Ubuntu 10.04′s UI – What Can Less Brown Do For You?

If there’s two things Ubuntu has always been, it’s brown and orange. This has a striking resemblance to the not-so good looking nature of, say, a shag living room carpet circa the 1970s.

You can’t convince me that a brown interface with bright orange icons looks good. Not a chance. Ubuntu has been like that for quite some time. While it’s true you could always change the GUI colors to whatever you wish, the point is that you always see a cavalcade of brown and orange on first install.

But not anymore.

Ubuntu developers are finally getting the hint and now has a default theme called Light. You can see screen shots of it here, along with the not-so subtle OS X inspirations that you’ll immediately notice, such as putting window controls on the top left instead of the top right.

The orange icons are still there, but they’ve been toned down a bit to what appears to be a butterscotch color for lack of a better description. Desktop background has changed as well to be not-brown.

This version of Ubuntu is going to tick off current Ubuntu users, again, because the GUI has stuff in different places, again.

Ubuntu has a nasty habit of changing major UI stuff around with each successive release, so much to the point where it’s outright annoying.

A few quick examples: Power off/shutdown/hibernate used to be a green “running man” icon, then it changed to a power symbol. There was a nice-and-easy Samba admin menu option in the Administration section, then *poof*, vanished. Is it back in 10? No idea. The way to change fonts has been shoved around several times, the wi-fi settings (which is really important) have been shoved around several times, and so on, and so on.

Every time a new version of Ubuntu is released, the first question you ask is, “Okay, what was moved/removed/shifted/changed now?”, followed by, “How long is it going to take to relearn this UI, again?” This is unfortunately par for the course with Ubuntu’s UI.

Both Apple and Microsoft fixed this problem in their OSes for when things get moved around by implementing a global search function that allows direct launching from search results. If you can’t find the icon, search for it and it will be found in Snow Leopard or Windows 7 easily and quickly. On 10.04′s desktop screenshots I don’t see any obvious way to do this. Ubuntu of course does have the ability to search itself via the GUI (or terminal if so inclined) using Beagle, but I’m uncertain whether this is installed by default. If not, it should be because it can find just about anything.

To note: Clicking on Places/Search for Files only scans your home directory. Nice to have, but not as good as Beagle, which is a complete global indexing system.

I do in fact like the direction the Ubuntu GUI is going, as long as they stick with it. It looks friendlier and continues to improve as time goes on. However my complaint stands that things get shifted/moved/removed around too much per each successive release. This breaks familiarity with the GUI and annoys Ubuntu users whenever they upgrade.

If you’re wondering what’s breaking familiarity with 10.04′s desktop compared to 9.10, the bottom panel isn’t there by default, the aforementioned window controls have been moved from right to left, and I don’t see any workspace switching options in the top panel whereas you did before in the now-gone bottom panel.

Yes, it’s true all that stuff can be changed/put back, but the point is that it’s not there by default – or at least not at present with the currently released screenshots.

The window controls on the top left will irk current Ubuntu users, save for Mac people of course. And I guarantee these same users will instantly put back that bottom panel, if for anything just to get the clickable workspace control, unless they decide to put it in the top panel.

What do you think of Ubuntu’s Light? Good? Bad? “Should have left it the way it was in 9.10?”, or “Better now, 9.10′s UI sucked”? Voice your opinion with a comment or two.

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Matt
I’ve just updated the latest Alpha of Lucid and just to clarify, the minimise/maximise/close buttons are on the right of the titlebar and the bottom panel is where it has always been with the workspace switcher too! I think the Ubuntu devs failed slightly in their screenshots, as the bottom panel was on autohide! As for the buttons on the titlebar, perhaps an experiment to see how people reacted?!

TemperingPick
Yes, I second that.

http://howto-ubuntu.com Eli
I’ve been an Ubuntu user at home since version 7.10. I like the brown and orange. I mean, how often do we change things around as far as the looks of our desktop. I know that I do pretty regularly, so the brown will just get changed, just like this new theme will get changed.
As far as Light goes, I don’t like it. The colors are… well, kinda boring. The brown caught my eyes much more so than this Light theme. I know that the brown didn’t look that good, but Ubuntu did it well in my opinion.
Window controls on the left is horrible. This is a convention that I’ve been used to for a LONG time now. This isn’t something like a wi-fi control, window controls are something that you click on several times, every time you use your machine. To be fair, I really don’t like it on the Mac either.
And as for the UI changing with every release, I’ve found that I prefer to stick to the Long Term Support releases. I’m still using 8.04, and I love it. I’ll be upgrading to 10.04, and staying away from everything in between it and the next LTS. As far as I’m concerned this is the only way to do Ubuntu. I get a new OS every 2 years, I can live with that. Who really needs a new OS every 6 months anyway???
coskibum
“The window controls on the top left will irk current Ubuntu users, save for Mac people of course. And I guarantee these same users will instantly put back that bottom panel, if for anything just to get the clickable workspace control, unless they decide to put it in the top panel.”
They’ve already fixed it…
http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2010/03/worried-ubuntu-1004-will-have-left-hand.html
TemperingPick
I really hated the brown and orange in 9.04. The UI in 9.10 was okay but not great. However, this new one I like a lot. I’m getting ready to check it out but the pictures of it look nice.
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presence1960
You can install Gnome Do to search for anything or open applications on your machine. As far as searching outside of your /home directory in Linux that is basically unnecessary as you do not usually need to be fiddling with your root (/) partition contents.
The theme with the Mac like windows controls is not default as I have been testing lucid alpha 1, 2 & 3.
Of course I must add that I am biased to Linux as it is my main OS for a couple years now. I have Vista installed to a partition along with Ubuntu 9.10, 10.04 alpha3 & sabayon 5.0. The only thing I use windows for is Acrobat professional and once in a while for Office when formatting is critical and must remain exact.

TemperingPick
Umm…yeah it is default.
David
Gnome Do – Tick
Mac Theme – hmmm…I do use a dock
Office formatting in Windows? – Open Office can do all that and save it in .doc (if you really must)
Brown & Orange themes – yuck. Linux is so themeable (is that a word?). I change themes probably too often because it’s so easy.

http://forkwhilefork.org adam h
Me? I prefer the look of Hardy Heron. Too bad they probably won’t ever go back. I like the Orange-Brown, the rounded Ubuntu logo. It was unique. Nobody else’s OS looked like that. When you saw the brown, you knew that person was using Ubuntu. Now it’s “Are they using a hackintosh or is it Ubuntu”.
Good thing the human theme is still in the repo’s.