Ubuntu: Jaunty isn't Pretty
Now that I’ve been using Jaunty for a while (netbook and laptop) I have to say, I’m not impressed with the new login theme, background or upslash graphics. I feel like my computer’s gone all red and demon like, but colour is a matter of subjective opinion so I’m willing to admit this entire post is nothing more than my opinion on colour.
What ever happened to orange and brown? I like orange and brown. When done right it can been soothing and food like and there is I read a link between stress and colour, especially in high stress fields where a person is on a computer all day. Someone did point out below that there are cultural connections for colours, although I’m more interested in the biological ones.
Red isn’t good for mood, green is a much better for your mood, relaxing like a forest without tigers. Blue seems refreshing and browns seem earthy and productive. Orange and yellow remind me of food.
So what’s the deal? Well there is a move towards high contrast designs, black colours and all very gothic colours. I’m sure this is a move towards showing off on newer high contrast displays and perhaps a new colour theme is more appropriate for the majority of users.
I know there are loads of artists and designers in the community, hopefully you guys can come and tell me what a load of tosh I’m talking about. But for now I’ll hopefully have my upsplash changed… although on my laptop I already had a nice blue gdm theme and brown gnome theme in place. Only my netbook needs updating now.
Instead of complaining why don’t you use the features available to you and change it to one of the many different themes. Dumbass.
I think Jaunty is a big fucking regression atm… but i think Karmik Koala will be great!
There are more important stuff that looks, backend…. and jaunty just sucks at video accelleration… intel and ati drivers at least are crap.
So it seems that the color perfect for you is pink.
http://webdesign.about.com/od/color/a/bl_colorculture.htm
Colors have different meaning in different cultures. For example, according to that link:
In India red is pure.
In China green is related to adultery and exorcism.
Yep! orange and brown make pink
Yes there are cultural ideas about colours, that’s why there is research being conducted to separate out the biological/chemical colour effects and the cultural/mental connections. I believe certain wavelengths of blue causes melatonin disruption for instance.
Anon: It’s Dumb Arse, since I install, support and upgrade so many other people’s machines, I have to be concerned with the default themes and colours. If I can’t sell Ubuntu because it’s lost it’s sizzle, then I might as well pack up the LoCo. What we don’t need is toxic workarounds that fix things for me and no one else. Although if it turns out to be totally subjective and I’m in the minority, I’m prepared to bare it.
I agree. I don’t like the new login promp.
I have not installed Jaunty yet, because I got an Intel card on my laptop and my desktop is still back in time with Dapper (LTS you know
), so I don’t know if the ‘classic’ login screen is still there or not.
Personally I think Jaunty looks stunning… oh wait, I’m on KDE / Kubuntu.
Seriously though, while intellectual interpretation of colour does vary from culture to culture certain combinations are common amongst most cultures. Blue and green together mean natural in most places just as black and red means dangerous. This is seen even outside human cultures, where most black and red insects tend to be poisonous.
For a new user trying to pluck up the courage to try an operating system very different to the one they’ve used their whole life, sending a signal with the default colours “Dangerous” is a decidedly strange choice. Good for hardcore gamers, but not grandma who wants her computer to feel safe, comfortable and easy.
I like many aspects of Jaunty, including some of the decisions related to style. However I would no more say that it was a significant improvement than it sounds like anyone else does. And as some say there are a few things that are regressions as well. My view is that this is not really a release that is designed as the be-all end-all for end users. It’s a release that removed a lot of cruft and hopefully the improvements in performance and support will give people interested in style the incentive to say I like the way this works, but here are some improvements in the way it appears, and we get better stuff out of the deal.
Perhaps the best use of the login screen as this sort of a tool would be to show prospective users just how easy it is to re-configure the interface to their preferences. How easy is it to build a corporate styled Login Screen that brands the PC as being part of your company, from the first point where user’s are expected to interact with the computer on. Further demonstrate the same variety with updating up-splash. The idea being that you have much more control over the UI than other platforms allow.
Make ‘faults’ into opportunities.
Also in China, white is related to death.
Actually, it is “dumbass,” and has nothing to do with the longstanding American practice of slurring the word “arse” and changing the spelling to match. “Dumb” meaning unable to speak, but more commonly slang for “stupid;” “ass” literally meaning “donkey” but in this case being slang for a mean, foolish, unlikable person, roughly equivalent to “jerk.” Put them together, and you have “dumbass,” slang for a stupid jerk. Incidentally, I don’t think you are either.
