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Maybe because blue is a more sensible choice than brown in most cases?

Whether you like the brown color of Ubuntu or not-- it does serve it's purpose.

Name one other distribution that is recognizable by colour only.

The more people whine about it, the more identity is given to Ubuntu. Hence, it is serving its purpose.

Yea, maybe you're right. Now there's no chance they'll change it... gah!!!

No, I think Mark has said they will change it after Dapper Drake.

Name one other distribution that is recognizable by colour only.

Never thought about that. Sometimes I can spot a SuSE desktop from the particular shade of green, but they aren't very consistent about it. Mandrake/Mandriva also use a particular shade of purple, which is noticeable, but again, I don't think they're as consistent, and Redhat/Fedora uses the Bluecurve blue, but it's been emulated often enough.

So I guess Ubuntu wins it for choosing a color no one else would use, and no one else will copy.

So I guess Ubuntu wins it for choosing a color no one else would use, and no one else will copy.

At least, no one with a sane mind.

"So I guess Ubuntu wins it for choosing a color no one else would use, and no one else will copy."

I wonder why :^)

So the purpose is to suck? I read those complaints as more for the lack of color but hey that's way better than trying for an identity of just working right out of the box.

in my humble opinion, blue for a desktop is about as sensible as blue for a leather shoe.

javajazz

Because you do the same things with your desktop and your leather shoes? You step on it?

Oh, c'mon.

Have you ever seen a blue desktop? I mean the real thing, not the screen background.

Desktops -- table desktops -- are traditionally made out of wood (that is, they're _brown_) or are covered with dark green felt under a glass sheet.

So, no blue.

In fact, despite the reasoning that blue offers great contrast for many objects (our peripheral vision sees better blue, and other nifty curios about our evolved vision)... we live essentially in a non-blue landscape. Apart from the sky (which we don't touch) and the sea (in which we don't live), all things are green or brown -- not blue -- and not like shiny metal, BTW.

So, I guess blue being sensible is open for discussion, at the very least.

I find blue distracting.

dòLób

or becasue it looks like the OS X one.

Yep, agreed - Mandriva needs to communicate effectively alot more often with the wider desktop Linux community[i] - it's pretty clear that it's recently lost some "mindshare" to the likes of Ubuntu and SuSE amongst others (not that it's unusual for interest in distributions to fluctuate over time).

Mandriva clearly produces one of the best general purpose distributions out there (nobody seriously doubts that) - however - it [i]does need to step up efforts to communicate effectively and more regularly with the wider desktop Linux community.

Actually Gael Duval has been doing this sort of thing every once in a while for years, so did Joseph Cheek when Lycoris was still around. With quite a few distributions you can talk to the person in charge, although I've never gotten to talk to anyone of importance at Novell/SUSE before :-( .

Because he's tired of all the buzz around Ubuntu and things that already exist in Mandriva since a long time ago. He's tired that when Ubuntu launches an OEM install, it creates a big buzz like it has never been done before, whereas Mandriva, SUSE, Red Hat have tools to do that since a long time ago. He's tired of misinformation around Mandriva (yes forums are free, yes knowledge base is free, yes they do have to make money somewhere to live and that's why the club exist). I am wondering if I'm talking about him or myself...

> He's tired that when Ubuntu launches an OEM install, > it creates a big buzz like it has never been done
> before, whereas Mandriva, SUSE, Red Hat have tools
> to do that since a long time ago.
This is called marketing.
It made Microsoft and Apple what they are.
The lack of it killed BeOS and OS/2.

I meant 'hate having to' not 'have having to'

Oh well, that what you get for posting anonymous

What, you mean you can't remember "./configure; make; make install" from one occurence to the next?

Meanwhile, if you ran Mandrake, you'd find that there's very little software that isn't in the distro repositories.

What distro are you running?

I tried ubuntu myself yesterday and I was absolutely pissed off to have to manually eject my inserted photo cd because the eject button didn't work.. (I have to go to the contextual menu)
Come on it's working in mandrake since the 7.2 version I guess

Well, the X.org isn't made by Mandriva

The binaries are not code made by Mandriva of their own code, but are binaries made by Mandriva of non-Mandriva source.

Okay. You got me. LOL.

Hell, even www.ubuntulinux.org and www.ubuntuforums.org use both a brown based colour theme that is better than the Ubuntu Linux default theme when you first boot it. You want warm colours, fine, but do it right for God's sake!

