Also, another wish for the long term which I don’t know how good of an idea it is: better wine/proton integration.
Many windows software work really well nowadays thanks to wine and proton, but configuring it (outside of Steam) may be very difficult for a newcomer. It would be great if sometime in the future a new converter to Ubuntu can easily at least try if the windows apps they use run on Ubuntu.
And, finally another wish for the long term which I don’t know how good of an idea it is: Android apps integration.
There are several alternatives for this but, again, they are difficult for a newcomer. It is a bit sad that Windows have better android apps support that Ubuntu.
i was very disappointed when ubuntu went gnome, it was no longer as reliable as it was with unity. and stiffled adopted by some of my clients. but that’s besides the point.
when mir was developed wayland did not do what ubuntu needed, nowadays mir is a wayland compositor that that build upon by window managers if they wish to.
wayland is a protocol, nowaydays windows managers like mutter and kwin essentially do duplicate work of implementing a wayland compositor. mir is a ready to use wayland compositor they could make use of, which one is now NIH?
snaps and flatpaks are not comparable, you can install an entire nextcloud server with a snap, flatpaks cannot do that. heck if someone in the community is crazy enough we could even have snap install flatpak to bring the latest and greatest flatpak support to ubuntu.
and finally yes snaps have user focussed benefits. not sure what the state is of context aware updates. but with the firefox snap you could reach point where you never get that “oops we updated your firefox, please restart firefox to continue” notice 
check the snap store permissions button it’s getting there, don’t worry xD
What frustrates me ?
Games
There are too many different ways to launch a game, every company has its own launcher, launching another launcher which maybe even launches a launcher again.
Most of these games need a compatibility layer like wine or proton to work, which complicates the process even further.
To get better fps and graphics you then add dxvk or vkd3d on top of it and still have to hope that the triple a games anti cheat and drm won’t break.
That is something clearly needing a better user experience.
Movies.
Talk to Google about Widevine. Being limited to 720p on disney or 1080p on Netflix because we can’t run window store standalone apps and are limited to firefox/chrome is not something an enthusiast forgets when he considers switching to linux.
Office/PIM
Development:
Another pain point are version control systems, like git, mercurial and svn.
It is a lot easier to use a gui like tortoise for various tasks over the CLI.
Unfortunately there it doesn’t work with Ubuntu or other distros just yet, windows only.
Security&Encryption
I think some form of measured boot would be great, so you are informed when someone other than you tampered with your system.
Opening Bitlocker Disks of various kinds by default with new versions of SystemD and Cryptsetup would be great
Storing keys inside a TPM module would be useful for mobile devices.
Advocate for and work on open bios&uefi for Mainboards. Core boot and similar projects don’t cover recent boards and lack features.
Modular solutions for this increase security and speed at the same time.
Communication&Social Media
Too many different messengers/chat tools out there
Slack, Teams, IRC, RocketChat, Whatsapp, Signal, Matrix,BBB,Jitsi,Line, Vibre, Wechat, Mastodon, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, FacebookMessenger,DeltaChat,Tox, Sphinx,XMPP, et cetera.
A common interface and application would be great. LibPurple doesn’t really cover enough of the recent development in a world that moves fast.
Hi, I would really like to see that qt apps get a yaru theme.
Also for the snap packages.
QT apps really look out of place when beinig used as an snap package.
I think nobody uses only GTK apps.
Qt and GTK have been the dominant toolkits on linux since the beginning.
So focussing the look of the ubuntu distrobution on just the GTK toolkit is just very short sighted.
My use of QT and GTK apps is about 50/50, and as far as I know breeze is the only proffessional looking theme that covers both GTK and QT.
Please do the same with yaru!
I always hear people complaining about their favourite software not being available on Linux.
Many companies claim it is difficult to support an unclear operating system with different versions of different libraries properly.
Snaps would be one option to make that easier and kill that argument.
If the rest of the system re uses libraries, i don’t think a few snap packages will be a ram or disk space issue these days. That argument feels a bit made up to me.
Pausing for 24 hours.
