@yman:
well, honestly i would not want that activated in my Ubuntu installation. Just because of one thing. Imagine that someone steal my laptop and try to use it. Its easy to bypass the login password, and so, someone could use my SSO credentials.

Then you just count the number of Ubuntu SSO accounts that are used on Ubuntu. It would be totally opt-in, and opting-in would be beneficial beyond a feel-good kind of thing that only Linux or Ubuntu enthusiasts would care about.

May i suggest 2 things? Ubuntu team should add a check box on the start of an installation (with of course, an option to disable it later) to gathering the real numbers of the running machines using Ubuntu and please,talk to Libbre office devs to working on some icons and theme for it.
Good to see the way Ubuntu is going. I am really happy with it.

@B. R. Ashley:

The problem is that we need to register to count our machine otherwise it won’t count. And the owner of the website guess that exists 60.000.000 Linux users which i don’t believe. I think there are much more.

Cheers,

Celso Henriques

Even if you don’t include non-native games (to encourage developers to port to Linux in order to be included), the service should still be appealing, especially since no one else is offering it on Linux at the moment. Make the client cross-platform, perhaps if you can you should even make an HTML5 version of the client so people can play anywhere with a browser.

Games that are available for free anyway, such as FOSS games, should also be free to play on the service, but if a player with a subscription plays them they will get his money just the same as if he were playing a commercial game (I’m assuming the model is that the money is divided between the games in proportion to the amount of time players spend playing them). This could be a way for FOSS fans to support FOSS monetarily by the tiresome process of having fun, and support Canonical besides.

I just saw a post about Ubuntu-Dell notebooks in a popular Brazilian blog:

http://www.advivo.com.br/blog/luisnassif/os-laptops-com-linux-da-dell

I’d like to mention that the wallpaper is really beautiful:

http://i.zdnet.com/blogs/ubuntu1204.png?tag=siu-container;attachment_10839

I can’t explain exactly why it looks so good – perhaps it is the contrast between the vertical menu and the horizontal landscape.

The horizon is more or less on the middle of the screen, which gives a good balance to the image.

That’s the kind of balance that you should look for, when you choose the next default wallpaper.

1. The graphical shell should always be in control so that I could switch to another window while I’m in a fullscreen game.
2. The transition between gaphical shell and fullscreen game should be totally smooth.
3. The games should not be allowed to change the resolution of the screen. Instead they should change their own resolution and display at the screen’s native resolution.
4. It would be usefull if the games could be compiled to run natively on one reference hardware platform like x86, but have a vm to run them on other hardware platforms like ARM. Compile once, run anywhere, but on certain hardware it would not only run, but run directly on the hardware.
5. It would be useful to have a format that would allow games to run without local installation from things like removable media, especially if it allowed multiple separate games to be installed on a single DVD perhaps the DVD with a custom menu system (similar to a DVD menu) for browsing the games and any other materials like manuals or bonus material.

Aside from this it might be a good idea to partner with Onlive to deliver Windows-only games to Ubuntu TV.

Ubuntu TV could then double as a game console on devices with sufficient hardware capabilities. It may not have many titles initially, but it could be a nice bonus. The trick is selecting only high-quality linux games that are suitable for use with a game controller and making only those available in a specialized version of the USC that is designed specifically for Ubuntu TV. Then sell Ubuntu TV as an entertainment system, with video games a notable but very much secondary feature. “Watch and record movies and TV show, purchase and play music, or even play games” – or maybe a stronger de-emphasis. The point being to *not* compete with the consoles, but offer gaming as one extra incentive to get people who want a media-center/DVR to buy your system, since it has a feature that isn’t important at all but still gives it an advantage over similar systems from other vendors. For parents who just want a TV, the fact that it can play games can be used to try to placate children – “You don’t an XBox. You can play games on Ubuntu.” And if those games include all the greatest Linux titles from indies as well as Id, Valve, and a few other AAA game companies then that argument will be all the stronger, especially if a few of those games are actually new.

Then make some partenrship deals with various companies to pre-install a dark-themed Ubuntu TV onto gaming PCs.