Today is day 3 of my “10 Days of Ubuntu 10.10 Feature Requests” series. See the series introduction here.
Day 3 – Improved Visual Aesthetics
It’s the elephant in the room, so we may as well get it over with now.
The following comments are taken from the OSNews comments on my Ubuntu Report Card article:
sakeniwefu says:
You can argue that looks are not as important as functionality, and you would be right if you did. But being forced to look at some of the themes in X/Kubuntu or at Gnome at all is akin to torture. I use Xubuntu which lets me have decent looks within the default packages. But I have to retouch theme and font configurations with each upgrade. The blame this time is entirely for Ubuntu, because the components are already there, they just need to make them default.
I couldn’t agree more. Yes, functionality will always trump looks. But functionality and looks are not mutually exclusive. Anyone who thinks style isn’t a factor in OS adoption has obviously never heard of a small company called Apple. Take a look at Apple’s “Get a Mac” frontpage. What’s the first line?
“It’s gorgeous. Inside and out.”
Could the same be said of Ubuntu? Not with a straight face.
Doc Pain says:
I know that the visual first impression (“first sight effect”) is very important for human decisions, and when presented a “boring” DE [desktop environment], people want something more “entertaining”, no matter if the “boring” one has better functionalities, faster usage speed and lower resource requirements than the “entertaining” one.
Which brings me to my next point. Yes, the same amount of work can be done using Beautiful Theme X or Ugly Theme Y. In fact, productivity probably isn’t affected in measurable ways by a given GNOME theme.
But Mark Shuttleworth and Canonical are interested in more than just pleasing hordes of existing Linux fanboys/girls. Clearly they are hoping to eventually make some money from Ubuntu.
I – and many others (see comments) – believe that the default Ubuntu theme is hindering this.
Now people will say “but I loaded Ubuntu on my <mom’s/friend’s/cat’s> computer and they didn’t care about how it looked.” I’m sorry, but that’s not good enough to justify an entire OS’s design choice. Real work needs to be done on a theme that’s both easy on the eyes and reflective of the quality OS underneath. I don’t even think the color scheme needs to go – browns and oranges have nothing inherently wrong with them. They simply need to be used in a way that doesn’t reflect shag carpet styles from forty years ago.
In expressing a strong opinion about this, I already know how some people are going to comment:
“You idiot, that’s the point of open source – you can customize it any way you want.”
I would compare this to a person preparing to buy a new car with a horrible color scheme (say, brown with orange trim). The customer complains about the car’s color and the salesman replies with:
“You idiot, that’s the point of paint – buy the car and then paint it any color you want.”
If you’ve never painted a car, that might actually sound reasonable. Once you’ve tried it, you realize it’s a hell of a lot more difficult and time-consuming than it sounds.
Yes, anyone can obviously customize Ubuntu to look however they want. That’s not the point. The point is: why provide a default theme that is anything less than the best?
I should also mention that if you read through modern KDE vs GNOME arguments, guess what the most popular point of KDE victory is? Out-of-the-box appearance.
Now that I’ve had my rant about Ubuntu’s default theme (one of a number on the internet[1],[2]), it’s time to tackle a few other aspects of appearance.
And no, I’m not referring to wallpapers – contrary to several smart-ass comments… :)
- Auto-configured desktop effects based on your hardware would be a great addition. (Note: KDE already does a good job of this.)
- If at some point Ubuntu does decide to auto-configure various compiz effects (and eventually GNOME Shell), I’d love to see a nice balance of eye-candy and productivity tools. The cube is great and all, but personally I’d like things like a super button + right mouse-click for “show all windows”, window previews when hovering over the task bar, and blurring/fading out the active window when the mouse is resting over a hidden window. Little things like this make a desktop both fun and more productive.
- An improved default font. Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like Ubuntu’s default font makes the OS appear cartoonish. It’s amazing what a difference the system fonts can make.
One last quote:
vivainio says:
It’s not like the guys that tweak the color theme for distros are the same guys that could hack together a window server that would support existing software.
