One of the new planned new features of the upcoming release of Ubuntu, Hardy Heron, is a fresh new theme. That’s right, no more brown and orange. While for many users just getting some nicer colors in to replace the “ugly” brown and orange is enough (I personally like the brown and orange a lot), I think the Ubuntu team should take this chance to get ahead of other distributions in another way.

For a while, Fedora has been know for its amazing art, but with the most recent release, Fedora 8, the Fedora team decided to go with a simpler, less distracting background. Although it might not be a good idea to use a theme as complicated as previous Fedora themes, Ubuntu has a chance to become known as the distro to go to for the best artwork. Although artwork may seem like an unimportant part of a Linux distro, an attractive, well thought-out interface can make someone take a closer look and see what the distro really has to offer.

Given the amount of talent in the open-source community and the previous simple but beautiful design of Ubuntu, I am confident that the Ubuntu team can create a really incredible theme to top off all the other features of Hardy Heron.