It's 2010 and Ubuntu is still ugly

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, too.

What's "gigantic"? What's "ugly"? This would tell me nothing about how to make you happy. How about you tell them, "the text in this area here, in this particular program, is bigger than I'd like; and over here, in this program, I think having green would be better than brown". That kind of thing.

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 toolset and if there are human interface guidelines they don't seem to be followed. So the problem isn't that you need to change a few small things about some interfaces, it's that there needs to be a strongly consistent design that all programs follow.

I wouldn't do that actually. Just emailing 'your' opinion to some of the developers might actually have the reverse effect.

I do agree that if you complain you also need to come with a solution and a contribution of some sort. You might what to create your own Gnome theme and show the world how it should be done. If the rest of the world agrees with you your theme will be the number one downloaded theme on http://art.gnome.org in no time.

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 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 be the same and you are by no means limited to Gnome or any of its themes. Having bad defaults is one thing, being ugly is another.

Reddit's search is broken now but users their post some absolutely gorgeous desktops where they do all kinds of neat stuff with conky. I will try to post some if the search comes back within the edit timeframe.