Today is day 3 of my “10 Days of Ubuntu 10.10 Feature Requests” series.  See the series introduction here ^[1].

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 ^[2] on my Ubuntu Report Card ^[3] article:

sakeniwefu ^[4] 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 ^[5].  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 ^[6] 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) ^[7] – 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] ^[8],[2] ^[9]), 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 ^[10]… :)

• 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 ^[11]), 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 ^[12] 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 ^[13]

Day 4 – Real Wine Integration >> ^[14]