While I agree that shipping kat in Mandriva 2006 was a mistake, I love that this guy (Gaël Duval) shows so much support in the project (they even host kat website : kat.mandriva.com).

Ubunto is the little engine that could, but Mandriva's already done everything that they're getting their users excited about.

Not to knock Mandriva but it can't get me GNOME the day it's released on one cd along with .deb based package management. People have their preferences. Mandriva's maturity isn't enough to pull me away from GNOME. Other's have their own reasons.

I am one of the few people who thinks the brown colour scheme of Ubuntu is really pretty cool?! ;-)

The .deb format is a liability if you want to run multiple architectures at the same time, e.g x86_64 and x86. On Mandriva there is no need to chroot as you need to do with Debian or Ubuntu. Nowadays it just works, thanks to the hard work that Mandriva put into this side of things.

BTW I use Debian on servers, as I appreciate the multiple versions of packages like python, which is essential for running zope/plone. Mandriva is weak in this respect, as I've yet to see a python 2.3 RPM for Mandriva 2006, for instance. If it were strong in this area, I'd be happy to stick with Mandriva, but alas.

Damon

OMG! I'd never expect to find anything worse than Ubuntu. This is ridiculous. What's wrong with this people/Ubuntu people? Hire designers for the love of God. Brown itself is not the problem, as we have seen this green desktop sucks more than a vacuum cleaner. The problem is that brown is such a difficult colour to make a good theme, that it will most probably end up like crap as it does on Ubuntu theme. If you want inovate on desktop design, hire designers to do it, and not coders... geez.

Canonical has had professional graphic designers do everything from the logo, to the color scheme, to the splash screens and backgrounds since it's inception. Only recently has a community-lead team been put together for working on official artwork. (and we mostly like the brown)

There are Canonical devs that work on artwork, but they're obviously good at it. I'm a full time graphic designer. If I learn to code does that make me less of a designer, or somehow inhibit my ability to learn to code? That just doesn't make any sense.

If you don't like it, don't use it. It's as simple as that. If you ever visit distrowatch.com, you'll notice that SOMEONE likes it.

I am a newly paid up Mandriva Club Silver member. I have been using Mandriva/Mandrake as my main OS since Mandrake 10.0 dumped XP off my machines for good.
I used the download editions from 10.0 to 10.2, then I installed 2005LE from a magazine DVD.
I liked 10.2 better than 2005 for some reason, dunno if it was the screwed up crow or not
but I urpmi from 2005 to 2006 and it was sweet.
However, Mandriva are now offering membership on a pay-per-month basis, so I signed up to a Silver membership and downloaded 2006 Discovery pack.
I installed it on this machine and it is simply amazing compared to the upgrade route. The KDE system is well snappy compared to before and has a smaller memory footprint, and the machine starts in less than a minute from boot to KDE desktop, and that is without initNG.
I was also a distro whore, but then, thats the best thing about having /home on a separate drive
Looks like now, I will settle on Mandriva, and use Discovery on friends and families PC's and Powerpack on me own.

Mandriva 2006 is well worth trying out Jeff - download the FREE 3 .iso set in a few weeks or you do an FTP install etc now - it's more polished than ever (the installer's real classy now ) - boot-up times are as quick as hell - the desktop's snappy as ever (KAT and a few other "bits" can be "disabled" if desired) - Fluxbox is included along with ICE now (on the discs), to make a very lean, snappy, minimal setup. All in all, good incremental improvements across the board - certainly well worth having on a spare partition along side your other distros

Mandriva can be as "minimal" & "power-user" ish as you want it to be - I've got fairly minimal custom installs of Mandriva on around 500 mb disk space, consisting of Fluxbox, Eterm, VIM, NEdit, XChat, Firefox, MCC and very little else - so as you can see, you can implement a fairly light-weight setup from a standard Mandriva distribution.

(With Mandriva I typically go for the custom install - then strip out all the tickboxes down to around 275 mb, then "manually" select the packages that I want (including X, the 75's, the WM etc, etc))

You only ave to give Mandriva money if you want the ISO NOW. That fact has been pointed out in previous comments. If you want to wait a few weeks, ISOs will be generally available.

You can download boot.iso from the repository and do a network install if you can't wait.

Don't sweat the small stuff.