Here are some of my ideas for Fedora 8 and Fedora 9

[Gerry Reno]

Valent Turkovic wrote:
> Hi,
>
> here are some of my ideas in which I see that Fedora can improve
> general user and desktop experience and usability. I would like you to
> see my comment and suggestion in the manner I made them - I don't mean
> to be a critic but only an objective observer that loves usind Fedora
> at home and also at work and would like to see more people do so - and
> I belive that with some of ideas I have here more people would use
> Fedora and be more productive.
>
> * NTFS support during installation
> there should be NTFS support built in to anaconda so that ntfs
> partitions are automatically recognized and added to /etc/fstab - and
> that users are given an option to make them read-only or to be mounted
> in read-write mode.
>
> * Beagle and Deskbar installed by default
> these applications make all the difference for an desktop user between
> an "OK" user experience and "wonderful" user experience. Work flow
> using these two applications is radically improved and this is what
> should be showcased as a "Modern linux desktop".
> - also I would add a beagle firefox plugin which also makes all the
> difference when you need some resource you saw online but didn't
> bookmark it or put it on del.ico.us
> - these apps don't waste resources, and the memory footprint is really
> not that much, especially if put in context that you really have to
> look hard these days for a system that has less or equal to 256MB of
> memory. I tested beagle on 3 laptop systems with fedora 6 / 7 and one
> desktop with also fedora 6 / 7 and I didn't have a single issue. So
> for me not to have in installed in Fedora 7 was a big disappointment.
>
> * Tomboy installed by default
> - I have all the same arguments here as I do for Beagle and Deskbar
>
> * Firefox to have it's original icon in gnome panel
> the icon fedora uses makes me search for firefox icon all the time. I
> guess that I'm not the only one. Firefox has one of the most
> recognisable icons I have ever seen and simply don't see why fedora
> uses non-firefox icon. It just confuses users.
>
> * Desktop shortcut for joining Fedora IRC (aka "Get Live Help")
> Fedora is about freedom+communication, right? Why not make this
> statement more that just a nice slogan. If you installed saabyon linux
> you could experienced for yourself what this really means. I as a new
> user to gentoo (sabayon is based on gentoo) was really blown away with
> this feature. It is really, really simple to implement and gives a
> real meaning to a communication friendly linux distro.
> In sabayon link to their IRC chat has a simple name "Get Live Help"
> and it work fabulous! I didn't have any Portage experience so I poped
> in IRC chat room and was on my way after I got quick help. Whis kind
> of help was precious to me and would love to see it in fedora as one
> of it's main features and not just as a slogan.
> screenshot: http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=382063978&size=l
>
> * Desktop folder with examples of what "this linux thing" can do :)
> This is especially important for a live cd versions. Ubuntu has this
> "feature" on each of their live cd's as a folder on desktop. In these
> folder you can see and test for yourself some filetypes and apps that
> work woth them. So for example you open examples folder and see how
> some spreadsheets work in "this linux thing" by simply clicking on the
> spreadsheat that they placed in there and also for some text
> documents, images and the most important thing - there is an video
> clip. And it is a really nice video about the meaning of Ubuntu
> project. I saw some great videos on redhat magazine page and it is a
> shame that these aren't part of Fedora 7 live cd's. I hope you see the
> great value in video presentation and include some great videos on
> Fedora 8 live CD.
> ubuntu examples:
> http://johnny.chadda.se/wp-content/uploads/2006/06/Ubuntu_Examples.png
> and another: 
> http://knowledge76.com/images/thumb/800px-Dapper_examples.png
>
> * a working Burning app for Fedora Gnome desktop
> Put any new user in front of fresh Fedora 7 desktop and ask them to
> burn some files to CD or DVD - any watch them as they wiggle
> unpleasantly as they can't find any burning app under gnome desktop.
> Puting a link for nautils burner under "Places / CD - DVD Recoder"
> doesn't help. If you choose atleast not to include Brassero as the
> default burning app under gnome then at least thre should be a link
> for "CD Recoder" placed somewhere under "Applications" menu and not
> "Places" menu.
>
>
> I have some other ideas, suggestions and improvements I would love to
> see but these are the main ones. I hope you see all of my suggestions
> to Fedora desktop in the manner they were written - as my intention
> was to be as objective as possible and not to be a critic. I love
> Fedora and it is definitely by my opinion the best distro for Desktop
> users (yes, even better than Ubuntu).
>
> Valent.
Valent,
  I agree with you.  As far as desktop users, the out-of-the-box Linux 
experience has to be Wow! with little demos of Wow!  The installer 
Anaconda has to be flawless.  It still had some hiccups in F7 which I 
think was related to libata.  Another thing in Disk Druid that I would 
like to see is the ability to install on a degraded RAID-1 array where I 
declare RAID-1 but then the second mirror is missing.  I install this 
way all the time on systems and then when I add the second hard drive 
later and place it into the array, it just syncs.  Want to go back to 
just a single drive - no problem.  Just fault the device and remove it.  
No complicated remounting filesystems or anything - very smooth.  This 
way you're always on an md device.  I would like to see this actually 
become the default.
  From my perspective dealing mostly with servers, I would like to see 
libata get back support for all the previous controllers that were 
lost.  Like HighPoint.  We got killed with F7 when we put in on a few 
boxes with HighPoint controllers and the kernel would not even boot.  
Much scrambling then ensued.   All-in-all just make everything that's in 
F7 work well so that the initial experience for new-to-Fedora folks is 
really great.

my 2c,
Gerry