Ubuntu Brainstorm Launched

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."

Re:While servers are meltin...

[div_2n]

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.

The point being....

[m94mni]

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:Color

[psychodelicacy]

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:While servers are meltin...

[wishmechaos]

I've been using Ubuntu for more than two years and I've never had a DVD burn fail. Probably burnt more than 200 DVDs in that time... Both with Brasero and k3b. Maybe you've had bad luck?

Re:While servers are meltin...

[Blakey Rat]

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.

Usefulness

[blueg3]

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.

Damn Misleading Titles

[Dretep]

I thought it had something to do with Ubuntu supporting that Lego Brainstorm stuff. Or is that product not even around anymore? Still, turned what could've been an interesting article to the crapper - that and the site already being unavailable.

Re:The point being....

[DragonWriter]

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.

Allow upgrades from one LTS version to the next

[schwaang]

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:The point being....

[adona1]

I agree. I'm new to Ubuntu, after more years than I care to remember on Windows and DOS before that, and one thing I'm finding is whenever I have a problem, I google it and find that it's usually been answered in clear, concise and friendly ways on forums. Not something I've found when I've needed help with other software!

Asking users what they think the OS needs is a great idea - and amply demonstrates the difference between OSS and, well, MS.

Re:"build-essential" (singular), sorry. n/t

[Knuckles]

Ati and Nvidia proprietary drivers are included in Ubuntu and enabled by default (hm, ati's might be default only in 8.04), no compiler needed. vmware player is in the repos.

Re:Ugh

[mjwx]

M$W suddenly got released under Creative Commons, Gnu/Linux would have a ton to benefit (So would M$, but they would never be bright enough to realize it).

Don't for one second think that MS wouldn't do this if it meant saving their monopoly (granted it would be under an MS open license rather than the GPL/BSD/etc), MS gains a lot through the sale of software tailored to run on its OS (Office, Exchange, MS SQL), if push comes to shove, in a final act of desperation they would open source their OS maintaining a modicum of control for MS (I have always credited MS with an enormous amount of business intelligence but that doesn't equate to software development skills). As I said if MS open sourced its OS it would be through the MS GPL (Gates Permissive License or some such) as not to actually aid the GNU/GPL people but to attempt to actively compete (not where Microsoft is strong at). I personally believe that by the time MS is forced to do this it will be too little too late, MS may be some of the best businessmen in the world but they can (and probably will) end up being destroyed by their own greed.

Re:SLASHDOT SUX0RZ

[julian67]

Do you really want to assert that Ubuntu is "linux for idiots" at the same time as publicly announcing how you failed to even make the compiler run? There are a lot of "idiots" out there who manage this without difficulty, or perhaps after reading the docs to clear up any questions. There is no "any" key!

Re:The point being....

[AaronLawrence]

This would be my problem with the new Brainstorm site. It's easy to make these sites and collect information from users, but actually taking action on the requests - which might mean allocating huge resources to them - possibly in ways that all the developers think are unimportant or dumb, is a whole other thing.

Bugzilla for Mozilla apps has voting, and lots of bugs have votes. But the developers openly admit they mostly ignore votes and just work on what interests them or their company. Votes are "an input" which pretty much means, if someone has already decided to work on something seeing the votes will confirm it worth doing to them.