I think this kind of emails are helpful for linux desktop development. I agree with the firefox fonts. It should be out of the box on RHEL. This is the linux distribution most corporations knows. I'm not sure about system settings or desktop customization settings (because they are for power users).
I definitively would want to have an easy way to use an external projector/tv/monitor. And keep working on getting easier to configure wireless, bluetooth, volume settings.
Also, i would advise to think on corporate features for linux. They have been moving to web on last years. A good office+web linux box can be something they can use on some of their workstations, but it's a requirement that it should be easy to maintain. This is the hard part: You need to be able to change the settings from a central place, to change the proxy and other settings on firefox from a central place, to have rsync out of the box, to have samba and its new directory out of the box, to have a GUI for samba that allows to share the user's own files, to have a central way to change samba settings, to have a centralized backup system, to add fonts from central, to have a way to easily do a remote install/uninstall. To have a way to configure an easy menu with the permitted apps and the same on firefox (for webapps). Name it like coporate users want: Fedora Workstation or Ubuntu professional or OpenSuse corporate. If your concern is how linux can go in the corporate world, well corporate is actually one of Linux's strenghts. Corporations uses it on their mission critical services. The hard job (tech approval) is done. It makes sense if it lowers costs, not only licensing ones but maintenance and support.
Many of the tools are there: samba, puppet, bacula, mondo. Some of them requires some polish for the end user (e.g. a way to see which backups are done on your workstation and to recover it, a way to add easily network shares).
I'm sure desktop is a problem on meeting user's need. Ask google and android.
You can find it here: http://mkaku.org/home/?page_id=246
It's a little science+fiction, but it's anyway a great reading.
He states that:
"(...) Berkeley astronomer Don Goldsmith reminds us that the earth receives about one billionth of the suns energy, and that humans utilize about one millionth of that. So we consume about one million billionth of the suns total energy. At present, our entire planetary energy production is about 10 billion billion ergs per second."
and also, he suggests that we have to search for a combination of a star and a planet with great infrared emissions:
"Eventually, after several thousand years, a Type I civilization will exhaust the power of a planet, and will derive their energy by consuming the entire output of their suns energy, or roughly a billion trillion trillion ergs per second. With their energy output comparable to that of a small star, they should be visible from space. Dyson has proposed that a Type II civilization may even build a gigantic sphere around their star to more efficiently utilize its total energy output . Even if they try to conceal their existence, they must, by the Second Law of Thermodynamics, emit waste heat. From outer space, their planet may glow like a Christmas tree ornament. Dyson has even proposed looking specifically for infrared emissions (rather than radio and TV) to identify these Type II civilizations."
Finally from the original article we see a theory i want to add to this reasoning:
"One possibility is that Wasp-18, a sunlike, medium-sized star, is a thousand times less energetic than would be expected. That would mean it produces much less friction on the planet than normal."
Why this star has a thousand times less energy than it should have?
The described model is used on some open source projects like Hyperic, Zenoss, Groundwork, Mindtouch and more coming.
"And remember: Evil will always prevail, because Good is dumb." -- Spaceballs
