It's a growing process. The point is that it looks better than it did.
I for one like the clean look of my XMonad.
I am new to xmonad and loving it so far
my only issue is how terrible floating windows are, I would love to be able to use xmonad tiling mode for my constant windows, but if I want to bring up skype or a filebrowser for a few minutes just use a normal gnome type window that has the familiar mouse interactions.
* well not my only issue, I would also like to easily hide and restore windows
The big question for me is: if I upgrade to 10.04, will it by default overwrite my colour scheme and other things I've set up on my desktop? Because it took me time to set up the colours / fonts / effects / etc the way I like them, and I'm buggered if I'm going to let some arrogant bastard tell me I have to either (i) have my desktop they way he wants it not the way I want it, or (ii) re-do all that work.
Nop, I did that and it will keep all your changes... you'll just notice the improvements over the notifications area.
I already upgraded, and I'm quite pleased with the changes. Unfortunately, the new default theme is slightly buggy; for example, when you open gvim from a terminal, you get various error messages show up which are to do with the window manager. I swicthed back to the "Human" theme, and the error messages disappeared.
I've noticed the window manager under Lucid is much more responsive. I'm not sure if that's just me though, because I'm unfortunately damned with SiS graphics drivers, and I had to update those manually.
It's much more important to me to be able to change the resolution on my monitor (impossible to do anything other than 480x640 on 9.10) than what color the default theme is.
What I mean to say is that for Ubuntu to displace Windows in any measurable amount, the things that users expect to work have to work. While I am happy to edit my xorg.conf file because ubuntu doesn't recognize certain graphics card/monitor combinations, my mother would not.
My office laptop was recently upgraded from Windows XP to Windows 7. The background colors and overall theme changed. After a few days, I didn't notice it any more, nor was there a HN post about the color scheme change.
What I did notice was that offline folders worked a lot better than with XP. Those are the changes that actually make a difference to users. Users adapt to different themes and visuals pretty quickly.
Ubuntu has made huge strides in desktop linux usability, but Canonical needs to continue to focus on ironing out the last remaining kinks so it "just works."
As a huge fan of Linux, I have to say the modern Apple and Microsoft operating systems look significantly better.
As someone using all 3 OS's day to day (Ubuntu is my primary development OS, I have an iMac next to me, and I switch my laptop to Windows 7 for video games in the evenings), Windows 7 is easily my least favorite OS, it's performance is generally crummy compared to OSX and Ubuntu, and it's UI often aggravating.
See I find the opposite is true for me. I don't have much experience with OS X but between ubuntu and Windows 7 I _much_ prefer Win7. I just can't stand how much screen space is eaten up by useless padding, menu bars, sidebars and panels, not to mention the overly large fonts. I realize that everything is customizable, but I don't have the patience. Windows 7 also seems faster and more responsive to me but responsiveness is largely subjective and situational.