Hi, I thought I was going to share some ideas that could be useful for the beginner team. First of all I want to say that it's a great project which can be good for new users, if it gives the expected results and every new ubuntu user is happy with their system instead of spending countless of hours in figuring out how to solve problems that arrived after the switch.
The biggest problem for the beginner team is as I see that many users gets problems due to the switch that doesn't get solved and therefore wastes lots of time, just to switch back to windows. I've heard that from others, so I took a look in the Absolute beginner section in this forum to see how common it is that problem gets solved. After looking on about ten threads, I couldn't find a single thread which led to a solution.
The general characteristics of such thread is that nice people that tries to help guess for a solution, which fails 2-4 times. Many times the solution consists of some terminal lines to be Cut/Pasted(I have nothing against text-based terminal solutions, problem is when they do not work). Also sometimes the response for a problem is quite fast, sometimes not, that depends on the problem.
I have a few ideas to fix these issues.
-Users that don't get any luck in the forum can go to the chat. Especially useful if the problem is a big mystery that requires a long conersation. Right now, there's an IRC channel, but it gets more accessible for more users if there's a webchat directly within any browser.
- Easy accessible webchat.
-With better, I mean more reliable. That means, important software that can be big problem sources that affects the regular joe should be focused on beeing stable before it's officially released. That's because most people want their systems to just work as stable as possible, but have little or no interested in new features. There's a lot of solutions for this one, but one pretty easy thing to do is to upgrade ubuntu releases a few months after they've been released. Example: Ubuntu Feisty+ or Ubuntu Feisty complete etc etc.
- Better software
-People needs to understand that Linux isn't Windows. Lot's of efforts have been spent on it, but it havn't gaved as good results as we could expect. People generally needs to get some grip of what linux, opensource and Ubuntu is. It would be good if people knew the basic stuff. This would improve the quality of questions which will make it more interesting to support others. I'm not saying that ubuntu has done a bad job in this, but rather a very good job which has resulted to it's success. But there's still room for improvements.
- More competence for everyone
One area where many people knows the basic stuff is Global Warming. That's probably because information of it is easy to get and understand for most people. We need something like this: http://epa.gov/climatechange/kids/index.html
But instead of explaining global warming, it can explain what an OS is, the difference between linux and windows and that Ubuntu is a linux distro. It can also explain how to install applications and get further help.