The new branding of Ubuntu | Hacker News Reader

The new branding of Ubuntu

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156 pointsmapleoin68 comments

The GTK themes seem terrible to me. Not only did they move the top buttons to the left (good luck explaining to mom why she won't find the X where she's used to) but also it looks very inconsistent. Also the colours... It looks like one of those old themes why your friends still make fun of your Linux.

The web theme looks like a generic hosting company' website. Or like a hardware manufacturer.

I love the mission though, "Light" is a very good selling point for Linux. You might not agree about that for Ubuntu but more Ubuntu = more Linux = yay.

I agree. I also see no point in making a different theme the default one, because you can easily change it to another. And also because most people would be updating their distros and would not notice any changes.

Is the X really an issue? That's where it is on Mac OS X.

On Windows and OS X, the close button is at the far top right or far top left respectively. This theme introduces a new variant: third from top left.

The top left is where the close button has been the Mac since the mid-80s. But the question is not “is it really an issue?” but rather “why is it being moved?” Change for change’s sake is stupid.

Seems like the consensus is: "(10:30:18 PM) vish: the metacity buttons on the left is nothing more than trying to copy OSX :/".

I hope they have their own focus groups to back this up or something. Maybe they assume a Mac user is more likely to experiment and therefore more likely to try Ubuntu, so they would put the controls in their default place.

I'm not happy about that either. Otherwise, I think it looks fine.

IMHO, the UI aspect that makes the single biggest impact is high resolution icons.

Take a look at the 512X512 OSX icons (or Win 7 ones) and compare them with Ubuntu ones.

I think moving the top buttons is a terrible idea

Agreed, overall "meh", but I hope there's a clone of the final theme except with min/max/close in the old position.

There's a simple setting you can change in gconf to fix this (at least there used to be): /apps/metacity/general/button_layout. You should set it to "menu:minimize,maximize,close" to get the old functionality back.

Nobody seems to be able to explain the window controls, so hopefully we can be loud enough to get them to switch them back. Everyone should write/harass important people at Canonical regarding this.

I really seriously doubt they have anything approaching sufficient data for the change. It breaks every convention a user would be familiar with (though the controls are on the left like in OS X, the functionality of the buttons is reversed; in OS X, leftmost closes, here, rightmost closes), including existing Ubuntu users.

Commence pressure on Canonical promptly.

I disagree. Apple has a quality OS that forces users to use the left-hand buttons, and Ubuntu's perfectly free to try the same thing. In my opinion, buttons should be placed on the left of the menu bar. I've seen that users tend to keep their windows to the left of the screen, and left-side controls may require less mouse movement on average to reach, whereas the right side's edge is dependent on the window size.

I also sort of like the close button on the right with the buttons on the left edge (reverse of OSX as you noted). I think that makes it slightly more difficult to accidentally close the window.

they are perfectly free to use it ....as long as they will be not sued due to 'innovative apple idea' of three buttons on the left side

It seems like a rather superficial change to me. If you were to sit down and use it, you would probably get used to it quickly. It didn't take me long to get used to Windows 95 putting the menu bar inside the window, or its menu-title-min-max-close pattern instead of close-title-lower-raise.

Also, as for breaking conventions, OS X breaks many conventions a Linux/Windows user would be familiar with, but nobody is suggesting that Apple restyle their OS to look like Windows.

That said, I can see where working regularly on both OS X and Ubuntu's new branding could get frustrating, because the buttons are in the same place, but different.

I am lukewarm on this specific design, but am totally happy and excited by how ambitious this all is (not just the theme, but the logos, collateral, etc.)

I want Canonical and Ubuntu to kick butt. Mark seems like he's really making an effort to be a "product" person, which open source could use more of. Bravo! (And this has always been reflected in Ubuntu, which I really appreciate.)

Some nits: The new font is a step backward. The softness of the old font was both distinct, unique, AND comfortable. The new one is not as unique. And I don't think will age so well. (Plus, fonts and logos are not something that need an overhaul as often as themes and campaigns. I just think it was maybe too soon to overhaul the font. It was a strong brand.)

I LOVE the new colors. Yeah, there's an Apple overlap, but I don't think "APPLE!" as soon as I see it.

Window controls on the left: I don't like it. I have desktops on all three major OS's, so it's not because I'm trained for one way or the other. There's just something that feels better about them being on the right.

