I know we’re trying to move to fewer installation screens but I think it would be great to offer a choice of a few *complete* desktops.

* Totem is GNOME-ic as far as using gstreamer, and gstreamer exists to provide a GNOME equivalent to the DirectMedia(?) and Quicktime frameworks from The Commercial OSes – so don’t expect them to ditch Totem any time soon. It is thankfully improving, though (but probably still doesn’t perform well on old, slow hardware… or Atoms).

* Rhythmbox really is just-broken at this point. Sorting bands case-sensitively is ridiculous. The visualization plugins can cripple it. The controversial Mono-based Banshee might be more maintainable going forward but has as many bugs (and no visualization) features right now, so… yeah. For the GNOME distro, the only thing worth breaking with GNOME for would be Songbird, and Songbird is pretty heavy-weight (or is it?).

* USB Creator: Awesome, but crippled – WTF, it only supports Ubuntu images. If they’d made it a bit more generic and, say, potentially supported handling FreeDOS images or your_favorite_ISO, it’d be welcome. But instead, that’s left to be fiddly and annoying. [Thankfully / scarily, most of what I'd need FreeDOS for can now be accomplished in a sudo'd WINE].

I agree with various comments I’ve read from numerous sites about the color scheme though. Thankfully gnome-looks.org provides a quick fix every time.

Windows 7 / Vista / OSX are decades in front of Linux on the desktop. Perhaps a turd can’t be polished?!

There is a well known phenomenon of not being able to focus on the boundary of red and blue. Because of the difference in the wavelength, the eye cannot focus on both at the same time, hence the intersection appears fuzzy. The constant refocusing tires the eye muscles. This is also true for other color differences, but the perceived effect is proportional to the differences in the wavelength. But even when the difference is below the level of perception, it can still add to eye fatigue and strain. Similar colors reduce this effect. This is particularly important for those who spend long hours at their monitor.

Other color combinations can cause different problems. For example, the old green screen monitors had many users seeing pink blotches and getting headaches, sometimes for hours after getting off the monitor. It is a complex problem.

I belive that Ubuntu’s appearance is a real positive for its users.

On appearance, I fear you’re right. Personally I feel that Windows Vista & 7 are rather cheap and gaudy-looking – though not anywhere /near/ as bad as KDE in this respect. But even though I like the restrained browns & oranges, it might help to look a little jazzier. Linux Mint is worth inspection by way of comparison.

A start might be to enable a little more eyecandy by default, e.g. cube desktop switching; I think the user-switching feature is a minority interest for most users & should only be activated once >1 users are created.

Re media tools, well, it seems to me that there are a lot of rivals robbing effort from one another here. Some consolidation is in order.

Background updates would be a big boon, too.

I would really like to see GNOME become more flexible regarding panels and so on. An option for a Dock-style task-switcher would be good, and so would the direly-needed option of vertical panels – becoming critical in these days of widescreen monitors, where horizontal pixels are cheap but vertical ones very valuable.

I’m curious why you compare high-resolution production Mac and Windows desktop screenshots to ugly VGA-resolution boot-from-CD desktop screenshots for Ubuntu (with the installer actually running, no less!). Granted, Windows and Mac can’t run from CD – but Ubuntu *can* run from disk at a reasonable resolution. That’s how millions of people run it, actually.

One of the nicest improvements in my book is the NBR version of Ubuntu. It works so much better on netbook resolution displays compared to Windows XP, and looks much better as well. Probably worth considering in your grading scheme, since this is the fastest growing PC market segment, and neither Windows nor Mac has addressed it at all.