Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.
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?
A closed mouth gathers no foot.
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.
Comment of the year
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.
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.]