Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments
Search

News for nerds, stuff that matters

Slashdot Log In

Log In

Create Account  |  Retrieve Password

Ubuntu Brainstorm Launched

Posted by kdawson on Thu Feb 28, 2008 05:42 PM
from the good-ideas-are-where-you-find-them dept.
Software Linux
thorwil writes "Brainstorm is a new site where everyone can submit and vote on ideas for Ubuntu. It's inspired by Dell's Ideastorm. By default, you see the ideas submitted by the community sorted by popularity. Each idea is accompanied by arrows so you can vote it up or down (you have to log in first). You can only click once per idea. So this is an easy way to submit ideas and see what people are really wanting."
+ -
story

Related Stories

Firehose:Ubuntu Brainstorm launched by thorwil (734791)
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

Ubuntu Brainstorm Launched 25 Comments More /

 Full
 Abbreviated
 Hidden
More
Loading... please wait.

  • Slashdotted (Score:5, Funny)

    by The Aethereal (1160051) on Thursday February 28 2008, @05:44PM (#22593348)
    I vote for a better web server.

  • I was going to say Great Idea .... (Score:4, Funny)

    by garett_spencley (193892) on Thursday February 28 2008, @05:45PM (#22593358) Journal
    and go test it out and offer my, informed, $0.02.

    But you bastards slashdotted it. Now I'm mad. But I don't really have a reason to because if it weren't for slashdot I wouldn't even know it exists. Yet since I think it's an awesome but can't access it to check it out I hate you all.

    So yeah ... my head hurts.

    First post ?

  • HomerCar Linux (Score:5, Funny)

    by inflamed (1156277) on Thursday February 28 2008, @05:53PM (#22593490)
    This is superficially a good idea, until you realize that it's the slashdot crowd that will come out and vote on features. Soon enough, Ubuntu will release its latest version and we will reap the harvest we have sown. Ubuntu 8: HomerCar

  • My first submission (Score:4, Funny)

    by TitusC3v5 (608284) on Thursday February 28 2008, @05:54PM (#22593514) Homepage
    1.) Upgrade servers.

  • While servers are meltin... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Pecisk (688001) on Thursday February 28 2008, @05:57PM (#22593548)
    All those ideas are fine, but requires huge work from developers/testers/doc writers/etc. In fact, infrastructure, framework (a la NetworkManager and GST) are all there, just integrate it in sensible way!

    Also, I am kinda worried that this web site will atract just geeks, and geeks have very very different values and thoughts about program choice as common users. Also requests to replace sensible defaults or default beahivour should be taken with grant of salt.

    Anyway, nothing new, but it is nice to have it. Let's hope some features requested there will be rolled out in Ubuntu/Kubuntu 8.10.

    • Re:While servers are meltin... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by div_2n (525075) on Thursday February 28 2008, @06:19PM (#22593840)
      Ubuntu is fine for me. I'm happy with the improvements, but it's already a viable work and home platform for me now. But I've introduced it to a LOT of people with some successes and some failures.

      The burden is on us geeks to see where it fails and try to determine the why so we can feed back to developers what isn't working for more average users. I suspect this will be the true power of brainstorm.

        • Re:While servers are meltin... (Score:5, Informative)

          by ianare (1132971) on Thursday February 28 2008, @08:22PM (#22595220)

          2. Don't blame ATI.
          You should blame to ATI, not the hardworking linux driver writers. With all the vista driver problems, people (that had a clue) were blaming ATI/nvidia for the bad support, not MS. Why should Linux be any different? And the Linux people would happily write drivers themselves if they had they specs and not being worried about getting sued by ATI.
          As a matter of fact, now that AMD bought ATI and released the specs, there has been a very rough open source driver [livejournal.com] released. But guess what - this had everything to do with AMD/ATI. It's completely and utterly their fault that support has sucked so hard so far.

          I will never buy another video card again.
          I find that very hard to believe.

          In any case, if AMD is true to their promises [news.com], I will only buy ATI cards that are supported by the OSS driver.

    • Re:While servers are meltin... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Blakey Rat (99501) on Thursday February 28 2008, @07:00PM (#22594358)
      My idea is pretty simple.

      Don't tell people that something is supported if it's not 100% supported. For example, if Ubuntu doesn't support the wireless card in some model of laptop (like my 14" iBook), remove that model from your supported list. Or if Ubuntu doesn't support sleep mode (like my 14" iBook), remove that from the list.

      All of my bad Linux experiences have been from Linux/open source projects that claimed to support X, but didn't actually support X.

