I've been using Ubuntu practically exclusively for about 1.5 years (on 10.10 now). I mostly do web development/design and general productivity stuff. Obviously, most things work great or at least well enough, otherwise, I'd have switched to something else.
Here's what I really want:
# Top 3 Desktop
- Place tracker (or whatever it is these days) search bar into the panel by default. Allow easy mapping to a key combination (e.g. win-space though that clashes with gnome-do). Not having an intuitive desktop search is really sinful.
- Allow me to define apps to (auto-)open in specific workspaces. This would make getting back into things after a reboot much faster.
- Sound - midi is just broken (on my machine) - alsa, jack, etc. I don't get it - this should just work. Midi matters for music production and learning (e.g. even for just playing guitar tabs).
# Other desktop
- Desktop zoom - it's overall done right, but please give me option (like in OS X) to move the zoomed area only when I touch the edge of the screen rather than keeping the mouse pointer centered in the zoomed area.
- Tomboy notes are quick and easy, esp. in conjunction with gnome-do and ubuntu one. However, they lack features (export, tagging), and they occasionally freeze on sync/crash, so not the most stable (no data loss yet though). They don't handle copy & paste well (bad html for lists if I remember correctly).
- No good evernote client. The current version runs ok in Wine though, so not super major.
- If you remap ctrl-alt-backspace, please tell me what the remapping is. Also, I've gotten into swap hell occasionally, and there was no way to force an efficient shutdown of a memory-hogging app, thus forcing hard resets, which have actually led to data loss on an ntfs partition that I keep for win7 interoperability.
- Don't mute the microphone after reboot. It makes for weird skype phone calls.
- Nautilus: add default "open terminal here" context menu
- For less geeky users: Make Ubuntu Software Center more prominent, also expand the choices in "Synaptic > Edit > Mark packages by task" and put them in Software Center as well. (e.g. graphics design, music, etc.)
- On my machine HDMI connections to an external monitor don't work. VGA gives me a headache because of artifacts (can't screw connector into notebook port).
# My biggest wish by 1000x
- Improve power management for notebooks. I bought a notebook with a long battery life, but I get roughly half the battery life on Ubuntu vs Win 7. I know this is hard, but this is seriously where Linux lags by far the most behind Win and OS X. This issue has the biggest potential to drive me away from Ubuntu/Linux again. If Win 7 had multiple workspaces, a visible desktop search, and an OS X like zoom function, I'd be tempted to put a small CLI linux in a virtual machine for coding and run Windows, just for the extended battery life.
- Also power-related: flash plugin CPU usage and stability are abysmal. It crashes all the time, across Chrome tabs (b/c flash is a shared process). So having a video open in a tab and opening another site with flash on it can kill the (paused) video in the other tab. This happens multiple times per day. Also flash ads/widgets in several tabs == hot laptop. My most frequent terminal command is "killall npviewer.bin". Java (plugins at least) has similar issues (very high CPU usage for apps that hardly do anything).