OSNews

While I really would like to see a complete departure from the overall Gnome look and feel, the new theme is gorgeous! I for one can not wait until this new version is released.

Edited 2010-03-03 20:52 UTC

They show some design for Xubuntu and Ubuntu, but Kubuntu look like that have been left being again...

Otherwise, it look good. I think it will make a smooth transition between Gnome 2 and 3, as this use color closer to Gnome 3 default theme. So, they may drop custom skin to use the new default, after all.

One of the screenshot also show global menubar on an Asus computer. Strange, Asus said they were dropping Linux, so it is strange that Ubuntu website show a big Asus logo with what seem to be a custom Ubuntu build.

Edited 2010-03-03 20:59 UTC

Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of Ubuntu (and Debian, for that), but the orange/brown default-theme of Ubuntu was not my taste. The new themes look beautilful, have a good balance between dark and light widgets and don't get in your way while working. Thumbs up from me, good work!

Placed left, so they don’t interfere with the notification pop-ups.

Elegant. That's what comes to mind. I won't comment on the slight feeling of it looking a bit like OSX.
I'm happy for linux distros in general. Ubuntu's win is a win for all... I'll buy that t-shirt but in a different colour :-)

Finally!!!!! Enough said!

The new color scheme is great, but I'm in love with the new logo font, the boot splash and the website redesign. Very elegant and professional.

Notice that screenshots don't show a bottom panel. What are they coming up with? A DOCK? Nothing at all? That's weird.

Am I the only one smelling quite heavy Apple ripoff, especially at the web themes examples section?

In OS/2 Warp 3 and newer (includes eComStation) the close button is the innermost titlebar widget. The buttons are in the right side, with close,minimize,maximize/restore. Ubuntus solution is simply a reversed OS/2-positioning. I wonder if this will be just as quirky in Ubuntu as in OS/2 & eCS.

EDIT: One should know that it is very easy to change the widget layout. It does require messing with the Gnome "registry".

Edited 2010-03-03 21:45 UTC

It's a mixed bag if you ask me. The "branding" and colour choices are great. So is the new bootsplash.
The new gtk is far from "great" IMHO (It's less defined, and more chaotic than the old humanity). I would have kept the old human gtk and applied the new colors to that instead.
The new metacity was quite ugly IMHO. Bleh. I hope they at least do a poll or something, so that people get to voice their opinion about the theme change.

I don't understand how they could ship with something so bad. Would almost expect them to call it "Bruised Human"

Everything else is great though. New font is a nice move fron "Generic Sans", new bootsplash is elegant, and the light theme is just gorgeous.

This look will make it's way into the alpha releases for 10.04? I can't wait to use it.

I think it looks really good and professional. The older designs were nice, but didn't really set Ubuntu apart.

Did anyone else feel that the background was a little OS X like? Not complaining, I have always felt that the Mac UI is really good.

I've been using ubuntu since edgy eft (7.04) and I've always loved it. I thought the theme was pretty cool back then.

However, nothing compares to this new theme. If I weren't such a nerd I wouldn't be saying this... But I think this new theme is drop dead sexy.

I foresee this new theme being a conversation peice, in starbucks, on my sleek new laptop, with someone nice.....


Windows 7 eat your heart out!

The NewWave theme in Ubuntu Karmic 9.10 already looks great.

http://www.paradoxuncreated.com/Pxu/Screen26feb2010.png

I hope this theme will not be changed/still be available. It suits me perfectly.

Nice to see more work done on themes though, interesting still. But I do think I will stick with the one I have now.

Peace Be With You!

Honestly, I like my own theme better.

http://www.uploadimage.my/pictures/18540339994b8f18719dd53.png

It may look ugly to you, but I find those colors no distracting.

This is obviously something that was thrown together in a few hours without any thought. Here are immediately obvious problems:
The wrong (yes, flat-out wrong) order of the titlebar widgets.
The hodge-podge of colors thrown together - the white window color, but slightly off-white titlebar and menu; the quite purple-tinted tooltip and wallpaper, but much bluer highlights and shadows on the buttons and highlighted items.
The tango icons that don't match with anything but the strange off-white titlebar.
The horrible simple non-nuanced gradient in the trough behind the titlebar widgets.
The "x" icon (the one on the active window) stolen from a completely different icon set than anything else on the screen.