We know the Ubuntu team can program – but where are their designers? I hope we get to meet them soon.
<< Day 2 – A Music Player That Doesn’t Suck
Day 4 – Real Wine Integration >>
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We already detect compatibility and turn on compiz if possible. We don’t want the crazier effects (wobbly, cube, firepaint, etc) so we don’t have any autotune to see if your system can run them. Not that it matters, really. Other than a few effects if compiz can start at all they all work just fine no matter how fast the hardware is, we’re not doing anything taxing here.
By Travis Watkins | October 2, 2009, 4:35 pm |Canonical’s inability to do nice design work leaves me tearing my hair out. Like with the new 9.10 beta, they update the icons and wallpaper to something acceptable (though not great), but then decide what consumers really want is an even browner window theme that people have compared to the Breezy Badger theme. Did they not get the memo? Everyone freaking hates the brown used by Ubuntu. They should have kept the orange.
The new design team seems to have been making some strives with Ubuntu, but really not enough progress when you consider anyone can go to Gnome Look and find a better theme in a few minutes. Why don’t they just customise an already beautiful theme? From what I’ve seen I have no confidence that 10.04 is going to beautiful looking.
By Jimbo | October 3, 2009, 2:05 am |When Gnome 3 comes out, Gnome Shell should make a big improvement towards having by default a highly usable and nice-looking compositor and window manager. And yes, the default Ubuntu theme is UGLY, and so are the aliased rounded corners of metacity (if your theme has rounded corners, that is). The problem is, metacity sucks, as a window decorator anyway.
A lot of people play down aesthetics, but look how successful OS X has been because of it. (Of course aesthetics has not been the ONLY cause of its success.)
By molecule-eye | October 3, 2009, 5:26 am |Canonical would do well to completely forget the brown. I just took a look at the proposed themes for Karmic Koala, and in all honesty, I think they’re even uglier than what they’ve had in previous versions of Ubuntu.
It’s my understanding that Mark Shuttleworth likes the brown look, but he needs to give up that idea completely. If he insists on sticking with warmer colors, why doesn’t he go with orange instead? After all, Ubuntu’s “Human” icon theme has been orange for some time now, so it would make perfect sense to go with an orange GTK theme and wallpaper if you ask me.
Besides, Linux Mint’s “Gloria” release, which came out back in April, has a very nice default green theme to it that uses the “Shiki-Wise” GTK theme, the “Shiki Metacity” theme, the “GNOME-Wise” icon theme and its own wallpaper that’s been designed to match with all of the above, and it looks very nice indeed. By the same token, there are also orange versions of all of the above with the exception of the wallpaper, and for that, there’s always the Arc-Human wallpaper and GDM screen, which would, IMHO, make for a much more inviting appearance.
By Fred McKinney | October 7, 2009, 4:38 pm |What you have said is true, I like using Ubuntu but when I show it to people looks are a big factor for them.
At the first boot of a computer, if compiz effects are enabled, it would be a good idea to have some kind of introductory dialogue/program to the commands and let people play around with it for a few minutes. This should obviously be a discreet dialogue box that pops up and can be closed by experienced users or clicked and activated by inexperienced.
By Felix Holst | October 8, 2009, 3:27 am |I install linux since 5.0 release and now I have 9.10 installed on AMD64 dual Processor.
By Mario | December 11, 2009, 7:18 am |1. Mozilla Firefox this has been a disaster from day one with the multi media drivers. still you need to be an expert to solve this problem.
2. Graphic programs I do not know who is writing those programs, but they are the less user-friendly programs that i never encounter in my life.
3. non flexibility to install other OS like Leopard or XP. Wine is a ridiculous application, but the idea is good. We need to open different windows under different OS. VirtualBox is NOT the solution !
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE ADD voice/video chat SUPPORT BEFORE IMPROVING USELESS INTERFACE(U CAN’T GIVE IT HI PRIORITY, ISN’T IT?). how long we use Windows only for this purpose ?
