Three years ago I started to experiment with using Slackware Linux as a desktop OS. Needless to say, there were some problems but I managed to sort them out after some forum perusing and driver hunting. I used it for about 2 months until I found myself going back to Windows (since I was dual-booting) because the applications that did the job for me weren't either stable enough or they lacked some really basic feature. After about 3 months I gave up and just decided that I could use the space that Slackware was taking for something better.

Since then I've mostly used various distributions of Linux solely as a server OS and in that department it shines! And that's probably and understatement. However, a few months ago I got a great summer job at my university, developing and researching a project to use a very new and expensive depth camera. It was decided that this project would use mostly free/open source tools and we would try to give back something to the open source community. As a result we would of course use Linux (the Ubuntu distribution), the pinnacle of the open source community.

Ubuntu on the desktop

So, I downloaded the installation-slash-liveCD of Ubuntu 7.04 and away we went. I installed Ubuntu in about 30-45 minutes and 15 minutes after that I had a working desktop environment with all my hardware drivers correctly installed. I didn't have to lift a finger to get the wireless working which was a great relief seeing as how the experience was three years ago.

Now, to get to my final point. I've been using Ubuntu now, exclusively, for about three months and I absolutely can say that I never want to go back. However, there is a problem that I've found and not so surprisingly it is the same one I encountered three years ago. The applications.

I am going to compile a list of applications that I would really like to see in the next few years, mature and stable.

Photo organizer

Yes, there is F-Spot and it does do a very good job. However, what really frustrates me are a couple of things. (Disclaimer: These problems might just exists on my system, I am not saying that these problems exist for everyone).

1. It is very slow. When I open a photo it takes a few (3-6) seconds to draw itself. It doesn't really sound like such a big problem but it gets really annoying, really fast.
2. If you are viewing a photo in full screen and would like to view the next one (by pressing the left or right arrow key) that damn bar pops up. In the middle of the photo. That you're trying to view. It's annoying as hell. (Please fix this as soon as possible F-Spot people).
3. This one isn't really a bug, more like a lack of a feature. It would be really great if F-Spot would recognize images that were taken in portrait mode and automatically rotate them accordingly. Picasa does this and it really is a very very handy feature.

I know that you can have Picasa in Ubuntu but it's wrapped in WINE and doesn't support UTF-8 (at least my Icelandic characters get all messed up). If F-Spot would fix these problems (not very many of them) it would really be equally as good as Picasa in my opinion. Don't get me wrong, I still use and love F-Spot, but because of these quirks it's not as good of an experience as it could be.

Music organizer

I have used Banshee for this and it is working really great. I really prefer the way it does things and it needs only a few adjustments so it would be the ultimate music organizer for me.

1. MUCH better iPod support. It really is very basic at the moment, with no podcast support (that I could find anyway)
2. The previous song button is strange. It doesn't always play the song I was previously listening to. It's just *weird*
3. The podcast part of Banshee is also rather incomplete. It doesn't automatically update the podcasts. The podcasts appear in my main Library. I would rather that podcasts be completely separated from the main library. If you listen to a podcast all the way to the end it skips to a random podcast (looks random anyway).
4. If you have a very large music collection, sorting it will be very slow.

PHP development environment

I have been using Eclipse with the PHP plugin for a long time now and it works great. Except that I find it to be a pretty huge resource hog. It just slows my entire system down. What I would ultimately want is basically Geany but with some code insight and a SVN plugin. Right now, Geany is a very lightweight text editor that can handle many file types and is built on the Scintilla text editing component. It already has code completion except it doesn't figure out the classes I've created in my project.

Maybe someday

Currently, there are applications that do behave exactly as I would like them to, and I would really prefer to use. Sadly, those applications are not available for Linux at the moment. I would like to have:

1. A fully functioning, identical to the Mac version, iTunes. With full iPod support and the whole shebang.
2. A fully functioning, identical to the Windows version, Picasa. Not the horrible, wrapped in WINE version currently available.
3. A complete port of Photoshop CS2.
4. I'm still looking for the ultimate PHP editor.

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