This theme makes it look like the designer was supposed to be working on it a while, but was actually sleeping on the job, and when it suddenly came time to turn something in, he stayed up the night before throwning something together.

Did anyone of you noticed it is a wiki?

Maybe those screenshots are from a casual user/dev and it doesn't represent the actual out-of-box look of lucid.

I myself have buttons in that order since ages just because I like MacOSX (or better, I don't Like Windows). The only difference: I run Kubuntu.

The only thing I don't like is that there's some Apple-ish look in. I hate Apple and I would not like my PC to copy the OSX look. Then again, I already worked hard to take some of that OSX feel out of Windows 7, so I hope there's still some customization room in Ubuntu to get rid of the OSX touches.

Not a significant improvement, waste of time & effort. Your only guaranteed to tick people off with a color change.

I'd like the close/minimize/restore buttons to the right.

Those monochrome icons in the upper panel are just idiotic. They look great until you actually launch something that uses a colored notification icon(skype, transmission, amule, ekiga, pidgin, etc) or you place some launchers in the panel just like everyone has been doing for the last years. Then consistency is gone. Can they provide a monochrome alternative for every icons? Bah

There are a lot of "manly" cool themes, why copying macs?

This is not an overhaul at all. It is just a different color scheme with different icons and different border. GNOME still looks like GNOME/GTK. An overhaul means something completely different. An example for this could be that little script that makes GNOME look like XP nearly pixel by pixel similarity.

There is also a way to decrease the size of the gigantic widgets and make them smaller to take less space. If you apply the Redmond theme for instance, all of the buttons take less space and it looks much neater. Sure it's ugly but you get the point.

Ok, it is time to mod me down.

Edited 2010-03-04 08:41 UTC

They might as well use a my little pony background. That purple needs to go.

Wow looks like they installed the Zune theme for windows xp on linux

I like it

This is a disaster. People going for the edit menu will suddenly find that their window is gone.

The theme itself is ok i guess, but window button controls are placed so awkwardly, that it will be difficult to get used tu, unless there is a way to put them in the usual place and in the usual order.

Love everything, boot up screen is slick looking, theme is awesome (good thing there is light and dark versions), wallpaper is nice, and we already know the icons theme is superb from 9.10. But I don't like the placement of the window buttons, hope I can have them back on the right hand side of th window.

It's not nearly as bad as "MANDRIBBLE".

Besides, Haiku is almost usable for me again now.

*can't wait*

Why cannot the theme managers pick a theme that balances out the three primary colors? This slant towards red is disturbing to use. Its a pita to fix all the colors to something more pleasant.

This is why I prefer the work Novell has done with SuSE. They've got the colors right coming out of the gates.

Other than their paid support ... what does ubuntu need a brand identity for? They give away their software! Can someone explain this to me?

It's getting a lot better, though.

I tried a little experiment. Put your mouse in the center of the screen and open a new maximised window. Now quickly flick your mouse and close the window.

With the X on the top right, it's easy. I overshoot by miles and the cursor hangs out right where it's supposed to be. When I try the same thing in the opposite corner, I end up about an inch short and have to move my whole hand. I am a righty. Also, I can move easily to every corner except top left w/o moving my hand. Which is probably why windows put the start menu on the bottom left (it's something you want to click quickly w/o thinking about it.) Anytime you access the "File" menu you're should be working slow/carefully anyways..... hopefully away from the "close" button.

BeOS sort of did it that way.

A window title was the little yellow bar just above the main window area, and the control "widgets" (to use Thom's terminology, never ever called them widgets that I can recall... but I digress...) were immediately to the right of the title. So, in most cases the title bar wasn't nearly as long/large as the main window the "widgets" got scrunched up to the left more although displaced from being comletely on the left by the title text.

I think that there were a few other GUIs that placed them specifically on the left as well, but I can't recall what those GUIs were as I, evidently, never used them for very long or only saw screenshots or mockups of them long ago.

