Ubuntu to get prettier than OS X?

Word on the street is that Ubuntu is going to get prettified in the near future.


Well, maybe not that prettified.

From the original article:

When Mark Shuttleworth, the man behind Canonical/Ubuntu, made the comment that Ubuntu should be prettier than Apple OSX in near term I got excited - the man was absolutely right. It doesn’t matter how customizable and operating is, or how good can you make it look with some effort if it does look bad out of the box. The out-of-the-box experience is the key to reach the average users, and if that is not aesthetically pleasing a lot of effort is needed to win the user back. Interestingly Ubuntu with their orange/brown themes and very basic Gnome looks is possibly the worst looking distribution out of the major players. So here comes release 8.10, the Intrepid Ibex - a first step to the direction of making Ubuntu look good? We’ll see about that…
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Unfortunately the Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex does not live up to it’s name. It lacks any ground braking changes, innovation in design or brave new approaches on the visuals and usability.

One of my biggest complaints with Linux is the lack of a truly streamlined desktop experience. Each developer takes their own route for user interface and "prettification". This mean inconsistent menus, strange window behaviors, and even conflicting theming options that seeming to fight each other for control. I'm not a n00b, I've been running Linux for over 8 years now.

The real problem is, to impose usability standards on applications goes against the open-source grain of exploration and creativity in problem solving. There is no Steve Jobs to force developers into doing it in any particular way, and developers don't want that either. End users are another story.

I'd also argue that "pretty" is not vital to an OS, but usable is. Therein lies the rub for me. Until Linux runs Photoshop natively, it's usability as a desktop for me is dimished. Also, OS X has the pretty interface and the BSD based functionality to make it a daily driver operating system.

That being said, all of my servers are some flavor of linux.

So for now, I'd say embrace Linux for what it is - a user-friendly distribution with serious horsepower under the hood for power users. If you haven't tried it, and you are a Windows user, you should. Immediately. For OS X users, your mileage may vary.