Opinion: Another Way for Ubuntu to Get Ahead
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.
December 7th, 2007 at 3:20 pm
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December 8th, 2007 at 1:45 pm
I say go ‘gold’.
The brown-orange theme of Ubuntu is probably not going to grab mainstream folks, ever. I’ve often though the natural upward evolution would be to morph orange-brown into a richer ‘gold’ theme, using of course all the glassy reflections, metallic highlights, gradations, transparencies, etc. that the best modern themes use. This would still distinguish Ubuntu with a warmer color scheme, differentiated from the blue Mac tones and the black-blue-glass Vista tones.
And I absolutely agree. Ubuntu is loved for it’s function, but it’s form should reflect all the care that goes into the code. Why do you think people are so attracted to Macs? Pure aesthetics. You spend how many hours staring at this screen? It should look beautiful, not just acceptable. Likewise Vista attracts users of XP mostly because it looks much nicer. I have to keep an XP machine around and recently got sick of the primitive theme, but in no way wanted to put Vista on the machine. So I downloaded some free ‘Vista’ theme. It’s amazing how much a theme can improve the look and feel of the desktop and the whole aesthetic experience.
December 8th, 2007 at 5:43 pm
I get sooo tired of people who call any color scheme ugly. Ignorance about color and closed mindedness are sure signs of a lazy mind.