This has been gathering in my brain, I figure I should write it all down:

X

• Render everything using Composite and OpenGL
  basically then we can have output that doesn’t suck! Translucency is not only cool, but useful in some UI.
• All 2D graphics to be drawn with Cairo.
  Enough said here – vector is the future.
• A magnify screen function (look at MacOS X’s) except using Cairo et all so that everything is still smooth when you zoom (use those vector graphics baby, yeah!)
• Graphics cards companies to pull their finger out and do full open source drivers.

GNOME (note that this is only long because I love it so much and spend so much time using it)

• To be able to set emblems on files/folders in Nautilus via the contextual menu.
• To have the Create Archive option in the contextual menu have a submenu with options such as “.tar, .tar.gz, .tar.bz2, .zip” (or just .gz, .bz2 if only a single file is selected)
• Take less time to log in
• Evolution to not leak memory.
• Evolution to handle big maildirs better (where big is the multiple hundred of thousands of messages
• For Evolution to not do “checking” stuff on mailboxes.
• Gaim getting it’s contact list from Evolution
• Nautilus having better graphics for open versus closed folders (at least in the theme I use – Industrial)
• The applications menu to be faster
• Get rid of the Window List and Virtual Desktop – they are broken UI elements. Windows 95 proved that the taskbar just doesn’t scale when you have enough memory to run more than one application. Maybe a NeXT style dock would be good? I don’t have the answer here
• Dashboard and Beagle to become easily installable and usable. If there’s issues with shipping mono apps as part of core gnome, then lets rewrite them in something that isn’t mono. I want that functionality!
• gThumb to become good – think iPhoto on steroids with links into Gimp. Also, some sane way to store metadata
• Multisync to work properly with evo2
• Multisync to sync photos (and their metadata)
• GnuCash to be GTK2
• xchat to get some HIG UI love
• All settings that a user could care about to be in a user-visible folder and able to be easily backed up (e.g. by dragging to a blank CD with nautilus-cd-burner). i.e. put everything in a folder called “Settings” instead of buried around in dotfiles.
• A good backup utility that my mother can use (that’s smart enough to split things over multiple CDs if needed)
• GUI for ACLs
• Open With to be file specific as well as global
• Animation with UI events (drool at OSX’s effects, then make better ones)
• A good RAD dev environment. Something involving Glade and Python and integrated. Think Visual Basic 3 (when it was actually good) but on steroids with GNOME love.
• Gnome Time Tracker to scale better (and not corrupt it’s own data files – i.e. use rename and sync properly)
• Rhythmbox to have iPod (or any MP3/Ogg player) integration. I want to plug my ipod in, and see it in both Nautilus and Rhythmbox (and have a big Sync button in RB, as well as being able to drag files to it).
• The desktop background to be Xinerama aware and know not to stretch an image over both screens. let me set one for each screen!
• Have “random” desktop backgrounds from a folder
• a desktop background option to better “fill” the screen on widescreens (where the image isn’t widescreen)

General Utils

• xfsdump to get DVD support (multi volume dumps directly to DVD)
• g++ to be faster and use less than a squigabyte of memory
• prism54 to have proper link monitoring (with the gnome panel applet)
• GUI version of kismet

there’s more… i just can’t be bothered writing any more at the moment :)