Submitted by “Canonical has announced the availability of the first Ubuntu 10.04 beta release. The new version of Ubuntu, codenamed Lucid Lynx, is scheduled to arrive in April. It will be a long-term support release, which means that updates will be available for three years on the desktop and five years on servers. Although the Ubuntu developers have largely focused on boosting stability for this release, they have also added a number of noteworthy new features and applications. One of the most visible changes is the introduction of a new theme – a change that is part of a broader rebranding initiative that aims to update Ubuntu’s visual identity.” It might just be me, but I find the new theme ghastly. Compare this to this (my desktop). Oh, and Metacity – I can has anti-aliasing?
I don’t know why, but I think this color scheme is even worse. I had to change many more colors than I normally do. One example is the background to the terminal which was white on purple(looked bad). Also on boot up the theme didn’t exactly work, but that was probably a bug(had to download it).
Overall though I thought this distro was better than usual, I loved the start up times and everything looked good(the style not colors). It was also nice that FGLRX drivers were not that hard to setup after finding them in the forums. I would tell anyone to try it out, but be prepared to change a few colors.
Yeah, while I love the fact that someone starts shipping a dark theme as the default I am not sure a LTS release is the right time to do it the first time. Dark themes still have lots of issues, because all OS are light and a lot of apps and websites are not tested with dark themes.
Same with the title bar widgets .. those shouldn’t change in a LTS release.
So yeah for innovation, boo for doing it when people expect continuity.
Personally I think the new look is a huge improvement over the old brown & orange scheme. But then again, what difference does a theme make? Really? At the end of the day users are going to choose their own backgrounds and color schemes; typically within hours of installing.
You overestimate users.
I’m guessing that maybe 50% of users change the background. And maybe 2% change the theme.
Even if most users did change the theme, it is very important to leave good impressions when it is first installed.
On my primary machines/OSs I tend to customize them as much as I can. Otherwise, I just don’t care, and I tend to have a lot more secondary machines/OSs than primary ones, so I’m well below 50%
Never thought I’d say it, but I’ll be going back to the brown scheme! Yikes!
Pulse audio is working better than ever here.
I for one am loving this release, the best one so far. Oh and the most professional one IMHO.
What theme are using Thom?
Looks like the Shiki Wine GTK theme and Metacity, with the Gnome Wine icon theme.
Exactly. Beautiful, elegant, and VERY well designed. Much better than this new Ubuntu thing.
I’ve had a real problem with Grub2. I have to hand edit several config files just to get it to boot my laptop. I have to turn off UUID, turn of the “search” section, etc. It took a lot of googling to figure out. I don’t believe it is a good system. The files are spread out all over the place. I have had no such problems with the original grub (or LILO). I’m steering clear of Grub2 for now.
Sidux used Grub2 when I installed it, and I’ve had a similar experience so far. It’s significantly more complex, with config files scattered everywhere. Increased complexity would be OK if I where getting something for it, but I don’t appear to be; there’s no obvious new functionality, just lots of new complexity. At least it works, tho, so I can’t complain too much.
I haven’t personally been hit by any grub2 problems on my own machines, but I’ve had to fix a few that have. Good fscking god, whoever thought the new design for grub2 was smart must have been smoking something seriously strong. It’s a real bitch to troubleshoot, the conf files are ridiculously complex, and I’ve yet to see any benefits of grub2 other than gpt support, which later versions of the original grub had anyway. Change for the sheer hell of change is *not* a good design philosophy… not that most GNU people seem to understand or care.
Thom, I can has your wallpaper?
It’s a work by David Lanham, one of the best (if not the best) artists currently out there.
http://dlanham.com/
Some of you may not like the new theme very much but compared to KDE’s Oxygen – e.g. that “cool” blue shadow (or is it glow?) that the active window casts – it’s just art.
I just wish Kubuntu could get a distinctive style. I love Oxygen and all but having your own style is a nice touch. Say what you want about the Ubuntu brown, it does make you remember it (and I liked it).
Thom, your fonts look magnificent! Which fonts do you use and have you applied any customizations to the font renderer?
Subpixel smoothing for LCDs, set to “slight”, subpixel order RGB.
My main font is Trebuchet MS, by far my favourite font for just about anything:
sudo apt-get install ttf-mscorefonts-installer
My console font is Microsoft’s Consolas, which comes with Windows 7 (maybe Vista too). I copied it from my Windows 7 machines.
The exact artwork on Thom’s desktop is called “Nearly Ripe” but you should check them all out. He’s good.
… or not… some of you did said it already… but I really really love just about everything I’ve seen so far.
The colors are nice, they give a different tone to my desktop, I have no problem at all reading it even from some distance from my monitor.
The icons are clear and very understandable (even for my 60+ old mom who is not a linux fan)
The use and feel of this distro is the best I’ve experienced so far… (only haiku beats it so far) and for the first time since windows 95 I dont really feel the urge to change anything in my desktop or to install much else… the list limits to codecs, the gimp, gnucash and my printers… that’s all I’ve done.
I can assure you that I’ve always been the type of guy that changes everything in its computer… but this time I felt (with an alpha release) that it very well “just work”.
R.
Nite pick: Haiku isn’t a distro, it’s a whole other OS.
yeah I know… sorry that actually was what I meant… I was talking about the whole OS spectrum out there…
😛
I’ll try to be clearer next time
thx
*sigh*. Still with that obtuse Firefox and help icon with bad spacing stuck at the top there.
The more it changes, the more it doesn’t.
That spacing has never bothered me.
I don’t think the placement and size of those icons is a huge deal; that sounds a lot like nit-picking. Equally, they’re completely configurable; you could make them whatever you want, and position them wherever. It’s really not much of an issue.
