What I want is no change unless there is a good reason to change. The internet voting for Browsey McBrowseface etc. is not, in my opinion, a good reason to change.
There are things Canonical does well, I think. Those things are technical. When it comes to trying to be Microsoft/Apple/Google, it misses the mark. In part because it assumes that which PDF reader it ships with matters to users.
Agree. It really doesn't matter to me what Ubuntu is shipped with. If they're going to spend anytime on this, why not just build a quickie wizard for installation to pick what you want?
A screen with selection of Chromium, Firefox, etc. With a default selected of course.
Users can breeze through it if they just want defaults.
I would echo brudgers sentiment here but would table the suggestion for a meta-package or series of meta-packages that would install R, texlive, octave, iPython and a good selection of other mathematical/data processing software. My 'vision'(+) would be something like UbuntuStudio for data/maths.
(+) I can no longer use words like 'vision', 'paradigm' &c without distancing speech marks because of their misuse in the corporate world.
The survey:
Web Browser: Firefox with pocket &c disabled and javascript toggled off, Chromium for when I need javascript &c. Also a hosts.txt file that deep-sixes ignorant Web trackers.
Email Client: Evolution.
Terminal: Gnome-terminal (minimal use case)
IDE: RDesktop
File manager: default, Nautilus at present
Basic Text Editor: default, Gedit at present
IRC/Messaging Client: N/A
PDF Reader: default, Evince at present
Office Suite: Libreoffice but also use of texlive and pandoc (and groff!)
I'm not suggesting that anyone else run a Web browser with javascript switched off - I interpreted the list as some kind of survey of current use.
However I'm pleasantly surprised at how many Web sites do actually convey their main content with javascript disabled, and the increase in speed and battery life is marked.
The 'year of the linux desktop' meme is a little moot as phones/tablets now provide the mass computing experience for many people, and the primary experience for people under 25 or so (I'm a teacher).
There are things Canonical does well, I think. Those things are technical. When it comes to trying to be Microsoft/Apple/Google, it misses the mark. In part because it assumes that which PDF reader it ships with matters to users.
Good luck.