Building Safety Into Our Work

[satchitb at gmail.com]

>For some reason a lot of people seem to believe that installing a deb
or ppa is automagically safe. The idea that it could be malware or
render their system non-functional never enters their mind. I doubt
it's an issue that effects most power users but I know it's one that
newbies struggle with as I've gotten the support calls for it lol.

True. I think it needs to be stressed to new users that they shouldn't
install anything outside the Software Centre. At all. As a power user, I
frequently use PPAs and .deb packages for various alphas/betas that I test,
but that is not something newbies would do. However, I often use the
terminal as root to implement a number of tweaks to make the Ubuntu
experience better, more streamlined, etc. Just to illustrate the point, I
implemented some commands I found on the site WebUp8 to remove Places and
Applications from my Launcher (Natty on Unity, btw). THIS is something even
intermediate users are likely to do. Therefore, I'd like to suggest some of
the following measures:

a) Expanding the SC to include many more partner repositories to ensure a
greater range of applications. I honestly can't think of too many
applications that a newbie user would require that isn't already in there,
but Google Chrome (not Chromium) and Opera spring to mind.

b) Allowing themes, icon packs and other sundries entry into the Software
Centre. People love to theme their systems. It's a fact, and customisability
is one of the great selling points of Linux. gnome-look, kde-look and other
sites exist, but as has been pointed out to me a number of times, the
reliability of packages on these sites is not always guaranteed. Thus,
getting themes into the Software Centre would require some degree of
centralised screening, but, as I have already pointed out, this process
can't be tied up in red tape.

The tl;dr version is, "Make everything a newbie could want be in the SC",
and to facilitate that, I'd add another point:

c) Decentralise, to some extent, the choosing of themes and applications to
go into the SC. Themes that receive x number of "verified" ratings on
gnome-look or kde-look (if I've missed equivalent sites for other DEs,
forgive me; I know not of them) could get an automatic shoe-in every month
by a moderator doing a sweep. As for applications, they could be verified by
some empowered user group.
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