Unfortunately, you can’t change the button order without breaking the theme, as they are pixmaps.
But yeah, it’s not a big deal. It’s just well hidden in gconf-editor.
For those interested to get back the previous layout:
$ gconf-editor
Key: /apps/metacity/general/button_layout
Value: menu:minimize,maximize,close
Edited 2010-03-22 19:53 UTC
Yeah, it’s easy. As you can see in the shot, mine are customised as well.
I think he was talking about the Firefox and Help icons on the top panel, not the new button layout for window title bars. Which is even more trivial: unlock the panel and drag the icons a little bit apart, if it bugs you that they appear to be touching. And maybe set a different icon. Doing a google image search for “firefox”, picking something you like, and setting that to the icon for the launcher is trivial.
How about something as novel as them being right to begin with? They’re the only buttons anywhere that touch edge to edge side to side top to bottom. The fact that Ubuntu developers have been booting their machines up for 6 years and haven’t thought that _this should be better_ is kind of typical of Ubuntu design. It badly lacks all-round polish.
Thom,
You do realise that Metacity and any other window managers, cannot have anti-aliasing without compositing?
If you’re running Compiz then sure since that is a composting window manager, metacity isn’t by default so it’s impossibe to do anti-aliasing since there is no alpha.
1) Metacity can do compositing. Why isn’t this the default, and why doesn’t it anti-alias even if you do turn it on?
2) Metacity almost exclusively runs together with Compiz. Why doesn’t Metacity take advantage of that?
This isn’t rocket science, people.
1) Metacity can do compositing. Why isn’t this the default, and why doesn’t it anti-alias even if you do turn it on?
Metacity is SLOW. It’s slow as f*ck. Maybe that’s why it’s not enabled by default?
2) Metacity almost exclusively runs together with Compiz. Why doesn’t Metacity take advantage of that?
Metacity is a window manager, and so is Compiz. They can’t run both at the same time.
Metacity and Compiz are separate window managers. Compiz supports metacity theming that’s all.
You cannot do anti-aliasing without composting. Instead you have to do a step effect around the corners to try and make it look rounded. We have to do two versions of the background and panels with Plasma themes(opaque) because there is no alpha when desktop effects is turned off.
Well, to nit-pick, technically you could write a desktop manager that would do anti-aliasing in software, it’d just be painfully, hurtfully slow.
But yes, you’re right: compiz and metacity are different things; compiz replaces metacity; and, practically speaking, anti-aliasing requires compositing support.
The real complaint here, I think, is, “why isn’t composting ubiquitous and automatic in X yet”? To which, the best answer is, “it’s coming, slowly but surely.”
Untrue. Kwin does anti-aliasing when compositing is turned off, and compositing really doesn’t have anything to do with anti-aliasing.
Eh?
So where does it get the alpha from then to do the transparent pixels?
Just compare the corners of any window deco on any OS and you’ll see the same result, it’s a step effect because the bits in between cannot be transparent(which Anti-Aliasing uses to make the corners smooth)
Sorry, I misunderstood what kind of anti-aliasing you were talking about. Anti-aliased fonts work well without compositing.
I suggest you go learn about this sort of thing before comparing what gets anti-aliased, what doesn’t and why.
I think he’s talking about the RENDER extension, which does antialiasing of fonts and other stuff inside windows. Compositing is another extension altogether and deals with the windows itself, providing graphics contexts for X apps to draw on. The drawing is done with RENDER. RENDER works without the compositing extension and has acceptable unaccelerated performance.
It was just a simple misunderstanding, kid. Fonts are anti-aliased with help of the RENDER extension, and this is supported without compositing in most (all?) modern window managers, and works well with no hardware acceleration at all. You were talking about window borders, which have different needs, as windows are moved around over different backgrounds all the time. When dragging a text block off a window, you need compositing for anti-aliasing.
I could live with the brown and the orange of earlier iterations. This black thing, though, bothers me.
Black looks cool and hackish, but it contrasts so much with the rest of the user interface, which usually is light grey, that my eyes have to readjust when looking at the menus contra the rest of the interface. This leaves me with the feeling that I just drove into/out of a dark tunnel.
As you might see from Thom’s theme; there is VERY little difference between the new Ubuntu theme and the Shiki theme.
The only differences that are obvious are the window icons, and never mind there placing, they are very ugly and stand out a lot.
For the rest the theme does look nice, though I liked the old theme better.
Is it the name of the new theme?
where can I find link to download ubuntu 10.04 beta 1 Thanks
You maniacs, you blew it up! *noooooo* (man sitting on beach in front of broken tux statue)
Seriously, this looks like someone tried out the bevel effect in Gimp for the first time
and the fonts are just too large, so it looks so very wrong, like someone who doesn´t have a clue about proper padding and margin.
I find it funny that there are so many people saying how hideous this new theme is. I can’t say I’m totally sold on it, but it’s not bad. I like the fonts, I like the dark gray, the icon set is pretty meh (doesn’t quite go with the rest of the theme), not thrilled (but not terribly annoyed) by the window button placement, but I find the dark gray butt right up against the off white a little painful. That being said, I honestly can’t say I’ve seem any other themes that trip my trigger. Thom’s theme has some nice points, but the icon set is definitely not my taste, the font is so so, the window control buttons… where are the rest of them? I’m not trying to say that the theme is bad, I’m just saying that everyone has their own taste, and most themes aren’t going to satisfy the majority of people.
For the people talking about the missing anti-aliasing around the corners, I can honestly say I would have never noticed unless someone pointed it out to me. I guess I’m not that picky.