I wanted to get a closer look at the new Ubuntu “Light” styles that have been announced for version 10.04, Lucid Lynx, so I loaded up the today’s daily build in EC2. I was a little bit surprised to see that the default theme is Ambiance, a dark theme. It seems a little strange to roll out a new branding strategy called “Light” and make the default them a dark one.
The Ambiance theme seems a little half-baked, and doesn’t work well with some applications such as OpenOffice (where it becomes impossible to see the menu text). I’m sure that the Ubuntu team will work out all these bugs before the final release. Hopefully it will be fixed sooner, so that people can start writing documentation for the upcoming release with proper screenshots and videos.
One other disturbing change is the order of the window controls. For some reason, they’ve switched the position of the minimize and maximize buttons. I can’t imagine why they’d do such a thing, and if left in the final release, this will likely cause problems for millions of Ubuntu users. Please don’t mess with the window controls, please!
Here are some screenshots of the dark and light themes. Overall, I think they are pretty nice. There’s still a lot of brown and earth tones mixed in with the orange and new Ubuntu purple. I think it’s a fine start, and I look forward to seeing these themes develop over the next few months and years.
What do you think of the new Ubuntu look? Leave your comments below!
Ambiance
Radiance
I agree it looks half-baked- But I read somewhere (Wherever it was) that the theme was not final, and I’m quite sure it isn’t. I’m hoping that they will take some time to really look over the theme and get the bad stuff out before the release, and there’s always 10.10 of course. :P
Looks amateurish, don’t like it (Of course, I’ve tried it).
Since I have contrast problems with my vision, I cannot see well on a black/dark background. First thing I did was change it to the light (the Real Light that is) theme to be actually able to read the menu’s.
The swapping of the menu buttons was probably done to give it a bigger appeal to Mac users, (and the purple resembles one of OSX’s default backgrounds), but for me, a former Windows user converted to Linux years ago, it is the biggest pain in the neck ever. After changing the colours I changed the menu buttons back to how they used to be.
With those two modifications, the new look and feel of Ubuntu is a very modern and professional one. I like it. Font is great as well!
hideous….i stumbled across http://img229.imageshack.us/img229/4824/24v4fuv.jpg which looks a billion times more appealing than http://img229.imageshack.us/img229/4824/24v4fuv.jpg.
its the red tint thats really doing it for me, along with the horizontal bar across some menu’s, like firefox navigation.
and on my pc the display is at 1024*768 which is MASSIVE, i have to do horizontal scrolling on some pages and right click menu takes up 1/5 of the page
although, im only testing it, i would usually use a widescreen and change the settings from default. Why on earth the ubuntu team think this theme will compete with windows is beyond me (mac users are staying put)