Fix nm/nm-applet and I'll be beyond happy. I'm sick of it randomly dying whenever it wants to, having to do
sudo pkill -9 nm-applet && sudo nm-applet
...a billion times a day. Including
always when switching user accounts. It's really bizarre. I'm tempted to use wicd, but the icon for it and UI sucks balls compared to nm-applet. I used to have an alias set to to do most of the dirty work, but in the end it's only a few keystrokes saved; I still have to type in my pass to become sudo, and exit twice to close the terminal.
Really gets aggravating when my dad or someone borrows my computer and I have to su -l into my user, go through the whole process above and logout (from shell) all over again. Seems like a ridiculous process just to connect to my wifi.
A related issue to this is saner default key management. I've been using Ubuntu since Intrepid, and I've never figured out how to get the default key management to stop bothering me when unnecessary. It's sort of alright that it asks me for the default key on bootup since I change my password around regularly and it's different from the first one I set, yet it for some reason is unable to remember any wifi profiles at all after the first password change.
Default apps like Gwibber and Evolution have never worked for me on multiple computers (am using 10.04+ 32 and 64 builds), while their alternatives like Pidgin and Thunderbird or Claws Mail work great and consistently. On the branding side of things, LibreOffice rolls off the tongue better than OpenOffice.org, but still has the pesky, stereotypical problem of open source projects with tacky and alienating names.
Applaud you all on your choice with Banshee, better player than Rhythmbox for sure. As long as libmobiledevice is rolled in, I'm happy.
Unity is a bold move that you all have already invested quite a bit of development time and energy into, but I unfortunately will not upgrade from 10.04 because of it. It's really alien to me and others whom I introduce Ubuntu to, and I don't really see what problem it aims to fix other than maybe trying to shake up the old UI/UX scene on the desktop from the WIMP to something less...WIMP.
Really, the only things I miss the most from Windows and Mac is iTunes Store, which I can view from my iPhone anyways (although it'd be nice on the desktop, but I understand that this completely not your fault but Apple's decision) and high-quality FPS games like Halo that aren't all just a rehashing of the Doom engine.
Great work and keep on building a great operating system. Ubuntu's visionary development and support ecosystem is really a marvel that I've enjoyed using and supporting over the years. I really appreciate what you all do at Canonical.
Good Luck.
EDIT: Also see[1] my comment on the large default icons, fonts, and spacing for everything in Ubuntu. It's been getting worse since 9.04 and all the many thick panels, icons and such really add up to a bad experience and amateurish feel. If you all could explain the need for such large solid-colored bars on both the bottom and top of the page as well as the the thick, solid-colored toolbars in every application (Firefox is a big transgressor here), that'd be great to hear.
[1]: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2317321