Ask HN: What would you like to see in Ubuntu 11.10, Oneiric Ocelot?

Something to bear in mind, when neither wired nor wifi internet is available, plugging an Android phone in via USB does the job. Can be handy, and is still gee-whizz impressive to me, though I'm sure the novelty will wear off soon.

I keep switching between Ubuntu and Archlinux (on my development laptop) every few months. I'm currently on 11.04 and tried Unity for a few days. It kept crashing on me (I do realise that I'm using something that's still beta) but could not bring myself to like it as it's too much effort for me to deal with disappearing window borders, menus when you are busy working.

One thing that's struck me as odd is that though the boot up to login screen has improved drastically over the past few releases, login to desktop takes a really long time. I am talking about stock installs (nothing extra in startup applications). (There are some forum posts that indicate that compiz might be the root cause for this and I still havent' had enough time to track these down)

I haven't had too much trouble with drivers and configuration (Lenovo T61p..) but the lack of current versions of packages that I rely on for daily work (e.g. eclipse, etc) in the repositories or the ppa drive me to switch to archlinux temporarily.

At the risk of being horribly down-voted, I'm going to say that I'd like it to "not look like crap". Unfair with no information, so here's some (of opinion form).

If I look at the screenshots for 10.10 (let's take a tiny example, I could pick on many - http://www.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/sshot23....), the general quality of finish on UI chrome and layout is shocking. The inconsistencies, poor spacing, bad grid, etc. make this jarring and painful. I'm sure people will say this is irrelevant. It isn't. If you're staring at something for many hours a day, this stuff is your subconscious indicator as to quality. It doesn't feel "right". Most Linux user interfaces (and this isn't Ubuntu specific, but you guys are probably most likely to have a go at fixing it) feel "uncanny". They're just a bit wrong. Things don't line up, they're odd sizes, they draw the eye in the wrong way.

In short, they're inelegant and clunky. They feel like non-native Java app interfaces (used) to do (and still do, to greater or lesser degrees). This isn't about visual style or theme, it's a quality case not a taste one.

If I had a little more time (or if anyone thinks this is unfair and actually wants it) I could annotate a screenshot and point these things out directly.

(Please note - if you feel that this is all fixed in 11.x then I apologise, but I will be very surprised)

// Edit: If anyone from Ubuntu would like to chat ever, I'd be more than happy. Contact info is in my profile.

Concerning applications: I absolutely miss Grip and would be very happy if you could add it to the packages again. I really liked it because it is very unobstrusive but configurable to the max.

So far I have not found a nice replacement for Grip. At the moment I'm using XCFA, but I'm not very happy, because I have to do a lot of things manually, like replacing _ with spaces in directory names (in filenames there are spaces, very strange). What tool do you use for cd ripping (mp3)?

I'm very pleased with the overall looks of Ubuntu :). I guess spacing etc. is actually a very hard problem, because it has to work in so many languages.

Moreover, most of the software is not developed by Canonical. It's just packaged by them. I doubt they can influence the looks of individual programs that much (there are just so many and everyone uses different ones).