I like elements of the visual changes going on in Jaunty. My complaint is that it looks like they started to redesign the look of Ubuntu, ran out of time, and included the unfinished work anyway. That may not actually be far from the truth. Regardless, my complaint with the usplash and GDM themes aren’t the colors. I like the bold, glossy look of them. My problem with them is the vast amount of empty black space compared to the old themes. The GDM theme in particular needs a warmly-colored, glossy “ubuntu” above the login prompt. It might also benefit from some kind of faint, maybe just barely visible image or pattern behind it all to bridge the remaining black void on the screen and pull everything together.
That being said–as much as I think what I described would look great aesthetically, I don’t think it really goes very well with the Ubuntu branding. It’s been commonly recognized that the old Human themes can come off as a bit drab and may be small deterrent to some potential users, so I applaud the effort to make bold changes. However, the Ubuntu look needs to be bright and friendly, not dark and moody.
if youre taking suggestions on new GDM themes, i like
http://www.gnome-look.org/content/show.php?content=90885&vote=good&tan=56981075
just copy to the /usr/share/gdm/themes/ folder.
while the new gdm themes arnt for everyone, at least it inspires people to go out an customize it themselves.
You say this, yet your blog is a stark black and red?
It’s black and orange.
This blog, being mostly technical, should look dark and forbidding
.
for some reason, i just re-format ubuntu from jaunty back to intrepid
and for login page, i’m using custom made (dunno by who), that show my city, kuala lumpur
I can’t help, but the new login screen feels like it’s 1995 over again…
You’re right with the usplash screen, it’s horrible and extremely pixellized. I think I’ve already seen 4-color images that look better. Notification popups are too small and in most of them the text is split (e.g., Foo has signed in), which does not look good. Once again we’re promised a polished version and we just get what’s ready when it’s time for the release.
Fedora 10’s GDM theme works better than Ubuntu’s, largely because it has a face browser by default.
Ubuntu’s password entry field looks too similar to the username entry field. When using Human List, the user may not realise they’ve yet to select their face, and type their password into the username field. A minor shoulder-surfing security hole ensues.
Fedora’s GDM background is identical to the default wallpaper, which just makes sense.
Also, Fedora has animations. Animations look cool.
I can’t agree more. The usplash and GDM theme are regressions. Especially the GDM. It’s not just about the color, the design itself is ugly. It’s like some low-ranked GDM you can find at gnome-look.org.
Best USsplash ever. In fact I dumped my custom splash to GET this one. Now if someone could get back the art team for the DESKTOP….you know, the folks that did hardy heron? sigh.
I’ve got to say as someone who doesn’t really have a stake in this (I’m a KDE user) that the new colour scheme for the Gnome version looks a hell of a lot better than the baby-poo brown of the old one!
But that is (as are so many things in life) a purely personal opinion..
I actually like the new gdm theme. In Gutsy and Intrepid, since I’m a single user anyways, I only require password in bios to boot. Once that’s entered I go right into gnome. So, since I didn’t do a full install (upgrade) I didn’t even notice the new theme.
Then, I did a full install on one of my laptops, and to my surprise found this very sexy gdm login prompt. I think that the orange was so bright and goofy. Sure, this may be a bit gothic, but it certainly feels more polished.
That mentioned, I’m having a problem with the new notifications on my netbook. They’re too big and intrusive on such a small screen! And it seems that the preferences menu to configure it is missing. I did some reading, and some ASSHOLE apparently filed a bug, thinking that the a notifications menu was too advanced for ubuntu users. Actually the exact wording is:
“I think the preferences menu is crammed enough as is, and such small details should be hidden from the average user.”
Check out this madness! Bug #301766. I actually enjoy the notifications but I’m likely to disable them entirely since I can’t control the size of them on my netbooks small screen. Why not? Because some ass thought the preferences menu was crammed.
IMHO, black is a very elegant colour. And I hadn’t thought of anything satanic and/or gothic concerning the gdm login theme until I read this post.
Red goes very well with black!
Very dark orange, but okay. It’s orange.
You don’t like the new GDM? But the colour scheme of your blog matches it?
Jaunty is great. Superb,stylish,fast….I love it
Colors have cultural meanings. The exact shade of brown that Ubuntu had when I first installed Ubuntu (I think 3.x) made me literally fall off my chair laughing… I couldn’t stop for several minutes. That shade of brown is seen as the exact shade of SHIT in where I come from.
Now I understand that brown is a color of cleanless and good things in especially in African cultures (like white to us), but… If you want to get any real market share in elsewhere, you got to change the colors. It’s just that simple.
