Donal, you just named my biggest pet peeve! I’d love to sort out the arrangement and sizes of desktop icons… The task is pretty big, though — larger than paper cut sized.

A Telco Guy, thanks so much for the positive feedback and encouragement! People don’t realize how motivitating it is.

Rich, how many paper cuts did you report or fix last cycle? This is a community project, so if it’s not as big a success as you hoped, it’s partially your fault! Please jump in the fray this time and help us fix them. If you have any good paper cut ideas for Rhythmbox, I’m all ears.

Paul, yes, this has been a problem. We discussed it at UDS. Part of me wishes that we hadn’t used the term “paper cut,” and maybe using “Koala Bite” or “Lynx Flea” would lessen the blow (e.g. “this issue that’s really frustrating you isn’t a ‘Koala Bite’”. Don’t worry too much about the few hundred people who reported bugs that weren’t paper cuts–those bugs are still being worked on and fixed. We are taking extra care (more than we did at the beginning of the project) to thank people who’ve reported paper cuts, even if they are invalid.

Gena, please see the definition of a paper cut, I don’t think you understand the nature of the bugs we are discussing: http://wiki.ubuntu.com/PaperCut

Let me paraphrase: I understand what a papercut is. I am not angry because I think some pet bug of mine is neglected. I think the project is great, but I am worried that it might get a bad rep. This is because, as the link shows, there were perhaps 972 users who tried to suggest a paper cut, of which 100 were selected and 76 fixed.

That level of buy-in (almost 1000 suggestions!) is a good thing, but also has drawbacks. Namely, some people will complain when their bugs are not selected. This is not because the decision is wrong, but simply because these users misunderstand the working definition of ‘papercut’, or can’t see why their bug is not in scope.

Again, I am not one of these, but from viewing comments on bugs, it is clear they are numerous.

Unfortunately, with 76 fixes and 872 invalid bugs, odds may favour the complaints drowning out the praise, resulting in community opinion against something with real value. (The same sort of process is behind the groundless claims that “Ubuntu hates upstream.”

All I wanted to suggest was that, as the papercut efforts grow and mature from release to release, some attention could be paid to forestalling complaints by altering communication strategy somehow.

We can hopefully get upstream to fix the issues soon.

Our focus is get upstream to fix the issues too. If there was a delay upstream , it would have only been due to their attention being diverted to crashers and other bugs.

Ubuntu does *not* want to carry patches over upstream efforts[unless absolutely essential]. This has been very specific focus from the desktop team.
If any bugs are not fixed upstream as well. Kindly mention it on the lp bugs.

I’m very interested in working on Rhythmbox, so please keep updating your blog and keep me posted!

I just wanted to say “thank you” for all the hard work that you and your team have been doing on improving the Ubuntu user experience.

Putting tireless hours of efforts on the seemingly thankless job of tracking down and eliminating “minor” bugs… this kind of thing is exactly what Microsoft has NOT been doing for 8+ years and it reflects very poorly on them, for a lot of “minor” bugs add up to a “major” user experience problem.

You guys may not get a lot of accolades on it, but you are performing an extremely valuable service to the world of Open Source software.

Every time that I — or the dozens of friends, family and business associates who I have introduced to Ubuntu — power up our computers, we see the results of your work, right in front of us. It is immediately obvious that you are listening to us poor dumb end users and are fixing the problems as we report them.

We know what you are doing, and we appreciate it. Keep up the good work.

Can you sort out desktop icons?

Currently file-names wrap over lines, arrangement is all over the place, (despite gconf settings to the contrary), you can’t have names beside icons, keep align also doesn’t work. All together I can’t have a small ordered list on my Desktop. Desktop is always a mess.

Thanks for listening, and working on this.
Regards