It's 2010 and Ubuntu is still ugly | Hacker News Reader

It's 2010 and Ubuntu is still ugly

11 pointsswah20 comments

...and that makes me sad because that makes me feel like I should just stay on Windows. What's with the gigantic fonts and ugly Gnome themes?

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I recall reading somewhere that some of the better font hinting algorithms are patented such that its tough for linux distros to make them as pretty. My pie-in-the-sky hope is that the knight in shining Google armor comes in and buys some of these patents for their ChromeOS and opens them up in the process.

But really, Linux is far from ugly and can look as nice as anything you can do on windows/mac. Your fonts will be the same and you are by no means limited to Gnome or any of its themes. Having bad defaults is one thing, being ugly is another.

Reddit's search is broken now but users their post some absolutely gorgeous desktops where they do all kinds of neat stuff with conky. I will try to post some if the search comes back within the edit timeframe.

http://www.freetype.org/patents.html

The problem with that view, is that Linux distributions are free and maintained by a lot of people in their free time. (Yes, and many companies as well.)

Your solution has to come in some form of contribution, and it has to be specific. The best thing would be artwork, code, etc. Even if all you can do is E-mail somebody who actually works on Ubuntu, and let them know what you'd rather have, I think that would help, too.

What's "gigantic"? What's "ugly"? This would tell me nothing about how to make you happy. How about you tell them, "the text in this area here, in this particular program, is bigger than I'd like; and over here, in this program, I think having green would be better than brown". That kind of thing.

I think that part of the ugliness comes from having so many contributors and a culture that is used to things not having a consistent look and feel. On OS X almost all native programs look and feel the same way and the frameworks and tools encourage developers to follow Apple's human interface guidelines. When someone uses another toolkit, such as Qt, the apps just don't feel right. On Linux there is not single toolset and if there are human interface guidelines they don't seem to be followed. So the problem isn't that you need to change a few small things about some interfaces, it's that there needs to be a strongly consistent design that all programs follow.

Agreed. It's frustrating using an inconsistent API (camelCase, under_score, different parameter orders, overlapping functionality, etc.).

The UI is the API that users work with. Inconsistencies are frustrating.

I wouldn't do that actually. Just emailing 'your' opinion to some of the developers might actually have the reverse effect.

I do agree that if you complain you also need to come with a solution and a contribution of some sort. You might what to create your own Gnome theme and show the world how it should be done. If the rest of the world agrees with you your theme will be the number one downloaded theme on http://art.gnome.org in no time.

I'm pretty sure you can change the font size in Ubuntu :) also, if you don't like the default Gnome style, swap your window manager.

Ubuntu or Windows seems like a limited dichotomy you've just imposed on yourself.

There's more than two options out there. What about other Linux distros? What about BSD? If you're looking for something that's pretty, there's still no going past OS X, IMO.

To me, the choice is not Ubuntu vs. Windows, it's Unix/Unix-like vs Windows and Unix/Unix-like wins.

Just use XMonad, instead of Gnome. You will soon forget about visual beauty.

Ubuntu is a free software community project. If you're so concerned about the looks of Ubuntu you might do better to join the efforts and help improve it rather than troll on HN.

The biggest problem in my opinion is multimedia support.

I bet there is a market for a $25-50 Linux distribution with Open Office configured to use Ms-Office formats by default, have support for all "royalties required" formats, Microsoft fonts, and have a windows/mac look-alike theme installed by default.

I find that I'm able to consume all of the media I need to on except for Microsoft Silverlight content like Netflix and the Feynman Lectures. The bigger pain for me is that there's no iTunes or Adobe design products. I'm not sure if there's anything that we can expect more from Ubuntu in this regard.

With Google's ChroneOS on the way and Apple's eventual move to the cloud, I hope that I can soon access my iTunes functionality from a browser. And adobe has committed to moving all of their products to the browser, so I'm not too worried about i, just wish the process would move along a bit faster.

I think that battle has been fought and won by Windows. Open Office has had a long time to unseat Microsoft Office and it hasn't found that reason for people to switch (it's free isn't doing it). We are now looking at the computer actually turning into a low maintenance appliance, and I really believe some Linux distribution or BSD has a shot at taking a chunk of the market. I just hope it isn't by copying someone else.

Wasn't that Lindows/Linspire?

if you are going to call something ugly, you need to provide us with something you think is not ugly as reference (maybe a screenshot of your desktop?). If you think windows is beautiful, then you have no business calling anything ugly.

Ubuntu is a hardware OEM problem. Most normal people don't install an OS. They buy a machine with it there. Ubuntu needs to get serious with OEMs. The design stuff is fairly important too and I know they recognize it.

Have you seen Compiz-Fusion?

I still find the explorer XP to be nicer out of the box than Ubuntu... so much wasted screen space, feels like win95 vga mode

I have to agree. I like Ubuntu, but the graphics are aged.

Sure, but I'm not a designer. Someone isn't ugly just because they have a big nose, for example. I can't explain exactly why it is ugly. But it is in the fonts, the anti-aliasing, the theme that tries to be new but only changes some colors, the terminal tab bar too big...

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