Because I spent too long on the lottery machine yesterday...

[sally_maria]

One of the big advantages of open source is that if you don't like something you can fix it, or pay someone to fix it for you. So, if you'd won the Euro lottery (£117 million), what little "quirks" of your favourite distro or software would you pay someone to fix?

What projects would you donate to?

Comments

[ratcreature]

My major wishful thinking is wrt the projects doing drivers. I'd love hardware support be not such a potential pitfall, both with basics such as graphics cards as well as peripherals like printers or graphics tablets not working as they should when you were unlucky with your pick, because you couldn't find any reviews telling you in advance whether any of the drivers work for hardware you can currently buy.

Also making graphics software better, like improving GIMP, because I often can't follow Photoshop tutorials. I don't mean that GIMP ought to be exactly like PS (I've never used that myself), but some basics I can't replicate. Many functions have equivalents even if the interface is different, but some things are missing that seem really useful from what I see in tutorials, like its adjustment layers. Also I guess the often lamented lack of CYMK and such, though personally I don't need such professional print-related capabilities. Also make it better work with tablets and brushes imitating natural media. The screenshots I've seen of Photoshop make that seem much nicer with options for brush dynamics and such, though the newest GIMP has made some progress.

Also having one of the other linux graphics programs that are truly geared towards digital painting actually mature would be nice. I have used the program that came with my tablet in a demo version under Wine (ArtRage, I think it was called), but having something like that natively would be nice.

[sally_maria]

I'm afraid my immediate thoughts were on little niggles, rather than the big picture stuff.

For example, I want somebody to change Nautilus so I have the option to rename files just by clicking on them, no right-click or F2. (For that matter, I'd like Open/Save dialogs where you can rename/delete/move files, but I suppose that's dependent on the individual program.)

I'd also like to maintain a repository for Debian that contains things like the latest (stable) version of Firefox, and various other things that are available in PPAs for Ubuntu. I get why people who run production servers need stability more than anything else, but on my home computer, once the project releases it as a final version, it's stable enough for me. That's why I want to run a rolling release in the first place.

I'd definitely be donating to Linux Mint, as I think they have one of the best starter/low effort distros around.

I'd also give good money to a project to develop a proper GUI pdf editor - just for those times when I spot a typo or want to edit the meta-data...

A newbie-proof, competent audio/video converter would be another project I could get behind - somehow I just can't get ffmpeg to do what I want it to.

[foxfirefey]

CONFESSION: I am mostly a Mac person. So I think what I'd want to do is make sure that some of the Mac programs I use have good Linux equivalents and can import certain file types associated with the programs I use. That way, I'd have an escape route, as I'm sure someday I will need one.

[feathertail]

I'd put it towards WordPress, and have people make "themes" that turn it into an RSS aggregator and notepad. Then I'd fund Android apps to coincide with same. Having to depend on Simplenote and Google Reader is a pain.

Next I'd figure out how to do something about Gmail and Google search dependencies.

If I could get LJcode sites to play nicely with each other, that'd be neat.

[kerravonsen]

I agree with the driver suggestion.

What I'd also like would be to get someone to write a really good independent compositing manager for X-Windows. The xcompmgr program doesn't really cut it, and all the other compositing managers are wired into window managers. I don't want to be forced to use GNOME or KDE in order to get nifty compositing effects, and yet that is all the choice one has. I use Fvwm, but the Fvwm folks are adamant in not wanting to write a compositing manager. So for now, I do without. But I would like to have The Pretty, really.

[pixel]

While I've got almost no personal complaints about hardware with linux, things have progressed at this point to where it's been a non-issue for me recently, I think putting dev time into hardware support would not go amiss. It's probably the single biggest complaint I see.

I'd also like to see a really nice fiction/novel writing application for linux. I understand there might be a beta version of Scrivner floating around, and would be fantastic, but some nice native software would make me happy too. (Written in Java doesn't count, usually, I've written dekstop Java, we've agreed to disagree, and I avoid the hell out of it usually.)

[siliconshaman]

I'd go with the driver suggestion, someone to write drivers for everything. And someone to write the required 'gubbins' to make n-class wifi work on Ubuntu [it's not the driver, it's the bit of the kernel the driver talks to that's the problem.]

and if I had spare change, someone to revive and update Yggdrasil.. just because I like that name!