Overall: I'm giving it all a chance, and will jump in with both feet when it's released, without undoing the major changes. The main point here is: They really care and have a vision. Whenever somebody makes a tool/OS/webapp/meal with a really specific vision, i always give it the benefit of the doubt, and try it THEIR way, not bending to my preferences or instinct to add salt/take off the tomato/go to my favorite theme/etc. When I don't try stuff with that trust, i often miss out. I hope Linux users give it a fair shot, even if stuff feels funny at first.

They need to seriously reconsider this GTK theme. I feel like maybe they're trying too hard to look different. Does anyone actually like it? Besides bad color selection it's inconsistent. The menubar doesn't even match the rest of the UI which seems like the most obvious bit of consistency you'd expect. Even between the two variants it's lacking consistently. The dark version has menus that match the menubar color, the light variant does not. At least the old Taco Bell bathroom theme was consistent. I may not have liked the colors but you could ignore that easily enough. This theme just screams at my eyes and not in a good way.

This is a gigantic step... sideways.

Big clunky fonts and an excessive amount of blank space. It's like the American car of UIs.

I'm using the Droid Sans font for the UI. It's a great improvement in conciseness and should be the default interface font.

Regarding spacing, the space in the toolbar and status bar is being used a bit more efficiently than before, but cutting off the status bar skews the balance, and overall, the layout looks a little haphazard.

I'm using the Droid Sans font for the UI. It's a great improvement in conciseness and should be the default interface font.

Here's a good argument as to why it shouldn't:

http://troy-sobotka.blogspot.com/2008/07/why-droid-isnt-answ...

I'll grant that Droid has a number of typographical problems outlined nicely in that article (although I suspect his complains about kerning and colour might well be addressed by careful choice of GNOME's font-rendering options), but nevertheless I find Droid to be the most pleasant-to-read Free-as-in-speech font I know of. It's certainly slicker than the slow-moving and clumsy Vera/DejaVu, and the less said about the Liberation the better.

You could probably tempt me with Lucida Sans, if B&H ever released outline versions to go with the X11 bitmap fonts, but until another giant corporation shells out for a new custom typeface or FontForge becomes usable by designers, Droid is where it's at.

I used Droid for a long time and now am using Cantarell (another GPL font) for my interface... along with Inconsolata for monospace.

Huh, I hadn't heard of Cantarell before. At first glance, the hinting and so forth isn't quite as polished as Droid, but I'll use it for while and see if it grows on me.

I like it - Ubuntu is supposed to be the "consumer" flavor of Linux, so why should it concentrate on information density over usability?

My mother is the type that would start panicking if her computer looked like Mission Control in Houston, so I think it's great that Ubuntu is freeing up some space and paying real attention to layout, and this includes proper use of whitespace.

While we are on the topic of mothers :-) I recently moved my moms PC from Windows to Ubuntu. I stay in a different city and it was too much of a pain to support Windows. Its been a real relief.

She is 66 years of age and doesn't know know much about computers. She started learning to use it a few years back to keep in touch with me over email. Her use case is primarily email, google, bank accounts and sometimes facebook.

I think Ubuntu UI is nice and clean. It doesn't confuses someone like her. Updates also work very well. It also work quite well for a command line user like me :-)

same here - I just wish skype (with webcams) was better supported.

For a lot of people (and businesses), that is a blocker. I managed to get a UVC webcam, but still had to get a PPA v4l repository and build some drivers.

I think it is good that ipods will be supported out-of-the-box in Lucid (Rhythmbox). The same should happen for Skype.

On that front, one should get rid of all the useless games and instead have : 1. a nice Twitter app 2.Scrivener-like app

These are killer apps for a lot of people who use a Mac - especially the young student demographic.

How long ago was this? uvcvideo was merged into mainline quite a while back, so almost all [recent] webcams should work pretty well now.

My mom is over 2000 miles away and she's had Ubuntu for over 3 years now. It has been really easy to administer and help her use it. Every time I visit I upgrade the version of Ubuntu and make sure that networking works reliably, after that anything can be done remotely.

She is quite comfortable with it. What was interesting is that this is the first computer she has really used. Most people I know started on Mac or Windows then saw Linux. She is the only person I know that started on Ubuntu.

For emergencies I keep extra boot-able OS partitions including the original Windows XP that came with the machine. When I show it to her she thinks Windows is not very easy to use and looks clunky. That always make me laugh.

My kids have all grown up with linux and we homeschool. Their only windows experience has been seeing me run a VM occasionally. My wife is a converted linux user as well. She can't stand windows the few times she's had it on a laptop. I always got pestered until I installed ubuntu on it.

I sometimes wonder about all the Geeks and hackers out there running Linux/BSD whatever and their kids/wives. Is there a waiting boom of non-windows educated kids about to break on the scene?

