Ubuntu 10.04 Appearance Changes vs Ubuntu 9.10 | Hacker News Reader

Ubuntu 10.04 Appearance Changes vs Ubuntu 9.10

beginlinux.com

52 pointsaweber51 comments

As a huge fan of Linux, I have to say the modern Apple and Microsoft operating systems look significantly better.

It's a growing process. The point is that it looks better than it did.

I for one like the clean look of my XMonad.

I am new to xmonad and loving it so far

my only issue is how terrible floating windows are, I would love to be able to use xmonad tiling mode for my constant windows, but if I want to bring up skype or a filebrowser for a few minutes just use a normal gnome type window that has the familiar mouse interactions.

* well not my only issue, I would also like to easily hide and restore windows

> * well not my only issue, I would also like to easily hide and restore windows

The usual solution is designating one of your virtual desktops as a `dump' for windows you don't want to have around at the moment. You could also have a look at how the tabbed layout works, and repurpose that.

I use sawfish with the lines theme for roughly the same reason.

screenshot or it didnt happen.

I've heard a lot about XMonad. Could you give a brief rundown of your setup (and what you like about it) and maybe a screenshot or two?

My screenshots are really boring. There's no eye-candy. You know how Emacs looks like, now just imagine it full-screen without the window-decoration and I even removed the menu-bar and scroll-bar from Emacs. My terminals also have the scroll-bar removed.

I use the smart-borders, so that my windows only get 1-pixel borders when they are not in full-screen.

I have focus-follows-mouse and mouse-follows-focus. The left Windows-key acts as the modmask-key, i.e. the main key to activate Xmonad stuff. Alt is the default, but that interferes with Emacs.

I like that there's nothing to distract me while coding, and that I use all of my screen real estate for the task at hand, instead of menus, task-bars and the like. Especially the lack of a task-bar is an advantage in my opinion, as I am not tempted too much by my browser while working on code in Emacs.

Floating windows like print dialogs annoy me sometimes. Especially when they steal focus. I should be less lazy and fix those.

The problem is that Windows will have gone through another design interation by the time Ubuntu has reached the XP/Vista generation look-and-feel.

The gratuitous eye-candy of the XP/Vista look-and-feel was already cliché when it first debuted. Hopefully Ubuntu will leapfrog it. Note that the black "Dust" ubuntu theme seen here was created by a user, not by a designer at Canonical. Compiz is extremely customizable/themeable (unlike Windows or OS X) so it's likely another talented user will go further with the UI design.

As someone using all 3 OS's day to day (Ubuntu is my primary development OS, I have an iMac next to me, and I switch my laptop to Windows 7 for video games in the evenings), Windows 7 is easily my least favorite OS, it's performance is generally crummy compared to OSX and Ubuntu, and it's UI often aggravating.

See I find the opposite is true for me. I don't have much experience with OS X but between ubuntu and Windows 7 I _much_ prefer Win7. I just can't stand how much screen space is eaten up by useless padding, menu bars, sidebars and panels, not to mention the overly large fonts. I realize that everything is customizable, but I don't have the patience. Windows 7 also seems faster and more responsive to me but responsiveness is largely subjective and situational.

To each their own I guess.

Yep, I get excited for all the Ubuntu releases but end up back on Windows a couple weeks later.

You can use virtual machines (e.g. Sun's VirtualBox) to make the transitions easier. You don't even need to reboot then.

I agree. I find the new kubuntu with kde 4.4 much nicer.

http://www.kde.org/announcements/4.4/plasma.php

I agree with you there. I've stuck with the Gnome flavor of Ubuntu, despite my preference for KDE because Kubuntu feels like Ubuntu with KDE duct-taped on top. It seems to be missing quite a bit of the functionality and polish of the Gnome flavor, which is really quite unfortunate.

The engine/mechanics/code in KDE 4.4 are great, but I hate every single KDE theme. Way too much candy, way too cheesy. I personally kind of wish the two projects would merge in just the right way.

very true - take a look at the Klassik theme combined with Skulpture.

I really wish someone would make a better theme - gnome themes look so much better.

I like the way I have set up Gnome. I don't want to have to change it.

I've recently tried Mint Linux, and it's very aesthetically pleasing (screenshot http://i.imgur.com/2OBiH.png). (Disclaimer: Mac user)

Edit: except for the tray icons.

