Better use of popularity contest

Hi,

I have no particular computer skills, and when I moved to Ubuntu 3 month ago I had a lot of problem finding the right applications. I mean, all the apps are there and are easy to install, but the chioce is sometimes extremely wide, it's hard to understand what are the differences between one app and the other, it's extremely time consuming to find out about the existence of these different apps, install them, try them out. Maybe for skilled people this doesn't look like a big thing, but I can assure you that this is a big issue from the perspective of the normal guy that would like to switch to linux but cannot understand why all this heterogeneity.

The problem is really wide, but here is one possible solution. When I was trying to fing a DVD backup utility or a cd burn utility I found myself thinking many times: whatever, I'm so tired of reading treads and trying to make different apps working properly that I would really like just to know what is the most common apps and go with that! In a sense, for people that are not so familiar with linux, learning how something work has quite a cost in term of time. Picking up th most widspread apps guarantees you pay this cost for something that will pretty much fit your needs.

 think that a better use of the Popularity Contest and a better availability of the Popularity Contest data could be useful. For example, why not organizing the "stars" next to the name of the app in "add/remove applications" by category? Right now all you know looking at it is that Mahjong is more popular then VLC; this is quite meaningless. A more interesting information could be: among all the media player, which one is the most widespread? Ideally, the new beauty contest should include all the apps in repositories, should include the one installed on other distros, should clearly flag the default apps.

Thanks for your attention!