Ubuntu still looks ugly. Vista or Mac OSX need not worry.

Actually its not fair to say Ubuntu. It should be "Gnome" and "KDE" look ugly (but more Gnome is just fuglier). I am talking about the default out of the box configurations and not something customized to the extreme with Beryl and Emerald. Whenever I try out a new Linux one of the first things I try to get working is Beryl just so I can get the non-GPLed themes and use "Visa smoked glass" which is the best looking that is legible Vista like theme. Then tweak all the shortcuts to make it make sense for me. Using Beryl gives me that choice, but Beryl is not instantly setup with any Linux I have tried as of yet. Maybe in a year or so the top Linux distros would have caught up to something that would match what Vista comes out of the box. Although I would've preferred LunaQQ with the vista like close buttons. But in the end I got this However, I think it would be a while before we get some form of consistency with the applications because of this stupid KDE/QT vs Gnome/GTK choice we have to deal with. In KDE's defense, I don't think they are far off from good user interface design. Their defaults may suck as much as Gnome, but the first thing they ask is what you would prefer (which I choose Windows since that is what I am used to). Gnome doesn't give you that option or at least not that easily. I'd rather drop Gnome and use KDE for my apps, unfortunately Eclipse and Firefox (with StumbleUpon) are Gnome based. This is the same stupidity I find with SWT vs Swing. I wish that SWT just get merged with the JDK already and make Swing just use the SWT widgets at the same time getting rid of the theming thing. I'm all for Java, but seeing OpenOffice have their fonts anti-aliased using the old way rather than the sub-pixel smoothing method really irks me. I like consistency in my interface. I didn't like the Borland widgets when they came out with it and MS Office with their different fangled menus and Eclipse and FireFox themes (fortunately their default pulls a lot from the desktop environment theme already). Anyway back to Linux or more specifically X. Some all knowing wise guy up there decided that X should define mechanism and not policy. Nice goal, but now we have toolkits coming out left right and center. Maybe if Xt was more usable and portable. I mean how many different kinds of buttons/scroll bars would we need to see? Plus "Sans" is still one of the worst fonts ever for people with lower resolutions or who want to have as much stuff on the screen as possible. Its too bloody wide and you don't get the full CJK fonts. On Windows Tahoma is better, but Segoe UI of Vista is so much better and on XP you get CJK things rendering correctly for your file names and not boxes with hex values. I can't remember if it was GTK or QT that had this problem, but drop down boxes are not available to keyboard users (meaning you cannot tab to it). Lots of the applications I used in Linux have no sense of tab order sometimes. I think it was Evolution that had one of the more demented tab ordering for their contacts. Also aside from Mandriva, none of Mint, Ubuntu, PCBSD and FreeBSD set my monitor which is 1680x1050 correctly in xorg.conf. Yah I can do it manually, but that comes with experience of using Linux and X since Slackware was the only distribution out there. The package system on any distribution I have used all have potential flaws when you want to deviate from the norm. Especially since not everyone makes .deb or .rpm for every distro out there. (Choice presents this problem), the only choice you may have is to compile things yourself. And if you do something as large as KDE on Mandriva, you may break too many things (like I did) and just start over from scratch again (like I did, but at least I got to try Mint because of it). At least with Windows and Mac its not much of a moving target for device makers as well. Windows may need to deal with installation of drivers while mac doesn't as much, but at least the drivers and support software are more likely to be available and tested well than it would be for Linux. Case in point, my Nokia 6230i cell phone. After a lot of googling I finally got it to be recognized over bluetooth and gnokii can get some data off the cell phone. But there is no sync facility yet that works correctly at least in the released versions. In Windows, all I have to do is install the code bloat of a software known as PC Suite. In a Mac I just make my phone discoverable and let the Mac find it and Calendar and Addressbook just syncs up correctly. And then you get these Linux fanboys that just say get a new cell phone. "No thank you very much, I'll just stick and recommend that people use the OS that comes with their system which is usually Windows or MacOS". They already paid for it anyway. Using Linux has a cost, its not money (unless you buy Mandriva PowerPack), but time. Setting up Windows may take a whole 30 minutes plus another 30 for Office and another hour to download the updates, but Linux takes 30 minutes to install everything and an hour to get Beryl or some nice window manager working, and about 3 hours configuring things to get things just right. Macs are just happy out of the box, but they do cost a lot (so I don't have one for myself, my wife does have one), and I can fix things in Windows if I have to, Linux as well, but with more time. read more | digg story