My wishlist for Jaunty Jackalope
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It’s been two months since Intrepid was released, and soon we’ll be jumping on our toes for the next Ubuntu – Jaunty Jackalope. I’ve been an avid Ubuntu user since Feisty and I’ve always waited excitedly for new releases, until now. Seeing almost the same desktop for almost two years is kind of killing my appetite for Ubuntu. Ok, there HAS been a lot of improvement but none of these has been substantial. That being said, I’ll still keep my fingers crossed for a hopefully fantastic Jaunty. This is my wishlist for Jaunty, do share yours as well!
Enter VLC, Banshee; exit Totem, Rhythmbox
VLC is easily one of the best media players out there, and with the latest 0.9 series it has become quite user friendly. It would be just so much better to have VLC instead of Totem in Jaunty. Same goes for Banshee, which I feel is a better replacement for Rhythmbox. Totem and Rhythmbox are Gnome defaults, but then Ubuntu has done away with Gnome products like Epiphany (to include Firefox), and Cheese.
Can we have a better F-Spot, pleeeeezzz?
Most applications in Ubuntu work very smoothly in proper hardware, except that damned F-Spot. Even on my Pavilion laptop with 3GB memory, an AMD dual core processor, and 256MB ATI GPU, F-Spot surprisingly chokes and yells for help while importing my digicam photos. I’ve a very pleasant experience with Windows Live Photo Gallery, and a really horrid time with F-Spot. I would certainly love it to get smoother and more robust.
A more thorough Help and Support The built-in Help items in Ubuntu are just too little. A more comprehensive Help tool would be a good addition. It can be even better if the Ubuntu Help can import items from the Internet, like Windows Help does. Do something about that package updating technique It’s utterly ridiculous that no Linux distro provides updates to big releases of their included software. For example, if a distro version comes with OpenOffice.org 2.4, and OOo 3.0 is released meanwhile, you won’t be “officially” be upgraded to the new version – rather you’ve got to wait for a new version of the distro to use the new version of the software. For this reason, Ubuntu users will have to wait till April to get officially supported OOo 3, even though it was released more than 2 months ago. I’m not sure if it’s possible, but it would be great if we get immediate updates for new software versions. Release a special Ubuntu version with Ubuntu Restricted Extras installed The Ubuntu Restricted Extras is a great package to install support for most proprietary stuff on your Ubuntu. Thing is it isn’t installed by default, meaning people without an Internet connection basically CANNOT use Ubuntu on their desktops. Canonical should release a special Ubuntu version with these restricted extras package installed. Yearly cycles for new versions, half-yearly cycles for service packs Releasing a new OS every 6 months is simply overkill. Look at Canonical’s state – at any given time it has support anywhere between three to four different Ubuntu versions. Oh, and there are Kubuntu, Gobuntu, Xubuntu and Edubuntu as well! It would be much better if Canonical decides to release new versions once every year. Of course this will be sensible only if that package updating, which I talked about above, is modified. 6 month cycles can rather be used for service pack type releases. So. That’s my wishlist. Linux geeks, what do you think? Pour in your comments! 
“Enter VLC…” That would bring about a whole slew of legal problems. VLC includes a bunch of codecs that Ubuntu cannot legally install by default. It’s perfectly legal for anyone to download it, but it isn’t legal for Canonical to include it in a default installation. Makes plenty of sense, huh? Write to a Senator.
Unfortunately, same goes for an Ubuntu with restricted extras enabled by default. From my limited understanding of other distros, Linux Mint is basically Ubuntu + codecs. It may not be completely legal, though, and Canonical is definitely not going to support it.
The OO.o frustration is definitely annoying, but it’s more OO.o’s fault than Ubuntu’s. If Sun could organize a regular release cycle for OpenOffice.org (and actually release the software on time), distros like Ubuntu could plan accordingly. As it turned out this year, there was no proof that OO.o3 would even be released before Intrepid.
My wishlist:
I agree with your suggestion for Banshee. In my opinion, it’s already much better than Rhythmbox, and it’s improving at a much faster rate than Rhythmbox.
I also agree with your analysis of F-Spot. It’s so close to being such a great program, yet it still feels so buggy.
I’d also like the ability to share or export Tomboy notes or notebooks, but it doesn’t look like that will be happening before April.
Also, disk detection and renaming should be cleaned up quite a bit. In Windows, I could right click on the disk’s icon and rename the disk. By default, Ubuntu should include a graphical way to rename disks, change their mount points, and tell them to (or not to) mount when the system starts.
And Evolution is quite possibly the buggiest email client that I have ever used. I switched to it from Thunderbird because I liked that it looked like all the rest of my applications. Never before have I wondered if an email client was going to randomly lose my messages.
It would also be nice to finally see this new theme that they keep promising.
@Michael Martin
Thank you so much for that detailed analysis. I agree with you that Evolution is too buggy as well, just overlooked it because I prefer the web interface of Gmail anyway.