After years of promises there finally has been a mayor overhaul of the Ubuntu theme after the “Brown Human Theme” that we have been accustomed to for so long, I know the usual complaints about the old Faeces Theme but i actually kind of liked it, or at least its what I’m used too and thought that Karmic was almost pretty damn chocolate perfect.

So, before continuing my tasteless rant here i would like to thank the people who worked on this new theme because its not something i can do or even can do better, so please understand where this is coming from before taking it personal and i’m glad the theming of the metacity theme, desktop background, GDM and splash are finally heading consistency.
Also that i have remarks does not mean its all bad, its just easier to be negative so take it as positive criticism ;)

The timing

My first head-shacking experience is about the timing of the introduction of the theme itself, actually I had this about various new introductions in LTS releases.

I understand that a new release, and especially a LTS, has to be pushed with as much media attention as possible and a new exciting shiny new theme is definitely something to advertise on the billboards, but this sounds like a commercial decision to me and not something I’m happy with as a user in the long term.

Software gets better with age and so do themes, why would you want to put a new untested theme in something that you are going to be stuck with a long time, especially with the “only bugfixes” approach.

If you start a new theme with the LTS then the next LTS -1 will have the perfect matured version of that theme, that does not make sense to me.

The colour

OK, this is as subjective as its going to get but I actually liked the brown, as did many others. At least it was distinctive to Ubuntu. But yes, any colour will have its fair share of lovers and haters, but purple?

A choice is a choice and it has to be made, fair enough, but it took me some time to find out that this theme was described as “purple” since my first google after seeing the new colour was “lucid new pink theme” Am I the only one who’s first idea was that it was pink?

Apparently plenty of people seemed to like purple because it was the same purple as MacOSX. WTH??? Ubuntu should not to try to mimic the branding of Mac or MS but should stand out as being Ubuntu, did Linspire become a success because it looked just like windows?

But there are so many people coming from windows so you should try to make them feel at home is the usual response. Yeah Right, I did not move to Linux 6 years ago because I was so incredibly happy with windows and I can hardly imagine a happy Mac user to switch to Ubuntu because it looks so much like what he is used too, a cheap rip off it looks like.

The window buttons

Another much heard of complaint is the placement of the window buttons to the left. (Again, just like MacOSX)

Why? well.. its different, Yes….its how some other software company (That I will not mention again) does it, Yes….is it a useful change, No…is it confusing, Yes….does it look misplaced, Yes.

Every blog stopped complaining about it and started bugfixing, so I will repeat the steps here to be complete.

window buttons to the right

press — Alt F2 — type “gconf-editor” —- go to “apps” — go to “metacity” — go to “general” — right click “button_layout” — edit key — and change the value to “:minimize,maximize,close”

nuff said!

window title in the centre

This still leaves the window title on the far left instead of centred and it still looks ridiculous.

Open a terminal and issue the following command

sudo gedit /usr/share/themes/Ambiance/metacity-1/metacity-theme-1.xml

and find that part that looks like this
<!-- Window Title -->

<draw_ops name="draw_title_text_inactive">
<title color="#333333"
x="10"
y="(((height - title_height) / 2) `max` 0)+1"/>
<title color="#333333"
x="10"
y="(((height - title_height) / 2) `max` 0)-1"/>
<title color="#333333"
x="9"
y="(((height - title_height) / 2) `max` 0)"/>
<title color="#333333"
x="11"
y="(((height - title_height) / 2) `max` 0)"/>
<title color="#99958b"
x="10"
y="(((height - title_height) / 2) `max` 0)"/>
</draw_ops>


and change it to look like this.

<!-- Window Title -->

<draw_ops name="draw_title_text_inactive">
<title color="#333333"
x="((3 `max` (width-title_width)) / 2)"
y="(((height - title_height) / 2) `max` 0)+1"/>
<title color="#333333"
x="((3 `max` (width-title_width)) / 2)"
y="(((height - title_height) / 2) `max` 0)-1"/>
<title color="#333333"
x="((3 `max` (width-title_width)) / 2)"
y="(((height - title_height) / 2) `max` 0)"/>
<title color="#333333"
x="((3 `max` (width-title_width)) / 2)"
y="(((height - title_height) / 2) `max` 0)"/>
<title color="#99958b"
x="((3 `max` (width-title_width)) / 2)"
y="(((height - title_height) / 2) `max` 0)"/>
</draw_ops>


It doesn’t work with every application

Its kind of hard to make a theme that will shine and gives the best result for every application thinkable, this again has something to do something with maturity and how fast and if the designers can fix this for the new release.

Firefox for example gives a very unreadable result when the history results come up when typing in the address bar.

Skype gives an unreadable result when right clicking on a contact to see the available options.

I’m sure there will be other non-gnome programs…can the devs fix this before the release or will we be stuck with an unlucky theming choice for many otherwise useful programs the next 3 years?

Size matters

The last part of my rant is that the window buttons are really tiny, don’t get me wrong I’m not blind and they don’t have to be huge, but they are half the size of any other button available. Besides being a visual distortion it also leaves room for error since you do have to aim pretty actually to hit the option you want, this is doable during most circumstances but I noticed when wanting to close some windows when coming /home late at night after a few beers that it was damn right impossible to hit the right one.

But with the new 9.10 in beta i’m willing to put it up to the test to see if i can switch to the standard Ubuntu for all my installed desktops (+- 12 of them) by the time of 10.04 .

While safely posting this from my Xubuntu Jaunty 9.04 eeepc netbook i will be keeping track of the preparation for my personal use case on a modest Pentium IV with 512MB RAM as my test installation