[ubuntu-za] Getting the basics right - a reality bytes wishlist

[Morgan Collett]

On Tue, Oct 14, 2008 at 16:32, David Robert Lewis <ethnopunk at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> Getting the basics right is what Ubuntu should be all about. Okay, so the
> human interface is cool, and the big chief himself, Mark Shuttleworth is
> promising even better looking wallpaper in the next release, "that will
> compete with Apple", but who wants a snide, condescending piece of black
> metal or shiny titanium that gets the masses into a pickle, what I really
> want, when I have done with the brown human interface, washed-out denim
> jeans and my own MOTU is:
>
> 1. A better search engine. Let's face it, the current Ubuntu Hardy search
> engine sucks, and in a head-to-head comparison with Windows XP loses big
> time for its inability to do the most simple things, like distinguish
> between various categories of files, refine and edit searches, and yes,
> index ones harddrive.

Tracker sucks. Beagle sucks. (In my humble opinion, Windows XP search
sucked more - it was completely useless for me.)

Ubuntu is dependent on the upstream development of these projects, and
takes the best release available. Since releases are planned six
months in advance, the developers need to make a decision at that
point which of these is likely to be the best for the next release.

I can't remember which is currently the default, since I disabled it -
I have too many files (source code, build files, etc) which I don't
want indexed, and it always kicked in at inconvenient times to reindex
stuff when the computer was *not* idle.

> 2. Internet integration. Ubuntu is hardly what one could call
> net-integrated. Okay it has an interesting installer that claims to use the
> Internet, but this is par for the course on Linux. I have a dialup and have
> battled to get the most simple Internet connection working. I am not alone,
> and am left battling with archaic DNS entries, and therefore plus one to
> Windows.

Agreed. Unfortunately, modems aren't the typical use case any more,
unless you're talking 3G modems. Intrepid has NetworkManager (also
fondly known as NetworkDamager or NetworkMangler by developers) 0.7,
which adds 3G support into the little widget that lets you manage wifi
connections.

> 3. Spelling. Are you kidding me, do you expect me to believe that Sun
> couldn't offer the Ubuntu Community a better dictionary? The Open Office
> package needs a lot more localisation to fit into the Ubuntu ethos, and this
> means a South African English spelling dictionary!!!!

There are packages for South African English, for OpenOffice. They
were broken for the last few releases - for example, the PDF export
dialog box in openOffice had most of the buttons with no text on them
with the ZA language packs installed. I replaced them with the GB
packages, and that was fixed.

This is only going to be fixed if actual en_za people step up and make
it happen. I've spoken to translate.org.za who said they would look
into it, but I suspect that they are still broken.

We have a rapidly shrinking window of time to fix this for Intrepid.

> 4. End to Format Wars - MHT files do not run on Ubuntu. Period. Yes, there
> is a Firefox patch, but it doesn't exactly work 100% of the time, in most
> cases the hacks suggested by the community come unstuck on the tenacity of
> the opposition's willingness to compromise communication in order to achieve
> their nefarious goals. The forums are really bad way to fix format problems.

I had to google to see that MHT probably refers to Microsoft HTML.
Ubuntu really has very limited resources to fix big things like this,
and we must poke the upstream people (Firefox? OpenOffice?) to fix it,
and wait for an Ubuntu release that includes the upstream release.

>  Ubuntu lives and dies by its ability to be interoperable and to digest the
> internet in any format it comes in, but I fear we are all giving the OS a
> rare appetite for spewing out Microsoft files that don't match Firefox,
> which surely isn't the way to go?

My opinion is that we have lived with working around other people's
bugs on the Internet for too long, just because the bugs were in IE.

If a website doesn't work in Firefox, the web developers must fix
their site or go dark for a growing percentage of the Internet. (The
Internet nodes which are users greatly outnumber the websites.)

> 5. Better offline distribution. How many times have I got to say this - not
> everybody has broadband internet or even dialup. This means the distribution
> of the ubuntu universe sucks big time and is a huge disencentive to users
> wanting to convert from Windows. In fact, the ease of use with which the
> Microsoft installer gives to its users (who live in internet cafe's) is
> insane compared to Ubuntu. Ubuntu is a bum deal when it comes to this single
> hurdle and I can only say, offline community is the way to go - either share
> the universe or die alongside the Amiga and other Operating systems that
> have gone the way of the Dodo.

This is an area which we can work on as a community. Distributing DVDs
with the latest packages is something we can all easily get involved
in - we don't have to download them, just get them from those with
plenty of bandwidth, and then burn and distribute, without fear of
prosecution by the Business Software Alliance.
http://wiki.ubuntu-za.org/Get_Ubuntu

Regards
Morgan