By Ronnie | March 14, 2010, 12:15 pm |same issue here,i would also like to use yahoo mess video call on ubuntu ,might well be 10.10 :D
By niki | March 23, 2010, 6:07 am |You lost me with this:
“I should also mention that if you read through modern KDE vs GNOME arguments, guess what the most popular point of KDE victory is? Out-of-the-box appearance.”
You must be smoking crack if you think KDE looks better than Gnome. KDE is for little kids who like their UI to look like a “plasticy” rainbow.
By Andrew | April 28, 2010, 5:24 pm |Um, have you used KDE since 2004? It makes Gnome look RIDICULOUS. You are in the very, very, very small minority if you think a default Gnome install beats KDE.
And don’t even get me started on Qt vs GTK applications. Use wiki to compare the applications written with each toolkit, and it quickly becomes apparent which is preferable for appearance (using default settings; obviously the developers play a role as well).
By Tanner | April 28, 2010, 6:08 pm |you should see the gnome shell environment..that’s really a very good looking theme…i think that is probably nicer than the apple’s one. the environment needs only a better integration with the “online environment”..example gmail. Would be great if you can get the notification of your emails on your desktop, without using every time the browser. The instant messaging notification also should be improved (better notification for the events that happens: users that comes online, messages received ecc ecc..).
By fede | May 2, 2010, 8:27 am |But this works, I think, are all on the Gnome 3 road map..so, probably, the wonderful linux it’s just a matter of time.
Perhaps Gnome Shell will give ubuntu that improved visual aesthetics??
By Daniel | May 12, 2010, 1:59 pm |Sorry but your argument of KDE is better because of it’s out of the box appearance is a very poor point.
I began my Linux venture with Ubuntu 9.04 which of course uses GNOME. After reading about Linux and it’s different distro’s I tried out others like Kubuntu and even installed the KDE desktop interface on Ubuntu, so I could choose between which one I wanted, but I have to say KDE is just too fancy, sure it may be more aesthetically pleasing but that doesn’t make it better.
If I’m honest I find KDE a ball ache to navigate around as it’s structure is poor, with GNOME I know where everything is and can find it very quickly, while in KDE I get to look at lovely graphics while still not being able to find things. And thats not me being harsh, I actually tried to use KDE for a few weeks during the beginning of my Linux venture but I just couldn’t get to like it and instantly switched back to GNOME. I really did try and yet I couldn’t
After all an operating system is not all about looks and it’s feel, it’s about practicality too. So really if you use an operating system simply because of it’s looks then you should probably go ahead and switch to Mac OSX right now.
Besides, why all of a sudden is GNOME ugly? GNOME + Compiz work great together and there are nice themes for GNOME too? Just because they aren’t as fancy doesn’t make them bad.
Appearance isn’t everything, the phrase “Don’t judge a book by it’s cover” really applies here. GNOME may not look as fancy as KDE, but under the botox injections, plastic surgery and glossiness, GNOME is more practical. My opinion obviously, but how you’ve put it here
“It makes Gnome look RIDICULOUS. You are in the very, very, very small minority if you think a default Gnome install beats KDE”
The keyword is looks, how something looks is just ONE point, if we compared the two on other areas I think your “very small minority” would turn into more of 50/50.
*Hoping I haven’t started a flame war*
- James
By James | June 11, 2010, 7:23 am |Thanks for the well-reasoned comment, James. You make some great points. I’m going to address them in order (as best I can).
1) Kubuntu is widely regarded as a poor demonstration of KDE. Any distro that makes Gnome its primary emphasis is likely to offer a KDE version that lags in features, polish, and implementation. This describes Kubuntu to a T.
If you’re interesting in trying a more polished and refined KDE implementation, I’d strongly recommend PCLinuxOS 2010.1. After using both it and Kubuntu, I can understand the frustration KDE users have with how poorly Kubuntu implements their DE.