That is almost exactly the Dust theme which is now default in ubuntu, with green icons instead of orange.

That "almost" is where the big difference is. I think this theme is more balanced and pleasing.

One of the main reasons why that screenshot looks good is due to the fonts you're using, which are good fonts (presumably from MS Windows).

Good fonts always make a massive difference in terms of screenshots.

I agree, fonts (and their aliasing) make a big difference. But the UI font is the standard DejaVu Sans. (Only Google's page is in Arial.)

I think it's a big step backwards. It just doesn't fit. The selling point of Linux, as a desktop OS, would be its stability, reliability, flexibility, etc. I don't think using these weird exotic colors in such inconsistent ways sells those points very well. It looks very amateurish. Of course the point is made you can change the colors/theme easily but let's face it -- lots of people are going to look at the screenshots and make huge irrational assumptions based on them. Something cleaner and more professional looking would capture the essence of desktop Linux better in my opinion. I've always liked the default CentOS theme:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7e/Centos41-...

But you could also argue it the other way.

Staying with a stereotypical light gray desktop theme is easy and doesn't distinguish it from anything else out there. Mac and windows both made bold decisions with their UI, not all of which may have appealed to a lot ot people (remember "pinestripes" on mac? remember the cartoonish look of XP?).

While I do see this theme as slightly unual (in that it's a "dark" theme), I do applaud them for taking a risk.

For as much complaints that people had for this x button being on the wrong side, I have to say that I am really impressed with the growth between these two releases.

I understand where Ubuntu was when it came up with the brown design, but they hit a cord with the linux community and realized that they outgrew what they originally set out to do. I think the design shown in 10.04 really shows that understanding.

Agreed, I personally moved the window controls back, but otherwise 10.04 is a huge step forward.

I installed the beta a few days ago, while it isnt an overnight, omg this is better than osx, it certainly is a big improvement.

the default menu bar is incredibly nice, very similiar to osx, and glad to see the new weather icons that have a great finish (the old ones were so bad they were often confused as a bug)

The rest of the changes arent that significant, the new buttons and scrollbars are nicer but arent a huge improvement. I quite like the toolbar text, dark themes have always been my preference.

nautilus is still godawful, I am not a particularly huge fan of finder but nautilus does obviously lack here.

but I did take the time out to try xmonad and I am loving it - http://junk.arandomurl.com/xmonad.png , ill probably write it up soon.

The big question for me is: if I upgrade to 10.04, will it by default overwrite my colour scheme and other things I've set up on my desktop?

Because it took me time to set up the colours / fonts / effects / etc the way I like them, and I'm buggered if I'm going to let some arrogant bastard tell me I have to either (i) have my desktop they way he wants it not the way I want it, or (ii) re-do all that work.

Just preserve your home folder. I believe the changes are just a theme.

Nop, I did that and it will keep all your changes... you'll just notice the improvements over the notifications area.

Looks to me like an unfortunate step sideways in usability. Hopefully I'll be proven wrong when I try it myself.

Are you referring to the positioning of the window control icons?

It's much more important to me to be able to change the resolution on my monitor (impossible to do anything other than 480x640 on 9.10) than what color the default theme is. What I mean to say is that for Ubuntu to displace Windows in any measurable amount, the things that users expect to work have to work. While I am happy to edit my xorg.conf file because ubuntu doesn't recognize certain graphics card/monitor combinations, my mother would not. My office laptop was recently upgraded from Windows XP to Windows 7. The background colors and overall theme changed. After a few days, I didn't notice it any more, nor was there a HN post about the color scheme change. What I did notice was that offline folders worked a lot better than with XP. Those are the changes that actually make a difference to users. Users adapt to different themes and visuals pretty quickly. Ubuntu has made huge strides in desktop linux usability, but Canonical needs to continue to focus on ironing out the last remaining kinks so it "just works."

While I really like what they're doing design-wise in ubuntu, the second screenshot makes me kind of sad. I really think they should strive for less administration applications, instead of adding more.

All the ones showing are the ones that show up in a default 9.04. The 9.04 example, for some reason, has hidden a few.

