Ubuntu 10.04: The Perfect Consumer Operating System

Our office switched to Ubuntu 2 years ago, and every 6 months we wonder "how can they possibly make this better" only to be totally wowed that they've done something wonder each release.

This one looks really well integrated, and competes with Mac for style, and luxory (you know, like integrated music store, your own private cloud,etc.)

The answer to this question seems to invariably be "no, but it's a great OS for geeks." I think it's time to stop worrying about it and just keep on making it better.

I really want to like Ubuntu, but then I start it up and see horrible fonts, icons that look out of place with this new theme, and UI strangeness that doesn't seem to be justified.

Why doesn't the close button sit on a corner? Why is the program launcher on a different bar than the already running programs? If I want to bring up a program like Firefox, I don't really care if it running or not I want to go to the same area to bring it up.

I know I can change all of this things, but I have better ways to spend my time. Older users even if they wanted to aren't going to be able to change these things.

I was running 10.4 alpha 3 and then the beta in order to get better support for the hardware on a new laptop. I agree with the author of this article that 10.4 just feels well put together visually. BTW, I have had zero problems with the beta and now just use it rather than 9.10.