Recently I took my Debian/Ubuntu Linux-only laptop to the Philippines to see in-laws on a vacation with my wife; she had never used Linux before. In SE Asia it's a WinXP world, almost everyone runs pirated copies so there's not much interest in FOSS or knowledge of Linux, OS X, or any alternate OS.

The first thing she said upon logging in to the guest acct was, "Linux is FUGLY!", but I think she's started liking the fact that it boots quickly and can do everything she needs with OpenOffice, evince, Skype, &c. While she is not particularly committed to FOSS, after this trip away from home without Win she has come to see the light. To ease the transition I installed Chrome, added all her contacts to Pidgin/Jabber (all her old friends from the Philippines use Yahoo! products) and I don't think she misses WinXPProSP3 at all.

My cousin had a terminally infected (malware, spyware, adware, etc) XP machine for his kids to use that was brought to its knees by all the viruses. Had the pleasure of steamrolling it with Ubuntu, they've been happily surfing since.

I really do hope this pans out so long as ubuntu stays free and for the most part[1] open I'll support what they are doing for linux and operating systems.

[1]: So long as the base for ubuntu is free and open I'm happy and if they create software that costs money but it is not required to have a non-hindered user experience I'll consider them open

edit: I really hope that the orange starts getting toned down

Commercial software for Ubuntu could really help its adoption. Currently commercial software is pretty much limited to things like Maple.

Agreed, but the thing is it really is going to have to be good software.

In example it would take a very good software package to move ubuntu users from openoffice to another alternative.

But there are some places where ubuntu is somewhat lacking that might not need amazing software: something like itunes with a store and device support etcetera but I can't really think of more examples.

E.g. Dreamweaver, Photoshop, games. The same thing that Windows people pay for, really.

The thing that immediately sticks out to me is that the bottom gnome panel is no longer there. Up until now, default ubuntu (and gnome) setups have had one panel at the top and another at the bottom, and the first thing I'd do on a system is to get rid of one of the two.

This made more sense with 4x3 screens but now with many laptops at 16x9, it seems silly to waste that much screen real estate. The mac has a menu bar up top and a dock, but they also move application menu commands to the top, saving some space there.

Good catch. I was so distracted by the window management moving to the left, I didn't see that.

That's an important part of previewing windows. Even if that specific panel is now gone, something has do something similar (give you a visualization of what's open, how many desktops you have.)

I'm now even more eager to try this out.

That does raise one question, though: Where will minimized windows go? Those screenshots don't show that. They've removed the bottom bar, but there isn't any place (that's visible at least) to select minimized windows, unless they are planning on just using the Compiz window selector entirely for that purpose (i.e. minimized windows just 'disappear' except from the window selector).

I've always put those in the same bar, reducing the ubuntu menu to just an icon (instead of the separate applications, places, & system) in a setup similar to Windows, with open windows in between the application launcher button (start or whatever) and the notification area on the right side.

I realize that one can do that, I'm just wondering what the default setup will be. Based on those screenshots, there will be nothing to show you a window list (other than the Compiz window switcher). They have to have some sort of solution or reasoning, they wouldn't leave the default setup broken until someone configured it.

Yeah, it definitely can't be broken by default like that. And I don't really see a need for the "applications, places, & system" menu if they can be reduced to one button to make room.

Makes me wonder if there may be an auto-hide dock or panel at the bottom? I'm curious to see how this shakes out.

Unfortunately, changing the bottom bar properties to place it to the left or right makes the text indicating running apps show up as ... On the Mac, I make the bottom task bar very small and place it on th left side of the screen, near the bottom - really good for saving screen real estate.

On Ubuntu, making the bottom bar show up on the right side, increase to width by about 20% so ... shows as an app icon, and turn off "expand" provides a similar experience to OS X, but not quite as nice.

I thought the same thing at first. It's cropped out, you can see a row of pixels at the bottom and the panel's shadow. The screenshot-taker probably didn't want to list their running programs.

I like this a lot. I am not one to care much about looks (I use xmonad at home and Windows XP with the blue background at work), but I think this is a really appealing theme that doesn't get in the way; very much like OS X's plastic theme. (Aqua got in the way, which is why Apple phased it out.) They describe it as light, and I think that's exactly right -- it's simple, not bulky, and colorful enough to be visually pleasing. I think people trying Linux for the first time with this theme will enjoy it. (GNOME itself has a nice MacOS 7 feeling that I also like. I think new users will also like it.)

I am just speculating, because I just do everything in Emacs. I'm only have GNOME around for evince.

