What do you think about the Ubuntu's desktop?

[tracey__]

What do you think about the Ubuntu's desktop, in terms of appearance and customisation?
Another question towards my primary research for IT Diploma.

[aeiah]

you mean gnome? i find it fully featured and fully customisable. there's nothing ive wanted to do that i couldnt do with gnome/nautilus, but then that's true of most desktop environments in linux since they all have a basic philosophy of customisability.

[gnomeuser]

I think that Ubuntu has been good at building a visual brand, you know the brown tones means Ubuntu. I think they have been good at keeping that brand sacred, not throwing it overboard every 6 months instead refining it. While it is now reaching the end of it's life it has served Ubuntu well. Sadly some applications picked for the default install such as Firefox and openoffice are very poor at picking up the look and feel of the rest of the desktop and always manage to look alien not to mention ugly.

As for the customizations Ubuntu does, it is pretty close to upstreams GNOME though with some additions I like such as the work on the Fast User Switching Applet to do presence and logout/restart/suspend/hibernate interaction. It feels very nice in use.

There are also little things like adding links to "translate this application" and "report a bug" that make it very easy to transition from a user to a contributor which is a nice touch. As well as things like Apport to make crash reporting really easy and enhances the desktops stability long term.

Naturally the service it ties into, Launchpad, is both proprietary and dead hard to use correctly, which sorta defeats the purpose for the time being.

The main alternation from upstream in Jaunty is the notifications, while they are prettier in their simplicity than the standard I think time will show if we are able to make them part of a larger vision of the desktop. There is still work to be done for sure.