What’s Missing from Your Gnome Desktop?

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I know people have their pet hate, peeve, or thing that isn’t there on the Linux desktop and the guys discussed this on LUG Radio recently. Everybody knows about binary 3d accelerated graphics drivers, suspend and resume, wireless LAN drivers and so on, but I’d like to propose another which, I suspect, shouldn’t be too hard to fix, since it’s only an interface issue as far as I can see:

Bluetooth.

Everybody has a mobile phone. A lot of us geekier types would like to send files back and forth between our phones and our PCs, sync phone to PC (where there is a suitable standard) and back again, I would like to be easily able to use my phone as a modem when I’m in the middle of nowhere to make running repairs on remote servers, or use my bluetooth earpiece as a microphone. I know all of this is possible because I’ve done it on my work Powerbook (apart from the microphone thing) and I’d like to be able to do this easily on my new Linux notebook (which I’m about to blast a small fortune on) without having to spend an hour or two searching for howtos, configuring Bluetooth, sorting out pin numbers and using gnome-obex-send from the command-line, or searching Google to see how on Earth to use a mobile phone over Bluetooth as a dial-up modem under Linux.

Pairing, configuring with PIN numbers and so on should be easy, the Bluetooth stack should be as easy to set up as installing it and configuring params in a GUI. Sending files in Nautilus should be as easy as right-clicking something and choosing Send -> Using Bluetooth -> To DeviceName. I know some of this is there, but what I mean is that this could all be easier. Doing this on a Mac is easy, but it could be even easier. It could be there from the beginning, it could be built right into Gnome. No installing your Bluetooth stack, then Gnome-Bluetooth and fiddling with gnome-obex-send. Everybody has a mobile phone these days, it should be really easy.

Of course I have no intention of helping as I’m can’t program for shit, in any language, (maybe some shell, tied to Zenity ;)) and it may well be harder than I am suggesting, but well, it’s just one thing I think which should be fixed.

For some reason I seem to be the only one that I have heard mention this. Apart from Bastien Nocera that is. I think we could be the best at this quite easily.

What do you think is missing from your Gnome Desktop?

3 thoughts on “What’s Missing from Your Gnome Desktop?”

  2. For me, one of the big things that is lacking is a decent graphical interface for setting up xinerama on laptops. Shouldn’t be hard to do – the backend stuff is already done. I believe someone mentioned it at the recent UDS, and so it might be on it’s way 🙂

  3. Pingback: Adam Sweet’s Blog » Bluetooth in Gnome

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