Hi,

here are some of my ideas in which I see that Fedora can improve general user and desktop experience and usability. I would like you to see my comment and suggestion in the manner I made them - I don't mean to be a critic but only an objective observer that loves usind Fedora at home and also at work and would like to see more people do so - and I belive that with some of ideas I have here more people would use Fedora and be more productive.

* NTFS support during installation there should be NTFS support built in to anaconda so that ntfs partitions are automatically recognized and added to /etc/fstab - and that users are given an option to make them read-only or to be mounted in read-write mode.

* Beagle and Deskbar installed by default these applications make all the difference for an desktop user between an "OK" user experience and "wonderful" user experience. Work flow using these two applications is radically improved and this is what should be showcased as a "Modern linux desktop". - also I would add a beagle firefox plugin which also makes all the difference when you need some resource you saw online but didn't bookmark it or put it on del.ico.us - these apps don't waste resources, and the memory footprint is really not that much, especially if put in context that you really have to look hard these days for a system that has less or equal to 256MB of memory. I tested beagle on 3 laptop systems with fedora 6 / 7 and one desktop with also fedora 6 / 7 and I didn't have a single issue. So for me not to have in installed in Fedora 7 was a big disappointment.

* Tomboy installed by default - I have all the same arguments here as I do for Beagle and Deskbar

* Firefox to have it's original icon in gnome panel the icon fedora uses makes me search for firefox icon all the time. I guess that I'm not the only one. Firefox has one of the most recognisable icons I have ever seen and simply don't see why fedora uses non-firefox icon. It just confuses users.

* Desktop shortcut for joining Fedora IRC (aka "Get Live Help") Fedora is about freedom+communication, right? Why not make this statement more that just a nice slogan. If you installed saabyon linux you could experienced for yourself what this really means. I as a new user to gentoo (sabayon is based on gentoo) was really blown away with this feature. It is really, really simple to implement and gives a real meaning to a communication friendly linux distro. In sabayon link to their IRC chat has a simple name "Get Live Help" and it work fabulous! I didn't have any Portage experience so I poped in IRC chat room and was on my way after I got quick help. Whis kind of help was precious to me and would love to see it in fedora as one of it's main features and not just as a slogan. screenshot: http://www.flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=382063978&size=l

* Desktop folder with examples of what "this linux thing" can do :) This is especially important for a live cd versions. Ubuntu has this "feature" on each of their live cd's as a folder on desktop. In these folder you can see and test for yourself some filetypes and apps that work woth them. So for example you open examples folder and see how some spreadsheets work in "this linux thing" by simply clicking on the spreadsheat that they placed in there and also for some text documents, images and the most important thing - there is an video clip. And it is a really nice video about the meaning of Ubuntu project. I saw some great videos on redhat magazine page and it is a shame that these aren't part of Fedora 7 live cd's. I hope you see the great value in video presentation and include some great videos on Fedora 8 live CD. ubuntu examples: http://johnny.chadda.se/wp-content/uploads/2006/06/Ubuntu_Examples.png and another: http://knowledge76.com/images/thumb/800px-Dapper_examples.png

* a working Burning app for Fedora Gnome desktop Put any new user in front of fresh Fedora 7 desktop and ask them to burn some files to CD or DVD - any watch them as they wiggle unpleasantly as they can't find any burning app under gnome desktop. Puting a link for nautils burner under "Places / CD - DVD Recoder" doesn't help. If you choose atleast not to include Brassero as the default burning app under gnome then at least thre should be a link for "CD Recoder" placed somewhere under "Applications" menu and not "Places" menu.

I have some other ideas, suggestions and improvements I would love to see but these are the main ones. I hope you see all of my suggestions to Fedora desktop in the manner they were written - as my intention was to be as objective as possible and not to be a critic. I love Fedora and it is definitely by my opinion the best distro for Desktop users (yes, even better than Ubuntu).

Valent.