The main reason I was excited to try this release was due to their rebranding effort. Though a KDE-user I was excited to see how they had cleaned the murk-murk that you normally associate with Ubuntu’s default GNOME.

Download, burn, boot (a nice, fast boot!), and 20 minutes later I had a perfectly working Acer Aspire 4736Z running with Lucid Lynx. Sound, resolution, internet (including wireless!), webcam, and pretty much all my peripherals working out of the box. Well done. Kudos to the fact that I didn’t actually install it, but left it to my rather technologically illiterate mum.

Before going into the setup, the first thing anybody notices is the purple and orange highlighted colourscheme adopted by Canonical. It’s sharp and clean in a very distinct way. I have to admit that initially, I really quite liked the design (including that wallpaper somewhat). It had a sense of class the separated it from the age-old widget-like borders of other GNOME themes. Better yet, it did this whilst maintaining that characteristic Gnomish feel which I can’t really describe (you know, thick padding and such). However this doesn’t mean it’s good – on the contrary, GNOME’s bulkish plop of an interface lacks sleekness and eats up screenspace with excessive padding, large borders and ridiculously spaced widgets – both vertically and horizontally. It’s a mess. Upstream’s fault, true, but the large font size and the widget theme doesn’t make it any better.

What really contributed to the feel (in my opinion) was really in the monochromatic icons used. That was probably the sole cause of class other than the dropshadows on panels and slight compiz-integrated effects. The widget set wasn’t anything special, but the consistent rounded feel really contributed to the whole “smooth” look of the desktop.

However the polish falls short when it comes to the colours used in the widgets itself and icons. The widgets sport a hazy purplish brown throughout the entire interface, which really makes myself appreciate the clarity and brightness of my KDE desktop. In hindsight I suppose it was a way to prevent the harsh contrast that would otherwise exist when the dark toolbar and bright window background were combined, but all the same I think it could be improved. Radiance is lighter yes, but looks rather sickly pale.

The orange sported by progress loading bars and tinted across many icons (such as the folder icon and the close window button) is disgusting. It’s really terrible. Orange works upon purple well as a striking and clearly defined edge, but as a hazy blur (such as seen in a small area in the top of their wallpaper) it is a recipe for fail. Especially as I suspect the hue of orange used in icons was not part of their branding hue.

When using it for some time, I find that two things either will make you hate or love it – the size of the font and the default Ambiance theme. The size of the font by default is a shocking size 10. It’s large. It’s bulky. The rendering is decent but that doesn’t give it excuse to fill up the screen in a non-professional looking manner. I would’ve preferred size 8, but apparently dear mum who was using it wanted it changed back to 10. Getting older, eh, Shuttleworth? The Ambiance theme though on its outlook is rather nice may start irking you after a while having to adjust to the contrast between the light and dark. Navigating menus starts becoming painful and even though the padding helps, it’s not enough. Points for originality but no kudos from me there. I think a note should be said about default having the buttons on the left – it didn’t really affect me (I use them on the left anyways) and my mum (illiterate) but I guess legacy Windows folks might rant about their muscle memory.

The social integration is very neatly done. I had to watch over her setting up email and chats but it was surprisingly straightforward. Facebook, GTalk, MSN and email were nicely tucked into Ubuntu’s stylish monochrome status icons on the top right. Very well done. Recognisable, quick to pick up for beginners, and no need to wonder what the hell “Evolution” is and that it’d be under Applications -> Internet if you’re the sort of illiterate who believes GMail is the only way messages are sent online. The status editor is wonderful. I can’t help but really feel quite jealous of this whole status area, even though KDE is meant to be the “social desktop”. What a load of tosh. Thank goodness some work is being put into the systray for KDE SC 4.5.

Notifications are neat. Not as informing as I’d like them to be, but definitely better than the default GNOME notifications. The hover blur is a neat trick, and the dark background fits the rest of the tooltips and information providing bubbles.

Moving on to the default set of applications, I can’t complain. Removing The GIMP was a good choice IMHO, and the default is enough to give beginners a taste before they poke around in the software center – and on the topic of software, I must say it’s great how simple it is to install codecs, plugins and other software for beginners. Not exactly my cup of tea and incomparable to portage, but it’s definitely user-friendly and easy to start with.

On the whole, a (net) great release. Here’s to hoping that they extend this branding throughout the rest of their stuff (and please, clean up that disgusting website design they have!). For more information on branding I’d recommend this blog post for those interested – especially in the site design.

Note: in this review I’ve focused on their default look as well as their first impressions. Obviously everything is themeable but the point is that if Canonical is aiming to strike a certain brand with their identity plan, this is the stuff that’s going to count, whether or not you can customise it later. Of course, Ubuntu is not for everyone (me included, obviously, as a Gentoo user) so I’ve tried to look at things from their supposed audience’s view.

Kudos +1.

No related posts.