In any event, I'd imagine that the "widget" placement will be easily modifiable by themes and I'd imagine that it would annoy enough people that if the end product ends up as on the wiki some user will create a theme package to "fix" it for those who are tied to their "widget"'s positioning. (Personally I prefer to use keyboard shortcuts to avoid mouse tracking... so I doubt that I'll really care excepting for the case of unresponsive apps in linux that also seem to occasionally clog up the entire system which makes clicking the close "widget" a quick possibility of killing the offending blocking app especially if the system is so slow that desktop changes/etc. are very slow. i.e. getting to a terminal, then finding and killing the process... AAMOF I've often resorted to simply powercycling on occasion.

I think the changes are nice, although not a color palette I would have picked. The orangy/brownish theme as least made sense. It was to cover the colors of humans, hence the name Human.

I cannot think of anywhere that uses grey, beige and violet together? I admit it kind of works, but may have to grow on me.

Oh, and the placement of the window controls, especially the close button, has GOT to change. It sucks.

Looks decent enough, but I'm not a fan of the eggplant/aubergine usplash screen.

Back when I used to run Ubuntu (last one was 8.04), I almost always used the Ubuntu Studio usplash and distro logo, since my wallpapers and themes were usually a combination of blue, black and white.

On a side note, I'm loving the designs for the new concept CD, web branding and the stickers/mugs/souvenirs.

Judging by the screenshots, the new Ubuntu theme looks quite dark and heavy. I wonder why they wanted to name it "Light"?

Well, that doesn't really bother me. I'm probably not going to use Ubuntu much on my computers. I usually test-install every new Ubuntu release on a spare partition, but so far none of these installations have stayed for more than a couple of days. I think I like this new theme a bit better than the old theme, but I generally prefer a somewhat lighter gtk+2 theme (the default xfce4 theme with slight modifications of my own, especially to make the scrollbar dark grey, so you can actually see it).

And what's this talk about "titlebars" and "widgets"? I've configured fvwm not to show any titlebars, so the programs can use more of the available screen space. Hey, you only need to learn three keyboard shortcuts and then you can maximize, minimize, and close windows without touching the mouse. And the other two window managers that I occasionally use -- ratpoison and stumpwm -- don't even support titlebars.

Also, I prefer to use "xsetroot -solid gray10" as my desktop background image. I reckon the less the themes and desktop wallpapers attract your attention, the more time you're going to spend doing what you actually want to do with your computer.

I'm just pleased to see Karmic's Mr Bean splash screen has gone.

Lets hope pulse audio is fully working in 10.04.

I like the new font for 'Ubuntu', but what I don't like is that they've all but hidden their recognized 'three-dotted circle' logo inside this little afterthought of an apostrophe after their name.

I say, take the 'three-dotted circle' out of that white dot, let it stand out on it's own. It's the most recognized part of their visual identity (not to mention the topic icon for Ubuntu stories on OSnews).

First of all, people tend to pay all too much attention to such surficial things like colouring of theming. Those things can be easily changed by anyone reading a forum like this.

As to the new looks, I get the feeling that it looks rather mediocre still, unfinished and even confusing in many ways. The colouring might still need some improvement too in order to look more coherent. Now it still looks like a mix of old and new. Also the contrasts between the darker and lighter elements in the darker version of the default theme may look too strong, IMHO. But, anyway, like I said above, colouring is a minor thing and easily changed.

Much more problematic is the new window manager button ordering in the screenshots - like already pointed by many other commentators above. Actually I find it hard to believe that the final Ubuntu 10.04 could really use something so non-standard and odd as the default Metacity button ordering?

Placing the window manager buttons in the upper left corner of the window, like Mac OS X does, works from the point of view of minimizing the amount of mouse movements (menus, buttons, screen top panel). But if you want to go the Mac way, do it fully then and at least place the close button in the corner. In every window manager that I know, the closing button is placed in the window corner. Probably most people will find the setting shown in the screenshots quite odd indeed.

Also, it would probably save many Ubuntu users from frustration to keep the old Human themes around as legacy options too. Despite all the complaints, many people, me included, have found the Human themes quite nice too. Compared to the Ubuntu 09.10 default Human looks the new proposed 10.04 theming shown in the screenshots looks quite unfinished still.

Edited 2010-03-06 21:33 UTC