Canonical aims to improve the Ubuntu user experience by fixing a multitude of minor usability glitches. The project, which is called One Hundred Paper Cuts, will entail a collaborative effort by Canonical's new design team and the Ubuntu community to fix one hundred usability bugs before the release of Ubuntu 9.10.

Started during the Ubuntu 9.10 development cycle was an Ubuntu project to address paper cuts in Ubuntu, or rather small usability bugs in Ubuntu and the Linux desktop that are often only minor impairments or annoyances, but these easy-to-fix issues have never been heavily targeted for correction.

Paper cuts are rather trivial usability bugs that are small, but in one way or another could impair the Linux desktop. The first ten of the one hundred paper cuts for Ubuntu 9.10 have now been determined.

One Hundred Paper Cuts is a project which attempts to fix 100 usability errors reported by the users for the new Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala.

One of the most popular "paper cuts" concerns Nautilus, the default file browser in GNOME. Its graphical interface could be improved a lot: the space currently devoted to the menu / columns is too big and takes away space for the really important stuff.

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.

The first One Hundred Paper Cuts milestone was completed on time! Ten Ubuntu paper cuts and one Kubuntu paper cut were fixed.

From time to time, someone in the Ubuntu community writes about the experience of introducing a “normal person” (someone who has no specific expertise with computers) to Ubuntu. These accounts provide useful feedback to Ubuntu designers and developers working to make Ubuntu easier to understand and use. They are no substitute for rigorous usability studies, but are nonetheless worthwhile.

Bucking the historical trend of comparing desktop Linux with Windows, Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth recently told journalist Bruce Byfield that he was looking to Mac OS X as the operating system to beat for future Ubuntu releases — particularly in the areas of usability and user experience.  Now that Ubuntu 9.04 is out, how does it compare to Apple’s latest offering?