What Ubuntu is here for

[wersdaluv]

I chose to post this thread in the "Absolute Beginner Talk" portion because this is what everyone should know. Before one does something, he or she must know its cause. Before you Ubuntu, you must know what Ubuntu is here for.

For those who do not know what "Launchpad" is, it is a collection of services for products in the open source universe. Also, it is where users report Ubuntu bugs (or bugs from other distros). Now, there is these bug that is really bugging me big time. Not just me; it also bugs Mark Shuttleworth and many other people. It is the Bug #1 in Ubuntu initially reported by Mark Shuttleworth.

Here is the description of the bug:

Microsoft has a majority market share in the new desktop PC marketplace.
This is a bug, which Ubuntu is designed to fix

Microsoft has a majority market share | Non-free software is holding back innovation in the IT industry, restricting access to IT to a small part of the world's population and limiting the ability of software developers to reach their full potential, globally. This bug is widely evident in the PC industry.
Steps to repeat:
1. Visit a local PC store.
What happens:
2. Observe that a majority of PC's for sale have non-free software pre-installed
3. Observe very few PC's with Ubuntu and free software pre-installed
What should happen:
1. A majority of the PC's for sale should include only free software like Ubuntu
2. Ubuntu should be marketed in a way such that its amazing features and benefits would be apparent and known by all.
3. The system shall become more and more user friendly as time

I hope you take solving this bug problem seriously. It is what "Ubuntuing" is all about. We do this for HUMANITY'S SAKE.

[teejay17]

It's going to happen, I have a good feeling about it. Once Vista comes out, and people see how much control MS has over the computers, (and getting locked out), people will start switching.
In 2007 this forum will buzz even more with discussion.

[aysiu]

I've moved this to the Ubuntu Cafe from Absolute Beginner, as this isn't really a support request.

[Rackerz]

It might happen, it wont next year though. Things will kick off next year but Linux wont leap that important gap. Don't get me wrong, I love Linux. Try and get gamers like me into Linux, sure we have Cedega but that's not free, is it? Even if it was games run slower and we can admit they do unless we have some Alienware monster computer that will eat Cedega and Crysis for breakfast.

Linux needs to show that it can do the business so game developers start coding for it!

[doobit]

I'm trying to do my part! I'm thinking of holding some "free software parties" where 10-15 people get together for a dessert and a discussion and I hand out copies of Ubuntu. What do you think?

[Tomosaur]

His name is Mark, not Mike.

[teejay17]

I'm trying to do my part! I'm thinking of holding some "free software parties" where 10-15 people get together for a dessert and a discussion and I hand out copies of Ubuntu. What do you think?

It's a great idea. The more opportunity to show people how Ubuntu and dessert come together, the better

[wersdaluv]

I'm trying to do my part! I'm thinking of holding some "free software parties" where 10-15 people get together for a dessert and a discussion and I hand out copies of Ubuntu. What do you think?

May the "Ubuntu force" be with you! hehe... That's the spirit!

[seijuro]

It might happen, it wont next year though. Things will kick off next year but Linux wont leap that important gap. Don't get me wrong, I love Linux. Try and get gamers like me into Linux, sure we have Cedega but that's not free, is it? Even if it was games run slower and we can admit they do unless we have some Alienware monster computer that will eat Cedega and Crysis for breakfast.

Linux needs to show that it can do the business so game developers start coding for it!

Linux does do business, more than half of the web is served on Linux machines. The deal is major game publishing will not take place on linux until there is a bigger market for it same reason there are fewer games for Mac than Windows.

[SuperMike]

Vista has been really taking some black eyes lately. Steve Ballmer is going to have to ship panties with it or something to get people to purchase it. The print ads would go, "It's Vista. And a pair of tiny panties. Now will you purchase it?"

However, Ubuntu needs some work too, in my opinion. It needs more testing with newbies and improvements based on that.

I've mentioned some things below, but don't get me wrong -- I'm a big fan of Ubuntu and use it on all PCs at home and on my PC at the office.

a. User's monitor/videocard has higher capacity of color depth, but in the current screen resolution, Ubuntu has defaulted to a lower color depth. He'd like to change this but doesn't see a video preference for it.

b. User's monitor/videocard has only 24bit color capacity at a fairly good high resolution, and 32 bit color isn't necessary for this user, so they'd like to go with this option instead. But they can't by default because in this scenario Ubuntu has defaulted to 32 bit color depth and the high resolution choice isn't available at that high of color depth. He'd like to change this but doesn't see a video preference for it.

c. Where does a user find "The Control Panel"? It's not the same on Ubuntu. They have to be smart enough to choose System, Preferences and not get sidetracked by clicking on System Tools.

d. The user's net card has defaulted to auto, but then that translates to 100 half duplex in this case. He wants the option for 100 full but doesn't see a preference in the GUI to fix that. Plus, an end user may not even know that 100 full is even possible and may have already been tolerating 100 half for quite awhile now. They don't want to have to learn commands like mii-tool or ethtool.

e. The Main Menu has "Sound & Video", but that is somewhat misleading to people such that they may think that's where they find the control panel items for controlling sound and video.

f. User finds a great site with some TTF fonts. He downloads them to his desktop. Now he wants to install them and doesn't see an option where to do that.

g. Highschool girl connects iPod to PC. A window flies open that is worthless to her because it permits read/write to the file space of this thing but that doesn't translate to putting songs on the thing. This is because it's an iPod and you have to use a tool (which is quite buggy) like gtkpod to put songs on and off of it. Meanwhile, the iPod eternally displays a "Do Not Disconnect This Device" warning that never goes away unless you unplug it from the PC. Also, before you do that, if you rightclick the iPod icon on the desktop, choose Unmount, you get an "Unable to unmount media" error. As well, no websites appear to be compatible with Linux for purchasing and downloading MP3s. Plus, MP3 support is not built-in, legally in the USA. Normally that's no big deal except that iPods don't play Ogg.

