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 >>
Related articles:
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
I install linux since 5.0 release and now I have 9.10 installed on AMD64 dual Processor.
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 !