“Now let’s not get side-tracked from the primary topic. I’ve decided to focus less on making this an entertaining read and instead provide more brief and to the point examples. This being a sequel article, will certainly prove disappointing to many so I might as well not hold back even if this installment turns into more of a behavior and functional sanity check than a visual presentation critique.” More here.
Ubuntu 7.10 Pragmatic Visual and Behavioral Critique II
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
We are starting to talk about details of how to improve this already nice OS.
This shows that linux is here to live forever wheather anyone like it or not.
I use ubuntu regularly at my home and work and even though it has issues with it, I still prefer to deal with it than to deal with windows vista/XP
Nice Job Ubuntu team.
Consistency is the name of the game. Black and orange? Maybe, will have to wait and see on that one, I’m not a big fan of black themes.
Black and orange? I certainly hope that they pull it off, but yikes. On the other hand, if it’s just the branding (and not the desktop and theme so much) it could work just fine.
As far as the article, the guy knows what he’s talking about. Most of the items he brings up are things I have noticed and been slightly annoyed by, but not actually thought much about. Most of it is about GNOME more than Ubuntu, though.
Most of it is about GNOME more than Ubuntu, though.
On second thought you are right most of the article is about Gnome and not about Ubuntu. The GTK bug for example will impact every system that uses Gnome.
Edited 2007-11-03 07:48
Am I missing something here, or does this article really spend a screens-worth talking about colour schemes without actually making a point?
He says “Ok, so brown has become Ubuntu’s identity, but make alternate palettes available within the popular themes such as Human and Clearlooks and leave the color wheel with 4,294,967,296 colors for those who enjoy advanced tweaks of their interface (yours truly included).”
Did he not notice the section of the “Themes” control panel (admittedly “hidden” behind a button) that provides just what he is asking for (alternative palettes)?
The point is that the default theme only provides 1 color, brown. The Human theme does not even support different color schemes.
Changing a theme as you suggest does much more than changing the colors. All your controls change visually.
There is a reason gnome picked clearlooks as the default theme. A lot more work and refinement has gone into the engine to make sure it looks consistent across all applications and is generally a good default because it doesn’t have any over the top effects.
Changing a theme as you suggest does much more than changing the colors. All your controls change visually.
This is one of those things that the KDE appearance/theme stuff allows for. It’s also one of the things that makes KDE more “complicated” and less “easy,” if you listen to GNOME wonks. I always figured that when GNOME people woke up they’d have to adopt some “complexities” that are, as it turns out, necessary (or at least something the users want)… like print control dialogs which actually list every feature supported.
f–k another KDE troll. Do these always have to devolve into KDE vs Gnome?
Not a KDE troll. Simply stating a truth: KDEs appearance settings allows for this. GNOME’s needs to (according to the article). Toss in a little anti-GNOME bitterness, and that’s it.
I’m sure that most of the people working on GNOME don’t really bother to use it or any other GUI so they probably don’t see the deficiencies.
If they took a long, hard look at the various GUIs and really improved GNOME in a big way, they could actually make improvements that would sell Linux and BSD to the general public and garner developer support.
Sure, they want to keep things free, but imagine if you could buy real applications for Linux or BSD at a retail store that now only sells Windows applications. It might just create a huge user market because it would help overcome switching headaches.
I find this second part of his Practical Critique better than the first part. It goes deeper and doesn’t spend so much time on some minor issues that people could also disagree with (e.g. should the desktop environment have one or two panels). Also the ideas are better grounded and explained in the second part.
Well, yes, he writes quite a lot about theming and colors – but also about many other things. It is just that somehow things like themes and colors often seem quite important to people, like we know from the feedback that Ubuntu has got. And after all, the GUI is what you will stare at all the time when using an OS, so of course it matters what it looks like. Anyway, in my opinion the ideas he presents about themes are among the best I’ve heard in the field of improving the default Ubuntu theming.
I think that a critique of KDE by this same author would be nice.
Why wait for him to do it?
* When applying settings in Kcontrol, it’ll go through the ‘changing’ or ‘restarting’ dialog, and at the last instant I always see the ‘cancel’ button depress. It didn’t really, but the first few times I saw it I though the computer had somehow automatically cancelled my changes.
Haha yeah I notice that every time. First time I saw it, I thought in my head “HACK!!”. No dialog should behave like that. I should really look at what is going on in that code.