I don't hear many people gripe about these issues, but I have two complaints:
1.) There is no way to mute / lower the volume from the login screen. This means that if I'm in a setting where I don't want to make noise (e.g. in a library, in a meeting, in a class) and boot up, there's absolutely no way for me to prevent my laptop from playing the wonderful startup .wav file. I have to log in before I get any sort of volume control. (My laptop doesn't have a hardware volume dial.) Granted, at this point I have it disabled, but it'd still be nice to have.
2.) When I've booted up, the first thing I do is open all the programs I'm planning to use on different desktops. (I love multiple desktops.) The trouble for me is, the windows all open on whatever desktop I happen to be looking at at the moment. I would greatly prefer that they open on the desktop I was looking at when I started them. That would let me start at desktop 1, open Firefox/Chromium, switch to 2, open an IDE, switch to 3, open Gimp, switch back to 1 and start web surfing. Instead I have to wait for the program to finish initializing before moving to the next step to ensure that it's on the right desktop. Or I have to right-click-move-to-desktop each window after the fact.
I'm a big Ubuntu fan, I've been using it regularly since Dapper Drake. It's really come a long way! Keep up the great work.
1) can't you switch to a term (Alt+F1) login and use something like alsamixer to mute and then log in. Obviously not great usability but may be a workaround?
2) KDE lets you choose to have apps always open on the same virtual desktop, or as you say you can switch to a desktop and set an app opening and switch back and it opens in the other desktop.
On point #2, if you're feeling adventurous, you could try xmonad. Its support for programmatically moving windows to different workspaces is pretty nice. Every app in full screen on its own workspace automatically on login. It's great.
1.) There is no way to mute / lower the volume from the login screen. This means that if I'm in a setting where I don't want to make noise (e.g. in a library, in a meeting, in a class) and boot up, there's absolutely no way for me to prevent my laptop from playing the wonderful startup .wav file. I have to log in before I get any sort of volume control. (My laptop doesn't have a hardware volume dial.) Granted, at this point I have it disabled, but it'd still be nice to have.
2.) When I've booted up, the first thing I do is open all the programs I'm planning to use on different desktops. (I love multiple desktops.) The trouble for me is, the windows all open on whatever desktop I happen to be looking at at the moment. I would greatly prefer that they open on the desktop I was looking at when I started them. That would let me start at desktop 1, open Firefox/Chromium, switch to 2, open an IDE, switch to 3, open Gimp, switch back to 1 and start web surfing. Instead I have to wait for the program to finish initializing before moving to the next step to ensure that it's on the right desktop. Or I have to right-click-move-to-desktop each window after the fact.
I'm a big Ubuntu fan, I've been using it regularly since Dapper Drake. It's really come a long way! Keep up the great work.