I've never really liked Ambiance, mostly because of the garish orange default and huge fonts and icons that come default. This seems to be the default for all Linux desktops for some reason I can't understand...huge panels in GNOME and Xfce(I've never used KDE), huge icons, and large default texts.

Elegant Gnome[1] is a much, much saner and better theme IMO. Beautiful default font (Droid Sans+Droid Sans Mono), darker/more tastefully muted colors, Elegant-Aw0ken icons built off of Aw0ken[2] icons and the original Token[3] Icon Set by ~brsev. Also, it is a much more complete theme as compared to most themes for GTK. Full support for icons, GDM, and lots of edgecases. Really looks like the pinnacle of theming so far on Linux.

ElementaryOS[4] is a fork of Ubuntu that has spawned a lot of projects like Dexter, Nautilus Elementary, and Postler. Good to see more effort being spent on better UX and polish in Linux. I agree that Ubuntu/Canonical has come a long way since the days I was using Dapper on the desktop, but the paper still has to be pushed.

I personally use a mixture of Elegant Gnome when I use Gnome and a custom Zenburn theme with Xmonad.

Great theme, I'll recommend to friends of mine who use the default theme.

[1]: http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/Elegant+Gnome+Pack?co...

[2]: http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/AwOken+-+Awesome+Toke...

[3]: http://brsev.deviantart.com/art/Token-128429570