The Big Ubuntu Brainstorm Braindump

Posted on March 20, 2009 - by jono

The Big Ubuntu Brainstorm Braindump

One of the facilities that has been hugely popular in the Ubuntu community has been Ubuntu Brainstorm. With Brainstorm you can register ideas and features for the Ubuntu project and others can vote those ideas up or down. There are also tools in Brainstorm to indicate potential solutions or notes around the idea. Brainstorm has become a great way to get an idea of what our users want.

As we build towards the 9.10 release cycle, I figured it would be useful to present a summary of the most popular ideas of all time and the most popular ideas within the last six months: thanks to Jorge for helping me with this. This should offer some great food for thought for the wider community to work on. Here goes…

Most Popular over the last 6 months

These are the most popular ideas that have been registered in Brainstorm in a recent cycle. Many of these ideas give a great impression of more recent desires around functionality in Ubuntu.

Check my hardware against application blackists BEFORE ‘upgrading’

On 12 Jan 09 – 1653 Votes

http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/17218/

Better life battery for laptop

On 3 Feb 09 – 646 Votes

http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/17825/

Volume control should close when you click somewhere else

On 14 Feb 09 – 829 Votes

http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/18045/

Redesign ubuntu for 2010

On 21 Jan 09 – 773 Votes

http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/17540/

Allow ALT+Tab when drag and drop

On 4 Jan 09 – 753 Votes

http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/17042/

“Scan wireless networks” option in NetworkManager

On 29 Jan 09 – 750 Votes

http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/17725/
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id#498887

Easy screen-sharing and audio-chat for instant messengers

On 7 Jan 09 – 743 Votes

http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/17102/
https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/replace-pidgin-with-empathy
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/EmpathyVsPidginUsability

There should be a simple GUI to do basic disk maintanence tasks

On 30 Dec 08 – 723 Votes

http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/16919/
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/DeviceKit

When abbreviating filenames, cut out the middle, keep the beginning and end

On 19 Nov 08 – 720 Votes

http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/15752/

Guest account needs a change

On 19 Nov 08 – 690 Votes

http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/15773/

Make System Monitor as powerful as Windows Task Manager

On 24 Sep 08 – 682 Votes

http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/13626/

“Speed up” Ubuntu by reducing duration of Compiz animations

On 3 Jan 09 – 664 Votes

http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/17009/

Automatic handling of external monitor

On 20 Jan 09 – 647 Votes

http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/17509/

ubuntu main menu icons are too big, they take too much space

On 30 Jan 09 – 594 Votes

http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/17748/

Native Firefox on Ubuntu is even slower than on Wine

On 21 Jan 09 – 767 Votes

http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/18058/
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/Building_with_Profile-Guided_Optimization

Synaptic/Apt-Get should check for free disk space before download or install

On 15 Sep 08 – 669 Votes

http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/13235/

Unify sound drivers and the sound api

On 22 Oct 08 – 661 Votes

http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/14682/

Usplash should use a time-based progressbar

On 18 Nov 08 – 578 Votes

http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/15741/

Something in this big ‘ol list strike your fancy? Well, roll your sleeves up and start making plans for the Karmic cycle. Lets see how many of these features and problems we can fix. Start your engines folks…

This entry was posted on Friday, March 20th, 2009 at 4:56 am and is filed under Ubuntu. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

11 Comments

We'd love to hear yours!

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March 20, 2009

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ethana2 said:

Gotta say the firefox with profile guided optimization is pretty important– after, of course, we don’t have to be scared of like, right clicking. (yay, contextual menu roulette!)

The entries that say ‘fix this or that’ are indications of a couple different things.– Jono, would you be able to tell us which bugs in launchpad have the most ‘me too’s?
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  March 20, 2009
  
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  jorge said:
  
  Ethana2 look here: http://qa.ubuntu.com/reports/launchpad-database/bugs-with-most-users-affected.html
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March 20, 2009

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Mark said:

I think the right thing to do with this list is file specific wishlist bugs upstream where possible and in Debian/Ubuntu where not.
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March 20, 2009

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Tom said:

WOW, that list is awesome!

Crowdsourcing really yields great results. These should be release priorities IMNSHO.
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  March 21, 2009
  
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  Jef Spaleta said:
  
  Are these results?
  
  Brainstorm has been running for a while now. Has it demonstratively impacted any of the Canonical design goals? Popular ideas are brought up at at least the previous UDS for developer review right? Were any highly popular ideas turned into release priorities? Do the highly popular ideas correlate with current developer roadmaps? Do the highly popular ideas impact the development roadmap for Canonical at all?
  
  I’m not convinced that there is a positive feedback loop that actually makes use of the popularity metric that Brainstorm measures ideas with.
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March 20, 2009

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Vadim P. said:

Firefox people basically said that PGO on Linux does not help as much as on Windows and hence why they don’t do it (except for some javascript libraries).

I haven’t tested myself, or bothered to, but the implication that msvc > gcc was there and they aren’t at fault.
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March 20, 2009

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nicu said:

About a week ago I was poking some fun at Brainstorm, hope you don’t mind :p
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March 23, 2009

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Adam Williamson said:

So, hmm. http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com/idea/28/ – filed in February 2008. AFAICT, nothing has actually been done.

I implemented all of this in approximately a week:

http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/2008.1_Synchronization

refined for MDV 2009:

http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/2009.0_Synchronization

lots of talking and voting means little if no-one gets up and does something.
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Posted on March 20, 2009 - by jono