Yeah well the more important thing seems to be that they changed gnome-over-compiz setting to gnome 3.0 w/ gnome-shell, which means the compositing window manager is now part of the gnome. While some ideas in gnome-shell are quite cool (though obtainable in gnome 2.x as 3rd party stuff like gnome-do project), the stability on some GPU hw/firmware/driver configurations may be sucky.

And if you care about your current gnome2+compiz configuration, it will be most probably messed by upgrading.

The nice thing about Ubuntu/Gnome is how easy it is to customize. As long as Emerald Theme Manager still works on 10.04, this release should be great.

I also prefer the window buttons on the right and it's good to know that we have a choice. On my MacBook I just have to accept it as is.

One thing I would love to see from Ubuntu is clean fonts working out of the box like Windows and Mac. I think that would be game changer for desktop Linux.

One thing I would love to see from Ubuntu is clean fonts working out of the box

Sounds like a matter of difference in personal preference. I'm pretty sure that the way fonts look out of the box is intentional, not a deficiency for which devs are actively seeking a solution.

I've noticed the window manager under Lucid is much more responsive. I'm not sure if that's just me though, because I'm unfortunately damned with SiS graphics drivers, and I had to update those manually.

Still using those ugly orange folders, though. Hrm.

Will they ever get rid of the dual task bars (or panels or what they are called)?

They're panels. There's one task bar (window list) on the bottom panel by default. And you can get rid of them now if you want. I'm reading comments like above mentioning how Linux Mint's look is aesthetically pleasing. Really? It's almost all GNOME. Why discuss a whole change of distro to get a different theme/look? Just change the theme.

It's not even like you're downloading third party apps or doing registry tweaks/resource hacks on Windows 10 years ago. Context menu→"Delete this panel". It's less of a hassle than managing your desktop icons. It's just like making sure Firefox's "Always show the tab bar" preference is set to the value you want it to be.

More broadly, it seems like any level of hullaballoo about Ubuntu's default theme is too much. Who actually sticks with the default theme?

I usually stick with the default theme, except for reconfiguring the panels. Why change the default theme? Last time changing themes excited me was when I had an Amiga 500.

There's hardly excitement from me. My choices are mostly functional; I think skinning culture is kind of silly (e.g., especially so with the hype about Mozilla Personas). There are things that I could do to make things look nice or gimmicky, but I'm definitely happy to do without for functional gains, and I do.

Here's the end result of my "theming": http://i42.tinypic.com/2r5b0pi.jpg

Is it easy to exchange themes? I might be bothered to theme if there is an easy way to set the theme on every computer I use. I suppose some productivity enhancements are possible, I just never took the time.

System → Preferences → Appearance to tweak installed themes and create new ones. There's a link there to get more, but there's also http://gnome-look.org. The ones from gnome.org are easier to install, because they send the "Content-Type: application/x-gnome-theme-package" header, while gnome-look.org just does plain ol' gzipped tarballs. (Actually gzip vs. bzip vs. raw tarballs might be up to the uploader, I don't know.) You can also save the theme packages, and drag and drop them in the appearance preferences window.

Also, terminology. I think "theme" refers to a packaged deal, which can include window borders, gtk controls, icons, colors, desktop background, maybe more. So the frustrating thing you might find is that you see a theme you like, but it changes your colors and gtk controls, and uses an incomplete icon set, when really all you wanted was the window borders. If you install it, you can do something like revert back to the default Ubuntu theme, click "Customize", and change the window border to the one installed by the theme. This is is probably easier than trying to customize the new theme itself, especially since if you're used to the Ubuntu theme, you'll probably find that your desired look has more in common with it than the new one you just downloaded.

My enhancements are pretty low key. I mute the colors, scale down the font size to 9 to make more use of screen space, and use the SlicknesS window border, which has a smaller footprint than the Human window border.

Something else that's mildly frustrating is that the window borders' colors have almost (completely?) nothing to do with the color scheme. If you think, "Oh I like this, but I'm going to get rid of the insane colors.", you're probably out of luck.

I totally can't wait! 7 days left!

I already upgraded, and I'm quite pleased with the changes. Unfortunately, the new default theme is slightly buggy; for example, when you open gvim from a terminal, you get various error messages show up which are to do with the window manager. I swicthed back to the "Human" theme, and the error messages disappeared.

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