Comment 7 for bug 149775

I see a benefit as an advice to developers. If tons of people are requesting a fix for a bug that has been judged minor, maybe this bug is affecting usability. However, I don't see why a minority of people would vote. Just add a parallel "importance" tag, which is weighted so that it becomes relative to other bugs, instead of absolute as the current importance mark.

I agree to the current state of things where users can't set priority, since a bug marked as high will be "as high as" every other important bug in ubuntu, even if an unexperienced user just thought it to be so. But if you weight votes, you shift decision power to whoever can set importance now (and notice it's not who is going to fix the bug) to everybody. If importance could be set only by the assignee of a bug, I would agree with you, we cannot dictate on developers work. But priority is set by the qa team. Why not make everybody the qa team? It works in many applications. Why do you expect the majority of users to be so ignorant not to understand the difference between a showstopper, and a cosmetic fix?

I personally reported tons of bugs, there are 4-5 that I consider embarrasing, and that urge to be fixed. Not all of mine, just 4-5. Because I want to be able to advice ubuntu to people (to solve bug #1) and want to be sure it will work for them, better than their current OS. If their OS can connect to pay-per-time DSL, and ubuntu needs me to remember to teach them the correct commands, there's no competition.

So, a way for users to signal common problems they encounter when adopting ubuntu, or offering ubuntu to somebody else, would shift the perspective from a mainly developer-focused point of view, to a wider, intrinsical definition of usability problem.