Canonical, the company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, is launching a new project to improve the usability of the platform. The developers aim to identify and resolve 100 minor bugs that negatively impact the Ubuntu user experience before the release of the next major version in October.

The initiative, which is called One Hundred Paper Cuts, will be implemented by Canonical's new design and user experience team in collaboration with the Ubuntu community. Canonical's design experts have called for Ubuntu users to participate by helping to identify relevant bugs. They are specifically looking for easily fixable bugs that impact the usability of key system components such as the panels and file manager. Canonical hopes to boost the overall quality of the platform by addressing a multitude of subtle issues that developers would otherwise ignore. Many of the improvements that are applied through this effort will directly benefit upstream projects.

Canonical began assembling a team of professional designers last year to lead a broad community-driven usability initiative called Project Ayatana. The new One Hundred Paper Cuts initiative is one of several strategies that comprises Ayatana. Another major facet of Ayatana is Canonical's experimental notification system, which was introduced in Ubuntu 9.04. During this development cycle, the new notification system will receive additional improvements as the design team simultaneously tackles the papercuts.

David Siegel, the developer of the popular GNOME-Do launcher, recently joined Canonical as part of the user experience and design team. In his blog, he describes the function of the One Hundred Paper Cuts project and provides more specific insight into what kind of issues are classified as papercuts.

"If some small usability detail has been bothering you release after release, now is your chance to step up and get it the attention it deserves," he wrote. "If we can find and heal one hundred paper cuts, Ubuntu 9.10 will surely be the most usable release of Ubuntu yet."

Users can participate by reporting bugs and flagging them as papercuts in Ubuntu's Launchpad development site. As Siegel points out in his blog, this is a great way for new contributors to get involved in the process of improving Ubuntu. Users can also help by participating in the Ubuntu 9.04 usability study. If the papercut project is successful, Siegel says, it might be reiterated during future development cycles.

Many of us who are experienced Linux users have become so accustomed to ignoring minor glitches that such problems practically become invisible. The result is that there are a lot of really subtle deficiencies that have long been overlooked by developers but are immensely frustrating to new users. The One Hundred Paper Cuts project looks like an effective way to overcome this challenge and smooth out some of Ubuntu's rough edges.

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