I am of a mixed mind with the whole Ubuntu brainstorm thing. I understand the idea — I jumped into the fray too, when Dell gave their customers the chance to speak their minds and push for Linux as an option on computers.

So the process is not alien to me. It’s just a little … strange somehow.

For one thing, this isn’t a company. It’s not a matter of putting X operating system on Y computer. It’s a community made up primarily of volunteers, so shaking the cage in favor of, for example, a more “professional-looking bootloader” is kind of like asking everybody to please sit on the left side of the bus, and expecting it to turn in that direction.

(And don’t get me started on what will be the “professional” results of that idea. No one is ever happy with the definition of “professional.” Pretty is a feature but ugly is what it gets called. Aesthetics are impossible to satisfy.)

Furthermore, I wonder if a lot of the “suggesters” are capable of contributing beyond their “suggestion.” It’s one thing to say, “it takes too long to start Ubuntu Gnome,” but another thing to actually dedicate your time and effort to correcting it. In that sense, the entire brainstorm machine runs kind of counter to Linus’s slightly out-of-context quote …

The Linux philosophy is ‘Laugh in the face of danger.’ Oops. Wrong one. ‘Do it yourself.’ Yes, that’s it.

That doesn’t invalidate the suggestions. It just underscores the validity of a suggestion, to me, if the suggester suffixes his idea with, “I’d help, but I don’t know how to code.”

So … I appreciate efforts like this for the Ubuntu structure to connect to its user base. I just wonder if it’s actually functioning, or if this is like listening to a conversation in another room by using a glass against a wall. We get a lot of people with great ideas (but no real contribution beyond that) in the forums, but I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen a developer online in there. The two halves might actually meet, but I still think the best way to fix something you don’t like is to start coding it yourself.

Regardless, it’s a little hypocritical of me to talk it down right now. Not only do I also lack the coding abilities to make a difference, but I currently don’t have Ubuntu on any of my machines. I’m not throwing out brainstorm suggestions either though. 😈