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It's 2010 and Ubuntu is still ugly

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: It's 2010 and Ubuntu is still ugly

#11

Post by kalid »

amock wrote: post #4
makecheck wrote: post #2

The problem with that view, is that Linux distributions are free and maintained by a lot of people in their free time. (Yes, and many companies as well.) Your solution has to come in some form of contribution, and it has to be specific. The best thing would be artwork, code, etc. Even if all you can do is E-mail somebody who actually works on Ubuntu, and let them know what you'd rather have, I think that would help,…

I think that part of the ugliness comes from having so many contributors and a culture that is used to things not having a consistent look and feel. On OS X almost all native programs look and feel the same way and the frameworks and tools encourage developers to follow Apple's human interface guidelines. When someone uses another toolkit, such as Qt, the apps just don't feel right. On Linux there is not single tools…

Agreed. It's frustrating using an inconsistent API (camelCase, under_score, different parameter orders, overlapping functionality, etc.).

The UI is the API that users work with. Inconsistencies are frustrating.

Re: It's 2010 and Ubuntu is still ugly

#12

Post by protomyth »

oconnore wrote: post #8

The biggest problem in my opinion is multimedia support. I bet there is a market for a $25-50 Linux distribution with Open Office configured to use Ms-Office formats by default, have support for all "royalties required" formats, Microsoft fonts, and have a windows/mac look-alike theme installed by default.

I think that battle has been fought and won by Windows. Open Office has had a long time to unseat Microsoft Office and it hasn't found that reason for people to switch (it's free isn't doing it). We are now looking at the computer actually turning into a low maintenance appliance, and I really believe some Linux distribution or BSD has a shot at taking a chunk of the market. I just hope it isn't by copying someone else.

Re: It's 2010 and Ubuntu is still ugly

#13

Post by htsh »

oconnore wrote: post #8

The biggest problem in my opinion is multimedia support. I bet there is a market for a $25-50 Linux distribution with Open Office configured to use Ms-Office formats by default, have support for all "royalties required" formats, Microsoft fonts, and have a windows/mac look-alike theme installed by default.

I find that I'm able to consume all of the media I need to on except for Microsoft Silverlight content like Netflix and the Feynman Lectures. The bigger pain for me is that there's no iTunes or Adobe design products. I'm not sure if there's anything that we can expect more from Ubuntu in this regard.

With Google's ChroneOS on the way and Apple's eventual move to the cloud, I hope that I can soon access my iTunes functionality from a browser. And adobe has committed to moving all of their products to the browser, so I'm not too worried about i, just wish the process would move along a bit faster.

Re: It's 2010 and Ubuntu is still ugly

#14

Post by protomyth »

htsh wrote: post #10

I recall reading somewhere that some of the better font hinting algorithms are patented such that its tough for linux distros to make them as pretty. My pie-in-the-sky hope is that the knight in shining Google armor comes in and buys some of these patents for their ChromeOS and opens them up in the process. But really, Linux is far from ugly and can look as nice as anything you can do on windows/mac. Your fonts will…

http://www.freetype.org/patents.html

Re: It's 2010 and Ubuntu is still ugly

#18

Post by nuggien »

if you are going to call something ugly, you need to provide us with something you think is not ugly as reference (maybe a screenshot of your desktop?). If you think windows is beautiful, then you have no business calling anything ugly.
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