Imagine a situation where a loyal windows noob finally decides to venture into the colourful world of linux. Then breaking his/her Distro Days, maybe even Hours/Minutes after installing it only to find they have to work their way though a mountain of bash commands to (possibly) fix it.

That exact situation scares many user back to their old OS every week. (There was a time 6 years ago when I can remember jumping between various Distros and XP several times for this reason.)

Granted that no repair tool is 100% successful but would the community (especially newcomers) benefit from easier and more powerful tools that can repair the simple stuff? I think so.

I can also see an easy to use backup creator (something that sticks a restore wizard + the backed up data on the medium) going a long way towards making linux more noob friendly.

The simple truth is, most people simply aren’t willing to find & read through a mountain of documents sparsely spread around the corners of the internet and then learn the mountains of commands those docs are filled with, simply figure out how to repair something the rest of us experienced linux users would sniff out and fix in minutes.

2. We need a decent app. for syncing Windows Mobile devices. Right now, there is stuff that sometimes works for some people. I had mine working, then it broke.

It’s a good thing, since all needs are eventually covered, and it allows innovation to flourish. Cool features that work from the forks are eventually integrated into the main branch.

However, this also means a lot of “Reinventing the Wheel” is done and many resources are wasted when they probably didn’t need to be in making “me-too!” technologies.

What’s the solution? Make the code proprietary. But when you do that, you destroy all the other benefits of Open Source. It’s a trade-off. Some types of apps and users simply aren’t fit for the OSS model.

I was talking to a friend about CAD apps on Linux and by doing a Google search I found a lot of commercial apps available. Are they bad?

Linux has too many duplicate office suites and other halfway-ware. Why not focus on one and complete it? Open Office is pretty good now, why not spend more energy on it?

Linux has too many players and few that actually work.

What else though?

We have browsers, IM, skype, word processors, music players… what else is missing for the common user?

What we need is less navel gazing like docking bars and more useful programs that Gnu-Linux is still missing like a simple editing software like Imovie or Windows program I cant remember now to edit home videos.
I said simple, not optionless.

Mom and pop want to take their digital camera on a trip and take the pictures and video clips, maybe crop the ends of the clips, put them together with transition/effects, maybe add a soundtrack to it and maybe some text. I know KDEnlive and all the others and nothing just works and nothing is simple.

We need to have more easy modes for software so the 5-10 most used functions can be accessed by people with little experience in the LEAST amount of steps possible and for those taht want more, the rest of the software is still there with all its power.

Which is understandable as it seems to be at a 0.1 release. But please don’t spam as it being amazing