The flood of I-don’t-like-snaps in the past few hours by first-time posters suggests that those folks won’t actually stick around to make more meaningful contributions. We have seen this before. So we’re going to wait for the drive-bys to move on to the next sensation.
My two cents:
ZFS and ZSys: I love these. But, AFAIK, they never made it out of experimental. Also, the new installer for 21.10 doesn’t propose them. Are you still supporting them?
Bring back Unity or switch to KDE: I think it’s pretty clear by now that GNOME is moving away from what Ubuntu wanted for its desktop environment. How many extension do you need to maintain to make it resemble a regular desktop that most users are familiar with? How many tweak tools do we need to access the basic settings we expect to have on any OS? I liked Unity and I would love to see it back. However, KDE is getting a lot of traction nowadays and it can do almost everything Unity could do and even more. Maybe it would be easier to sponsor KDE than resurrecting Unity.
Snap: I love them and I use them. But there are some pain points I would love to see addressed.
Having tried ZFS on root on three systems, and updates on two of them had grub busted. The lack of a ZFS recovery utility on the desktop install ISO image is a glaring oversight. At this point I cannot recommend using ZFS on root because there is no way to repair a broken initrd file. There was no way to roll back to previous snapshots because there was no zfs.ko bundled the the initrd after update.
I’m not a heavy snap user, but there’s one major issue I have with it: snapd silently updates some snaps and leaves previous revisions on disk. As time goes by that snap directory begins to grow unacceptably big. There might be an easy setting and sane default to set a limit for simultaneously installed revisions of snaps. Maybe there’s already one which I have no idea about? I beg my pardon then.
Ah, and another one, but that’s steadily getting inapplicable: many snaps used to be outdated and built by some random persons – maybe greatest on Earth but who I know nothing about – and that’s why I’d like to thank all maintainers like @alexmurray who are busy making various snaps up-to-date.
I hope all work done by systemd and tpm2 teams on github will be properly supported by Ubuntu (enrolling tokens used to unlock LUKS partitions, totp, etc). Being able to prepare unified unified kernel images with initramfs-tool or at least correctly working dracut also could be a good thing.
Pipewire, of course.
Maybe a little bit more love for Kubuntu and others? This is by no means an important matter, but last time I checked Kubuntu was still using its own plymouth theme, not that cool spinner/UEFI logo theme that has been allotted to “mother” Ubuntu a couple of releases ago.
Oh, almost forgot it: please fix that annoying bug that causes error when navigating with Nautilus to, say, /boot/efi directory (and other directories which are accessible using temp rights elevation). I talk about error appearing when user enters a correct password and the story ends with no access being granted.
Speeding up update-initramfs?
Not sure if a good idea or not, but maybe some way to replace grub post install with systemd-boot? It should be able to survive upgrade to 22.10
I suppose it’s not going to happen since systemd-boot is UEFI-only. Ubuntu has to support various systems including legacy ones, and maintaining 2 different bootloaders even if one of them is quite simple is only a little profit but big overhead.
snaps do have a builtin self-test and rollback mechanism (rarely used by desktop snaps though, but often in snaps with services etc) and always allow you to snap revert <snapname> to go back to the last known good version on disk … for that reason you always have at least two versions installed … and indeed there is a setting to force the amount of retained snaps (but you need to keep at least two). this is documented at:
https://snapcraft.io/docs/keeping-snaps-up-to-date#heading--refresh-retain
Hi @quarkyalice
The suggestion of having choice to switch between various different accent colors is one of the most discussed issue on Yaru’s github see issue: #2170.
The summary of the whole discussion from the issue is: it’s possible for Yaru to add new colors but would need an approval from design-team on what colors to offer and would also require someone from desktop-team to patch the appearance-panel to display the accent-colors to offer something similiar to the this screencast.
What features I would like to see on the Ubuntu desktop:
Ubuntu is the best OS for work and fun
As KDE User im absolutely biased but some more effort on kde plasma would be great. It is easy to configure to look like the design people are used to from unity, Windows or mac OS
Maybe the installer could offer preconfigured “lookalikes”.
I want my Desktop to look like:
-(K)Ubuntu
-Mac
-Windows 10