Recent Ubuntu releases have introduced major changes, including a new theme, a new application stack and–gasp–a new position for window buttons.  But Karmic and Lucid also included a number of tiny usability enhancements that you might not have noticed, but which are central to making Ubuntu a Linux distribution for human beings.  Here’s a look at five of them.

Coming on the heels of the campaign announced last summer to fix 100 “papercuts” in Ubuntu before the 9.10 release, a new round of usability bugs have recently been targeted for Ubuntu 10.04.  Here’s a look at some of the most notable ones slated to be fixed in coming weeks.

Starting with Karmic, Ubuntu now has its own slideshow for users to view while waiting for the installation to finish.  Besides representing one more thing Ubuntu has in common with Windows XP, the slides have some real value to new users.  Below, we take a look.

One of the less prominent Ubuntu features that has received an overhaul for Karmic is the command-not-found handle, which helps users find the program they’re looking for when they type an unrecognized command in the terminal. Following is a brief outline of improvements made to this tiny utility, and why they matter.

Ubuntu developers recently announced their intention to fix a number of minor but noticeable usability bugs, which they’ve termed “Paper Cuts,” in time for the release of Ubuntu 9.10 next October.  This is a huge step in the right direction for Ubuntu, and reflects the kind of usability-oriented thinking that is central to making it a success.

For the release of Jaunty, the Ubuntu developers decided to disable the control-alt-backspace shortcut for killing the graphical X session. This move prompted a lot of complaining from advanced users. Although I personally sympathize with these people, their grievances reflect the all-too-common tendency of a minority of geeky users to rise up in arms about trivial features, impeding the progress of things that matter.

Generally, a fresh installation of Ubuntu is pretty usable out-of-the-box.  But some aspects of the default configuration seem pretty silly to me.  Here are the ones I’d change first if I were in charge of Ubuntu.

File-system privileges

By default, almost every file on an Ubuntu system is readable by everyone.   This means that, under a non-privileged account, I can read system configuration files that normal users have no reason to view, and which might be exploited by a malicious user to gain root access to the system.