      • Re:While servers are meltin... (Score:5, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 28 2008, @06:22PM (#22593876)

        Let's hope some features requested there will be rolled out in Ubuntu/Kubuntu 8.10 which will be called .... the Slashy dotter

        No no no! We should all make sure that Ubuntu 11.10 is called the "Slashed Otter".

  • How about real disk management tools (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Gothmolly (148874) on Thursday February 28 2008, @06:09PM (#22593706)
    Sometimes its so simple, that you can't do anything. Why doesnt the disk util applet show LVM drives mounted? Why is there no GUI LVM interface?

  • The point being.... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by m94mni (541438) on Thursday February 28 2008, @06:23PM (#22593886)
    Are everyone on Slashdot failing to see what's new here?

    Ubuntu has reached a kind of critical mass never before seen for any distro - they have far more non-technical users, far wider participation in the Forums and a great attitude towards newcomers.

    The problem is - so far there has been no place except the forums for non-techies to participate and make their voices heard. I see four main categories of users:

    1. Developers. If they see a problem, they can code a patch if necessary.
    2. Technical users - these can test alpha and beta releases, and help locate bugs etc.
    3. Non-technical but internet-savvy users - if they report an issue, it's often a big, missing feature (like, "I want my webcam to work")
    4. Users that won't comment online in any case.

    There is currently no place for the third category. Dell realized that, and it's really a shame that the FOSS community took this long to realize that there is a need for structured feedback from category three.

    Kudos to Ubuntu, I wish them all luck with this initiative. Dell's ideastorm has been a success because Dell has actually listened to the community there. Let's hope Canonical etc. has the resources to fulfill some of the wishes of the community.

    • Re:The point being.... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by jez9999 (618189) on Thursday February 28 2008, @07:01PM (#22594370) Homepage Journal
      The problem is - so far there has been no place except the forums for non-techies to participate and make their voices heard.

      Not true actually. I investigated Linux distros a while back and was quite amazed at how hard it was to get your ideas for nerw features heard; Ubuntu was actually one of the only ones that did anything to listen. They've had the Idea Pool [ubuntu.com] for a while now.

      Only slight problem is, no one reads it. My idea has been on there for about a year now.

      • Re:The point being.... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by DragonWriter (970822) on Thursday February 28 2008, @07:19PM (#22594614)

        Category three users are much more likely to report n00b questions than actual bugs/missing features.


        Places where novice users fail to understand the OS (including the relation of the OS to non-OS components) given the existing presentation are actual bugs and missing features, presuming those users are in the group Ubuntu is trying to reach.

  • Usefulness (Score:5, Insightful)

    by blueg3 (192743) on Thursday February 28 2008, @07:07PM (#22594448)
    Granted, I don't know to what extent they're using this to drive their development, but...

    Most people seem to be commenting that if just suggestions drive their development, the end result will be terrible. That's probably true. But often as a developer you just have no real idea if implementing X, which is on your to-do list, is a feature people even care about, wheras people may really care about implementing Y, another item you know you can take care of but just haven't gotten around to.

  • Allow upgrades from one LTS version to the next (Score:5, Insightful)

    by schwaang (667808) on Thursday February 28 2008, @07:24PM (#22594676)
    I love Ubuntu's long-term support (LTS) versions for grandma and "aunt tillie" because they don't need/want to upgrade the whole OS every 6 months. (Myself, I like the bleeding edge.)

    But I'd like to be able to upgrade one LTS version to the next without having to do either the intermediate upgrades or a wipe-install. I know that would require a lot of testing, but for a lot of users who rely on the LTS release it would be a godsend.

    [I don't have my finger on the pulse of Ubuntu, so if they've added this already don't flame me TOO much.]

    • Re:Color (Score:4, Insightful)

      by psychodelicacy (1170611) on Thursday February 28 2008, @06:47PM (#22594176) Homepage
      Seriously? This is a great OS, which I (English major, with no previous Linux experience) got up and working in a day with no help except Google. It's so many different kinds of cool that I don't know where to begin. And you're bitching about the colour? Can you really not be bothered to make a few clicks to get a different scheme?

    • Re:Color (Score:4, Funny)

      by BenEnglishAtHome (449670) on Friday February 29 2008, @10:37AM (#22599624)
      To me, the "default" desktop background is the one I choose when I set up my machine. The notion of just accepting what's there never occurs to me.

      I don't see what's so bad about brown. All my default desktop background choices are sorta brown, anyway. "Flesh" is sort of brown, isn't it?

      Well, maybe not. There's usually a lot of pink involved, too.

All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2009 Geeknet, Inc.