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.