CNET Says Ubuntu 9.04 “As Slick As Windows 7 and OS X”

I am being honest when I say that I want Ubuntu and the Linux movement to get it. When I read articles like this one posted on CNET.com this week, I kind of chuckle at first, then reality sets in and I feel sorry for them.

Renai LeMay makes some huge claims in the article. Several of them I don’t have any problem with, such as Ubuntu being snappy and performant, it definitely is. He runs it on a 2Ghz Core 2 Duo with 2GB of Ram, a 7200rpm disk and a GeForce 8800GTS video card. I am sure it runs it fantastically well. But I do have a few beefs. First of all, to mock Steve Jobs repurposing of an old Mark Twain quote, “The reports of Vista’s performance problems have been greatly exaggerated.”

I’ll give you that there were some hardware issues and quirks pre Service Pack 1, but after a little bit to settle, it’s just fine now. I helped a friend upgrade a laptop with a 2Ghz AMD processor, 2GB of ram, 7600 series video and a 5400 rpm hard drive, and it ran Vista and Office 2007 just fine.

So taking performance out of the equation for now, and the unrealistic expectations that you should be able to run a next-gen Operating System, the issue is the quote that it’s just as slick as OS X and Windows 7. Of course Windows 7 and OS X Leopard are locked in their own battle for desktop slickness, but seriously, the drab brown Gnome based UI of Ubuntu looks like a JV attempt at UI design or a Sepia copy of a 10 year old Windows desktop.

I don’t mean to be rude, but this desktop looks exactly like it did when I started playing with Ubuntu over three years ago. Sure, the wallpaper is slightly changed, but if I were to grab a screenshot from my blog, dated September 2007, take a look:

Wow, um, I know you tidied a few things up in the package management and stuff, but where is any evolution of the desktop? I am going to clue the Linux community into the worst kept secret in human history… People like shiny glossy things. My previous post about Operating System color theory was just the beginning. Things have to pop, zing, and shine. People expect transparencies, drop shadows, fade in, fade out, shrink, grow, etc. Ubuntu has none of these things out of the box. Sure, you can tweak it to your heart’s content, but let’s get real, this is about first impressions.

I have seen some fantastic Linux desktops, but I have yet to see one in a default install. Why would Ubuntu be so ignorant to this fact? Let’s look at Ubuntu from versions 4 through 8.

That’s 5 years of development and improvements. Now seriously, from  2004 to 2009 what do you see if you don’t count the different wallpaper?

Let’s just make it clear. Ubuntu is not slick. It looks like what it is, essentially freeware, which has the general reputation of being out of date. It’s stable, usable and a legitimate operating system for sure. But it’s stuck in Windows 95 era design.

I hope the figure it out. Brown isn’t trendy and cool. Spartan retro looking operating systems aren’t going to win over users, and the majority of computer sales are made by a showroom impression. If you were to stick a default Ubuntu desktop beside a new Mac and a Windows Vista or 7 computer, you will quickly understand why Linux is not making progress on the desktop.

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