).

Obviously a lot of consideration would need to be given as to where the filesystems actually get mounted to, and whether uid’s / gid’s need to be mapped. Also, i realize this would be a major re-design to GNOME, so i don’t expect this to happen overnight ;)

2. If the user is an Administrator (In the ‘wheel’ group / or done using sudo?), and they copy/move files into a location they cannot access, instead of being outright denied (and having to resort to the shell or whatever) they should be allowed to authenticate with either the root password (for distros which do it that way), or their own password (via sudo). Or indeed another user / password (let’s say you are at a non-privileged user’s session trying to fix something).

Let’s say you want to install a firefox extension for all users of the system. Or a ScummVM game. Wahetever - the point is, on the Mac, if you drop something where you technically shouldn’t, assuming you are an administrator, you can authenticate and the file copy /move proceeeds.

The owner / group of the files / directories that get copied should be sensibly derived based on the owner / group of the majority of files in the destination directory (or indeed the directory itself).

Also ‘take ownership’ should be implemented (for ‘administrators’) - it would be nice to not have to open the shell EVER for simple chown / chmod tasks! I don’t really know POSIX ACL’s, but i know Leopard has introduced support for them in the Finder, so this should be implemented too…

3. Queued file copying/move when the destination filesystem is the same for a copy already in progress.

I sometimes move some big files around, but i hate the thought of fragmenting my destination filesystem or slowing down the overall throughput of the copy due to context switching between the files.

Which means i normally end up waiting for the copy to complete before proceeding to the next file.

Obviously this behaviour should be optional and decided when the user ‘pastes’ or ‘drops’ (when a copy/move to that destination filesystem is already in process) - if you have a huge dvd image copying and want to chuck a few text files over, you shouldn’t have to wait for that…

4. More nautilus extensions for common tasks (yes i know some of these exist already) - batch resize images, batch rename files, send file(s) to email client (my mother relies on this behaviour in Windows) etc - I know someone who won’t use Linux / Gnome / Nautilus on his Work PC because he is so used to Tortoise SVN !!

Anonymous said...

A tour of Xubuntu in a virtual machine. The name Xubuntu is a combination of Xfce Desktop Environment and Ubuntu. Xfce originally was an abbreviation for XForms Common Environment, while Ubuntu means "humanity towards others".Xubuntu's goals are to: "provide an easy to use distribution, based on Ubuntu, using Xfce as the graphical desktop, with a focus on integration, usability and performance, with a particular focus on low memory footprint.

http://techunits.com/content/list_all/19/ubuntu

Anonymous said...

Yes with the the right hardware, a bit of luck, and lots of patience you can if you're lucky

1. Easy (automated & graphical) configuration
2. Diverse hardware support (e.g., onboard and single-chip dual head video cards)
3. high performance (Xypher, xnest etc. have very poor performance)
4. Audio & USB key support
5. Multi-seat features (Turn one PC into 2)
6. Free for personal use.

Userful Multiplier has all these things. You can install it directly from Ubuntu Multiverse:

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