I agree, not very stylish…kind of what all the heavy metal guys think is cool. main thing it is dark and still a bit flashy. I hate it…:(
I’m from England and I consider that shade of brown to mean ‘earth’, so I call you out as positioning your opinions as facts.
I agree that the whole new Ubuntu theme stuff feels a bit like coming from the last decade. And yes, it’s too dark IMO. But the worst problem is, that it feels a bit inconsistent. There’s just no connection between usplash, gdm and the gnome theme. Fedora got this part much better, but has other problems (i.e. stupid animations in gdm…).
The hard reality is, there’s no perfect color palette for default (except of course for the colors I like.) There’s no strong technical argument for any particular palette. Studies on emotional responses to color are difficult to make use of unless your are designing a product for a particular culture. the Ubuntu distribution is global, and thus not that sort of product. The LoCo produced alternative localized livecds could make use of that sort of culturally aware colorscaping information, but the default Ubuntu, can’t really.
There maybe a strong technical argument on how to construct a palette of colors, such as issues of color contrast but there are no hard and fast rules for which properly constructed palette to use. Every single choice you can make with regard to elements of style like color palette is going to simultaneously be appealing and unappealing to different people. It’s almost not worth commenting on personal dislike or like as there will never be real consensus on the issue…. just controversy….like a Jackson Pollock painting.
Given that, what really matters is the squishier questions of distinctiveness and brand identity. Is the default palette distinctive? Or will people confuse the default Jaunty install for another Ubuntu release or another distro? Will people fail to recognize this as Ubuntu at first glance? Is the brown/orange palette seen in previous releases more iconic, more recognized than the Ubuntu logo itself?
-jef
[...] Ubuntu: Jaunty isn’t Pretty Now that I’ve been using Jaunty for a while (netbook and laptop) I have to say, I’m not impressed with the [...] [...]
With the new Jaunty, I have mistakenly type the password field in the username. Gosh, that didn’t happen before. Then, I realized that GDM on Jaunty only gives one chance to type the password. But, still…
I agree with the face browser or different field just to notice.
haha I agree. If you do not like the theme or splash page just change them, it takes like 10 seconds after you find the custom one you desire.
This is the first Ubuntu release I kept the default GDM splash active as I like it for some reason. But then again, I am one of those “heavy metal guys” Lorenz talks about. The desktop background does suck tho, change that for sure.
Agree, if Fedora have done something right with version 10, it’s their boot process. Simply awesome. Well, hopefully Ubuntu will get the same consistency after move from Usplash to Plymouth.
Anyway, about the default Gnome theme: in Jaunty I see subtle improvements to it and I think if the window title bar could be changed (I really like the Dust title bar) and the font be changed to Droid Sans, I guess there would be no need to switch to Dust (great, but even with the (new) lighter parts too dark) / New Wave (ugly title bars, imo) / Darkroom (usable, but weird).
I wish they had upgraded the face browser too. When/if using GDM, I only use the face browser, all my systems are multi-user (except my laptop).
[...] Ashughes: Ubuntu 9.04 First Impressions Technoblogical: Five Minutes of Ubuntu 9.04 DoctorMO: Ubuntu: Jaunty isn’t Pretty Mango Chico: My first trial with Ubuntu – [...]
[...] Una solució que em va donar Internet va ser purgar completament tots els paquets que tenen a veure amb el driver fglrx i instal·lar el paquet de la ati (xserver-xorg-video-ati), i efectivament el sistema no es penja, però no pots fer res perquè la pantalla sembla la de canal+ codificada, on difícilment pots veure els colors amb contrasts del nou tema predeterminat d’ubuntu, el qual ja critiquen alguns… [...]
quit bitching people. you’re on Linux. if you don’t like something, you CAN change it you know.
Yes we _could_ fork the entire of Ubuntu and create our own OS, but why not just bitch a bit and hopefully get the designers to see sense instead?
I have been using Xubuntu since Gutsy. I saw a solid improvement with each release though often there were issues that took a while to be patched in subsequent updates. Jaunty though has been terrible. It reintroduced many of the problems that had been sorted out in Intrepid.
To all the trolls, yes, I could go back to an older version if I wanted to…but I have enough stability to get by until the next release. And I simply can’t be bothered doing a clean install because I have better things to do than customising a system to suit my needs. Bitching about a release is a normal response. I mean, trolls like to bitch about people bitching!!!! What is the difference.
Something simple like themes are easy to fix. Something more fundamental like regressions in Intel video support less so. I think Jaunty was a backward step and I really hope Koala is more stable.