OSNews

This theme doesn't look like much more than a variation on others. I'm not so hot on what all of the GNOME/GTK+ themes are, but it doesn't really seem all that different to others I've seen in widespread use. The blue's nice I guess, and the widgets have been tweaked a little, but that seems to be about it. There are aspects of it which—just as with most themes—look awkward and out of place: the ticks on the checkboxes look completely wrong, the combo-box arrow miniwidget is totally off-centre, the GtkCombo in a disable state's arrow miniwidget doesn't look disabled [is that because you can still drop it down? if so, ignore that point], the bold font used for the frames is the proverbial sore thumb, and what on earth is that completely inexplicable additional shade of grey that doesn't seem to match anything else used for the menu bars all about?

Personally, I think a nice theme only takes you so far: unless the applications are designed with the theme in mind, you either find that they look like they've been built to be theme-agnostic (lots of overly-cautious spacing and so on), or they look like crap. If the Fedora guys want to really give their desktop a unique look and feel, they'll sit down and go through every single GUI element in the default install and fine-tune it to look and feel fantastic and consistent.

There's no reason why GNOME can't have applications that look and feel as good as some of the cream of the Mac OS X crop, but somebody who knows what they're doing has to be there to make it happen.

(Don't get me wrong, GNOME [and KDE] have come an awfully long way since their inception, but they still seem to be visibly trailing the visual fluidity you get on OS X—not that Windows is any better, of course, but aspiring to be as good as Windows, visually, isn't much of a goal)