A few suggestions to improve Ubuntu

It’s been a month since I burned and installed Ubuntu for the first time. Since then I fell in love with it and don’t plan to stop using it soon. However there are some features that are obviously missing and quite important. Most of them involve file operations, something I found quite crippled on Ubuntu.

On of them that got me quite frustrated is the overwriting/renaming tasks. I have two SD cards for my camera and I had to transfer the pictures from both cards to my Pictures folder. Since pictures have the same name on both cards, I had to rename them prior to moving them. However it’s apparently impossible to rename multiple files at once. I was really deceived and simply rebooted on Vista and did everything from there. Vista now has this neat feature that when you move files with the same name, you are prompted to either overwrite the files, rename the new files or cancel the operation.

The trash sucks too. There is no restore button so you have to copy/paste your way through your problems. Thankfully, you can add a “delete” option to the menu to skip the trash. For some reason, they also decided removable media also had to have the trash system. It’s not such a bad idea, but since the “deleted” files are still on your card (in a Trash??? folder), this hogs all the space on your card, especially when you deal with big files. They should instead ask you if you want to put it to a trash folder on your computer or simply delete it instead.

I also found that the “autorun” for storage cards is quite limited. I’d love to see a menu like on XP/Vista where you can select what to do.

I guess that’s all, from what I noticed. I’m just throwing in my two cents because I doubt I’m the only one being frustrated by these problems. Nonetheless Ubuntu is still excellent and worth a try. I guess you can always use F-Spot to sort your photos too.