2) To quote you:
This is more a function of familiarity than it is a problem with the desktop. Other individuals have reported the same problem with Gnome, with its odd system menu as opposed to a true control center.
Let me ask you this – if KDE’s Control Center is so difficult to understand, why do so many Ubuntu users download programs like Ubuntu Tweak? Personally, I find KDE’s Control Center to be a very simple analog to Window’s Control Panel when explaining Linux to new users. It’s also much easier to navigate in an exploratory fashion (as opposed to launching dialog after dialog from the Gnome system menu).
3) To quote you:
I absolutely agree on this point. As the first quote in my article states, looks are not as important as functionality. But they aren’t mutually exclusive, and in many cases looks can support better functionality. KWin is so, so, SO far ahead of Metacity in terms of customizable usability. Yes, Metacity+Compiz improves functionality, but it’s a kludgy solution at best. KWin is also lighter on resources than a Metacity+Compiz solution – which further promotes usability.
4) To quote you:
The title of this article isn’t an attempt to bash Gnome – it’s an attempt to beautify Ubuntu. Not ALL Gnome implementations are ugly. Fedora and Linux Mint are two examples of much more aesthetically pleasing Gnome implementations.
5) To quote you:
I never, ever claim that it is. :)
6) In summation:
KDE and Gnome both have their strengths. This article is just one of TEN that discusses improvements Ubuntu should make by the time 10.10 is released. Since 10.04 focused heavily on aesthetic improvements, you could say that Canonical has already taken my advice to heart.
Certainly the KDE/Gnome argument will get more interesting with Gnome 3.0. We’ll have to revisit this conversation then!
By Tanner | June 11, 2010, 9:36 am |Thanks for taking the time to reply.
I totally understand that your article is not here to bash GNOME or create another GNOME vs KDE flame war, but I felt compelled to reply to get my point across about my feelings towards GNOME, after reading some of your readers comments.
I think looking at it from a fair perspective, with GNOME you get simplicity and not necessarily the best looking interface, while with KDE you get a more aesthetic look with a new focus on the whole desktop environment interface. Really at the end of the day it’s personal preference isn’t it?
I can relate to your point about Ubuntu’s default theme to an extent, in older versions I don’t think the default theme stood out much, OK you can easily download a custom theme from GNOME Art after the installation, but if your someone new to the Linux side and had just installed Ubuntu, you’d probably want to have a decent theme that at least catches the eye of the new user making them at least welcome to their new OS and DE. In recent versions I think Canonical have been focusing on this, I’m not sure what you views are on this but I think Ubuntu 10.04′s new default theme, Radiance is very respectable as a default theme.
I am in agreement however that the use of brown in Ubuntu 9.10 was a very big mistake for the default theme.
The only thing I fear is Ubuntu becoming more like Mac OSX, I mean they moved the close minimize and maximize buttons to left on window pane on Ubuntu 10.04, which is beyond me as to why this change was committed, but oh well, a simply gconf edit and boom, back on the right again. But I was slightly worried as to why they felt such a change was needed when a out cry in the community was to change it back. Something to ponder eh?
Like you said GNOME and KDE are both good DE’s and have great points.
Indeed bring on GNOME 3, we can certainly revisit this discussion then!
- James
By James | June 11, 2010, 10:31 am |Whats better? 3 random letters (kde) or a little dude you put in your garden? Gnome wins hand down.
By JK | June 11, 2010, 7:36 am |:)
By Tanner | June 11, 2010, 9:38 am |I want a lynx with the Ubuntu logo on it prowling around in my garden, now that would be awesome!
By James | June 11, 2010, 10:32 am |The font is the most major issue for me; I cannot stand the default since it takes up far too much space. It is a ‘clone’ of Verdana, which only exists for viewing text on non-anti-aliased displays. Ubuntu has always had it enabled by default, so why not just use FreeSans? (Arial/Helvetica ‘clone’)
By Mark Provan | July 1, 2010, 10:37 am |