20 Minty-Fresh ideas

[martin0641]

A few ideas I had...I have been using the distro for only a week, and it caused me to follow through on a promise I made to myself to dump Windows if/when I found something that fit he bill and allowed the occasional seamless game or two. The suggestions below are nit-picky, but I think thats a testament to how good of a job the Mint team has done with it. I used to use OpneBSD for work and XP for play, now its MintBSD for me.

1: The "encrypt" menu had me confused for like 20 minutes. I right-clicked a file, picked encrypt, and just saw empty menus with no context or help. After playing with the menu, checking through everything Mint had to offer I came across the "Passwords & Encryption Keys", and it clicked that the menus were empty because I had yet to add keys to the system itself. It was obvious after I added my key, but before it was confusion-city. A "You have not yet created or imported a key to this profile" warning might be helpful.

2: Speaking of context-menus...how about a search option? Right-clicking has everything from encrypting to signing to archiving. Looking for files is a pretty common function.

3: I like the utility of the Windows XP style quick-launch by the task menu, but I find it really hard to add things to it in Mint. I cant just "Right click and add to quick-launch" I tried dragging things down and it compressed the "open windows" to the left of the bar and made the bar pretty much useless. The two things that are there, Tomboy Notes and Show desktop, are where I like to keep Firefox, Truecrypt, Putty and stuff like that. Also, an expandable interactive toolbar to navigate the filesystem on the right side would be a nice touch.

4. Right clicking the desktop properties has tons of good tabs, how about something that addresses resolution & cloned/dual head displays? A link to the proper menus would be just fine.

5. Since the distro is about adding useful things by default,how about biometric fingerprint logins? Most new systems have these.

6. AcetoneISO or a similar program would be nice for manipulation of CD/DVD files. Typing mount all the time gets old, I like the Daemon-Tools option to right-click-mount image files.

7. A non-cli RDP client would be nice, making it easier for people to transition. TSclient seems to work well. When I saw "Remote Desktop" it took me a while to figure out it was only for getting connections and not making them. I think powerful tools like RDP, RSYNC, Softraid, Ect, would attract usersto Mint if they had properly designed GUIs to make them more accessible to the Windows crowd that are teetering on the edge. We all know UNIX is better, its the learning curve and interfaces that hold it back from mainstream. Let them become CLI scripting masters AFTER they know what all the utilities do for them.

8. It would be nice to have "Preferred Applications" list file types and default programs for editing. And if the "OpenWith" had a checkbox to make default for that file type.

9. Please compile it to stop displaying that annoying "This session is running as a priv user" message. I know what I am logging in as, thats why I picked to enable root logins in the first place. There are many applications, such as LiveCDs, hacking platforms, and non-persistant disks which require no security, and sudo and su just slow things down and annoy people. Let the newbies learn their lessons the hard way and the more fluent get to work without restraint.

10. Is there a robust widget app for Mint? Some people like things such as Google Desktop and having weather or calendars on their screens. At least a default app, with the ability to install plugins via a repository would be nice even if it came with none and was disabled at first.

11. Some pages tell me to upgrade my version of flash.

12. Will Wine 1.0 be in version Rel2?

13. Most new systems have integrated webcams, is support already there? t would be nice to see a "Scanners/Cameras/Video Devices and simply raw access to them as input and possibly allowing Pidgin to see them and use them for video chat like iChat and MSN Live/Yahoo. WndowsMovieMaker?

14. Softraid, like the one on OpenBSD or DMRaid work great and take little space. Ultimate would be a GUI to pair drives together, set options, and have the script sent to terminal.

15. I have always felt Linux lacked a good Device Manager. Sure I can DMESG | grep things, but a device manager with real power and the ability to see devices grouped by type would be a real boon, especially if it listed things that are detected but have no driver with a PCI Vendorcode so I could fix the issue. The Dev manager in Ubuntu only talks about external hardware like printers and removable disks. Hardware should mean all of it.

16. Why cant I invert my mouse color, or make it bigger, or change its style?

17. I don recall it letting me set a workgroup at install, its just MSHOME, where is the GUI place to edit those settings, I only saw a settings for DOMAIN i the network settings, not workgroup.

18. Right-Click mounting of network objects?

19. MintSkins! Like Windowblinds, available through a Synaptics-type search tool instead of just an "install theme" dialog that makes people hunt them down on their own, stick a few ads in the integrated them-browser as well to generate some cash flow for bandwidth. That'd get the users pouring in.

Dang. I didint make it. I was going for 20, but try as though I may I wasn't able to think of that many nit-picky things to say about this Distro. It's that good. Some of the things I mentioned aren't really even related to Mint at all, but instead to other packages such as Pidgen, Gnome, and such. Well if I'm going to fail at something, it might as well be complaining about Mint. I'm ok with failing at that.

PS: MPlayer > Totem 4Rlz, I just wish they'd integrate an in-window autohide for the controls like fullscreen Totem/Windows Media Player

[punkrtekk]

Well, some brainstorm page would be nice...

!. good point
2. I think it is thing of Gnome. But personally I consider that as useless since you have Gnome-do in basic installation
8. Strongly agree, basic Gnome Preferred Apps makes me crazy if I compare it to KDE one...
9. I think safety should still stay on the first place before convinience. It does not mean to have everywhere plenty of dialogs like in Vista, but some level of security. I think working as unprivileged user is better. Anyway you can choose what you will need to put password for and what not.
15. Yeah, something like Everest could be found in linux, I miss it too... It means not only HW detection, but also interactive links to Producer webpage, Download drivers and so on...
16. I think you can, you just have not found it... or do you miss some more settings options?
17. well, I think could be nice to have kind of wizard or settings for making LAN, I think even the best could be put more things to Control Centre, so it would look like Drak in Mandriva/PClinuxOS...
18. I think there should be both ways...