Also, some users just want to leave their iPod in their PC and have it download 1 or 2 podcasts automatically while they sleep. Then, in the morning during their long commutes (for instance), they can have a radio show from their iPod playing obscure things that they normally can't get on the radio, like a Linux talk show.

h. Thunderbird doesn't have an easy way for end user's to backup their addressbook and mail folders somewhere and then reimport them on a rebuilt PC at a later time. For instance, my wife had one Ubuntu system but the hardware was zapped by lightning. I had to rebuild the system again by reusing her old hard drive. I had to install Thunderbird and then overwrite several folders and files for it so that her old mail was back online.

i. Calculator and Notepad should just snap open super fast on a system without waiting around. GEdit is nice, but I don't need it all the time to be that fast -- sometimes I just want a super-fast editor to paste something temporarily while I work. Therefore, I installed Mousepad, but not every user is going to know they can do that and use two single-file text editors on their PC.

j. Swapping the Universe option on and off in Synaptic should be with less clicks and be more straight-forward. I also think it would be a good option for Synaptic to warn the user if they left the Universe option when shutting down Synaptic. It should prompt them if they want to turn off the Universe option now that they have found their software and no longer need it flipped on again.

k. I think Abiword and Gnumeric (GNOME Office) should be installed by default on every Ubuntu system right along with OpenOffice.

l. GNOME Office lacks a PowerPoint knockoff. It doesn't have to be too complex, but something to knock out a quick presentation with fly-in text (or just text) and perhaps some pictures, colors, small vector graphics, and text styles.

m. The default fonts lack a huge amount of variety. I know there's a massive variety of free fonts out there -- why don't Linux vendors ship with more styles of fonts? I also think that several fonts I have installed are nothing but slightly different clones of other fonts and aren't that necessary to have on my system -- they could be removed. And we need edgy sans-serif fonts that don't look like Windows knock-offs and which can make great logos on Web 2.0 website pages.

n. Inkscape should come by default right along with Gimp. Many users may not discover they can install this unless you tell them.

o. Needs to ship with Chess, and need an option to play the computer, and it needs an interface built in GTK2, not GTK1. Some extra games would be nice too -- Gnome's had the same games for years and years.

p. Where's the GTK2-based VPN GUI that interacts with 'vpnc' and doesn't require a stitch of text file editing to make it work? Obviously someone is way, way under-estimating how many people need a VPN solution on their PCs. In the past year I've seen huge numbers of people now have VPN capability and Linux is missing the boat on this one by not providing a GUI and/or not providing a GUI by default. And 'vpnc' works the best, plain and simple.

q. GnuCash sort of handles a lot of financial tasks and is fairly easy to understand. Is the new GTK2 version no longer seriously buggy?

r. GnuCash is not comparable to say, Quickbooks for Small Business. Linux needs a knock-off version of this or perhaps some add-on for OpenOffice spreadsheet app or Gnumeric could have this functionality.

s. Easily selectable by the Accessories menu, Ubuntu needs an option to make a snazzy alarm clock out of it that wakes the PC up from hibernation (or monitor hibernation) and plays music (MP3, Ogg, etc.) from a folder, cycling them at random, or tunes into an audio stream from a particular location like something you'd find on Shoutcast. When the alarm goes off, the screen could display a big clock that could be visible from a distance. You hit the spacebar to snooze and hit enter to stop the alarm clock. If you wait more than 15 minutes, it can also optionally buzz the internal PC speaker (without need of a sound card). To continue with the music while one cleans up and dresses, they can hit M for music and X to close the app.

t. I think it should have a newspaper icon on the menus by default. You click it and it opens a news site in Firefox. Sure, newbies could do that if they knew how, but there's a cool factor of having that already there when they install Ubuntu.

u. I know that Ubuntu is crazy about oranges and browns, but it would be nice if the installer asked what color theme you wanted and you could boot the desktop to that color theme.

v. GNOME integration of SSHFS for "secure mapped drives" to other Ubuntu workstations and servers. It's more secure than NFS and needs good integration with GNOME. Users shouldn't have to keep typing in a password all the time when they "map this drive" all the time on boot.

w. Now that you have cable or DSL, if you do, then do you have an unused modem port in your PC? Great, map a phone line through it and use Ubuntu as an elaborate answering machine that can attempt to interpret the audio into text, then attach a super-compressed (lossy compression) audio file of the message, and save it on your PC so that you can mount the maildir with Thunderbird and interact with it like you do with email. And this should come with a default Ubuntu system -- you just add the applet to your panel. And why? Because it's cool and quite possible.

x. Sometimes a process can go whacky on any OS. There needs to be less steps/clicks for end users to kill that hung process. They also need to be able to kill just the apps they loaded, not the stuff that the OS needs to run -- there needs to be a protective barrier in this tool so that newbies don't go shutting off a critical service like cron.

y. In the Multimedia Systems Selector control item, end users are not going to know that Default Sink stands for audio/video output and that Default Source stands for audio/video input. They need something that makes sense to them.

z. Ubuntu doesn't come with a simple slideshow screensaver with fades? Is that too much to ask? Instead, it's an elaborate OpenGL sort of thing that warps the pictures around like flags and so on.