Does this mean that suspend and hibernation will work reliably out of the box? Because that means way more to me than a desktop theme I always end up changing anyway.

Even with 9.10, booting up takes very little time. It's very impressive. I don't even think of using suspend now.

And v10 is supposed to boot even faster. Yay! :)

Unless you are using something like a laptop and close the lid.

Suspend and hibernation pretty much entirely depend on what hardware you have. I used Ubuntu 9.04 on an Apple MacBook with all-Intel hardware, and suspend/resume was bullet-proof.

If you've got hardware that isn't well supported by open drivers (nVidia and ATi graphics are the usual culprits), well, good luck.

I'm not particularly fond of the GTK-themes. It's always hard to accept new and all, but they lack that unique touch of the earlier interface. The web site mockups feel like a mix of apple.com and a cheap hosting solution. Now, I get that they're merely mockups, but it tells a little about the team behind the redesign. The logo is not bad (better in the smaller variants). I like the use of purple. It's pretty unique (if you do not contrast their wallpaper to certain polar aurora wallpapers) and they can totally work that color.

I would have expected something more unique -- something much more refined -- of an Ubuntu redesign than this.

Dear God, it's an unholy union of Windows and OS X.

That's been a good description of Linux UI since OSX first appeared. Before that, it was an unholy bastardization of Windows.

I love it.. change with the times, dare to be modern and move along. All companies could learn from this.

Feels a bit too "precise" for me. Ubuntu is supposed to stand for togetherness -- this feels a little colder than I'm used to.

I'm getting the same impression. This feels like it's trying to be more corporate.

It's already accomplished the community aspect. Why not try to branch out into new areas with a fresh new look?

It's the same Ubuntu. They just need to start wearing a suit once in a while.

If the grassroots community feels Ubuntu has sold out to the corporate world, things will change (edit: and not for the better). I'm not sure one distro can be everything to everyone -- that's why we have so many.

But remember that even Ubuntu has many different official flavors already. I really don't think they are selling out, they are just putting on a new face, and frankly, it's just a cleaner face.

Really? I thought they were getting a bit more of the web2.0 vibe with the openness in the design, and a lot less. I'm thinking more along 37signals guys.

Ok, the logo's definitely quite a deviation from the super-"friendly" previous version. It feels a lot more "corporate" to me. I really liked the friendly feel of the previous logo, but it does tell me something interesting...

The fact that it looks more "corporate"/"professional", may indicate that Canonical is going to pursue corporate deploys more aggressively than before. They're still not making a profit as a company. If we want Ubuntu to continue its prosper for a long time, it's good to keep having Canonical as its backer.

Of course you can argue whether making a logo more "corporate" will help in selling it as a "serious" product, but that's not the point here. If Canonical feels this will help them, it will.

It takes a bit of time to get used to a change like this.

It has been haphazard up till now version to version. And the themes never feel totally cohesive.

Why have different logos for xubuntu and edubuntu etc, why the different names? Why not have Ubuntu education edition. Or Ubuntu light instead?

Perhaps they should have poured money into gnome instead. And concentrated on the logo.

Instead it looks, as other people have commented, like a bastard child of OSX and windows.

Just pay a good designer. And keep it simple.

I rather dislike pretty much all of it, but I'll wait and see if it grows on me.

In particular the GTK Themes seem really ugly. I don't like Dark themes at all, and the light one looks too much like Plastik from KDE.

Personally I'm a big fan of the old "Human Clearlooks" theme, which I'll probably be sticking to for some time - but I'll definitely give the new one a go and see if it grows on me.

the older gtk-theme was better, more well rounded. Too much different colors here. Dirty - not clean. But, hey, I hope it's not final. Also too much spacings everywhere. The fonts are still okay, even though fedora has a more unique appearance. And why change the current font face? It's good!

A month or so ago I linked to a Ubuntu "fix 100 trivial bugs" project, pointing to a bug which was open for several years.

I just checked it again, it hasn't progressed. But at least there's a new theme out.

Themes. The worst idea in computing since license keys.

Site down and google doesn't have a cache link up. Can someone post a summary?

While the images don't seem to want to load there's a good writeup at:

http://www.jonobacon.org/2010/03/03/refreshing-the-ubuntu-br...

I love the new look. At first sight, they just achieved what they wanted to express: lightness, reliability, precision.

I am somehow reminded of those cars from the nineties with the now outlawed purple ground effects lights.

Are they ever going to get away from the brown color?

Wonder how much Asus paid to be the computer pictured for "10.04 has arrived" (which I assume will be the homepage for awhile after launch?)

I don't like it. They should just try to mimic OSX...

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