Looks like the server's starting to buckle under the Slashdot Effect!

Here is the CORAL link to the page with screenshots:

http://www.jonobacon.org.nyud.net/2010/03/03/refreshing-the-ubuntu-brand/ [nyud.net]

You can close (and minimise, maximise, etc) windows by right clicking on the title bar or even the task bar's button corresponding to that window. This is consistent in KDE and several other window managers.

Windows 7 has many improvements over Vista.

I love the new window dragging features. Dragging a window to the top maximizes. Dragging to the side takes up half the screen. Dragging the top or bottom bar makes it go full-vertical. Windows Key + Arrow Keys also do those actions (as well as Restore/Minimize). Ctrl + Windows Key + Arrow Keys move windows across monitors.

Pinned taskbar icons remind me of the OS X dock, both of which keep everything ordered and uncluttered. Windows Key + Number 1 key will open a new window for the first taskbar icon, number 2 key for the second taskbar icon, and so on. Jump lists give you quick access to common tasks.

Just the fact that the taskbar buttons can be icon-only (square) means I can dock it on the left of the screen without it being difficult to use. (Again, like the OS X dock... that's how I've run both OS's for quite a while.)

Other than the steps backwards they took with Vista that are still around (like some of the layers of control panel/networking/etc. you have to go through to get anywhere), I generally have nothing but positive to say about the direction Microsoft went with the Windows 7 UI.

There's no one forcing you to use Gnome, the default theme or any flavor of Ubuntu; so if you don't like the default Ubuntu which is in your words for "drooling idiots," you are more than free to use one of the 400 Linux distros, one of the ~10 top DEs or the thousands of themes out there.

See this is why I use Xubuntu, the default theme is nice. Also XFCE is better than Gnome, IMHO.

Dust theme is the way to go.

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Artwork/Incoming/DustTheme [ubuntu.com]

I was referring to the fact that a GUI element on the edge (or corner) of a screen has, in effect, infinite size in the given dimension by virtue of the fact that the cursor cannot leave the screen, and thus, any overshot of the cursor in that direction will still leave the cursor over the GUI element.

I believe it's most commonly referenced as an implication of Fitts' Law [wikipedia.org]

Obviously, this is only true when the window is maximised (something I forgot to mention in my original post).

Here you go:

https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Brand

I suppose that's why industries that care about their professional image never use brown for anything.

Explain UPS then?

The UPS trucks are painted "Pullman Brown". This is a paint color originally selected by the company that made the Pullman railroad cars.

It was selected after considerable research: It is the color that can get the most road dirt on it before it LOOKS dirty. This lets them use a long interval between washings, saving money on cleaning while still having equipment that looks decent. When you have a large number of rail cars - or delivery trucks - it costs a LOT to keep them clean-looking. So savings on cleaning adds up fast.

(When my wife or I purchase an offroad vehicle we try to find one with a paint color close to Pullman Brown, for the same reason. My wife's Cheroke is such a color - though a tad redish. My Ford F-150 4x4 is white - which {surprisingly} also can go a long time without washing or looking bad in the kind of road and offroad dust it encounters - though mud looks bad right away and needs a hose-down. Shades of FedEx - literally.)

You can drag a window in most window managers by pressing alt down and left-button-dragging the window from anywhere in the window. No need to hunt for the title bar.

Along with alt+right-click-draggin to resize, It's one of the biggest features I miss on a windows (and mac) box.

Don't drag the window title - drag its edge (either top or bottom one).

Another good example is the window close button in Windows. If you maximize a window in either Vista or 7, you'll see that, visually, the close button ends slightly before the edge of the screen. However, if you put the mouse cursor in top right corner - where, visually, it shouldn't hit Close. In practice, though, you'll see that Close is in fact highlighted, to conform to Fitt's law. If I remember correctly, this is actually a very old thing, and has been there since Win95 or somewhere around that.

Same thing goes for Start button - again, it's visually 2-3px off the corner, but nonetheless a click in the corner will be detected as a hit. IIRC, they actually broke that in Vista, and 7 fixed that.

I truely hate that resize function, if I move a windows out of the way suddenly windows decides to resize it in some direction losing the "back to resize" functionality I expect from the clickies in the top right corner.

It appears to be an edited rip of Aakash Soneri [aakashsoneri.com]'s Sone [myfonts.com]. (A comparison [tinypic.com]: Sone is teal, the new logo face is wine, where it overlaps is cobalt blue.) The changes appear to be as insubstantial as adding a slant to ascenders and shifting the baselines of some of the glyphs.

If Canonical modified Sone, didn't license it, and they start freely distributing it ("our global community will still maintain access to the resources needed to construct logos that use the branding" - so either the modified glyphs for the logo as svg, or the modified font itself), that's a dick move.

And if they did license it, then why is an open-source project licensing commercial fonts and calling it a reflection of the project?

Maybe it's a placeholder - who knows? Canonical doesn't say anything about the font's origin or license in the linked documentation, nor does Canonical's Jono Bacon [jonobacon.org] in his nearly identical announcement.

But it is disappointing to see an open source project - whose community already made LGPL-licensed [betatype.com] typefaces [ubuntu.com] for their current logo - make and publicize such a half-assed effort, even in a preliminary stage, without any explanation on the decision.

When you say, as an organization based on community contribution:

"We wanted Ubuntu to reflect the precision and engineering that sits at the heart of the product. The new logo reflects this but not at the expense of the immediately recognisable circle of friends."

And you follow that with a logo that's based on a commercial typeface, you're reneging on that intent in at least one of two ways:

• You're disrespecting the designer of the commercial font by modifying it and refusing to give credit - if it's licensed correctly at all;
• You're disrespecting the open-source community, which includes professional designers who've went to bat for you in the past.

Even if Sone was correctly licensed, and Canonical got permission to modify it for their logo and future redistribution, why not get it from the community?

And if it wasn't licensed correctly, then is Ubuntu following the lead of Arial and just ripping things off in a legal but unethical manner when they can't find what they want in a convenient license?

(And maybe it's a coincidence - a really bad coincidence that still should be fixed. Without any explanation, nobody can tell.)

When you get away from Windows, you can not only choose the UI (bash, ksh, zsh, etc) or GUI [toastytech.com], but also change it. Before Microsoft became such a problem, it was the norm for people to not just tweak but show off their customizations. I know that most people really piss and moan about tweaking the defaults, but it is possible. The knowledge is gone from the mainstream, but the functionality is still there.

Whether you use KDE, CDE, Xfce, or GNOME you can choose not just the theme (appearance) but also the behavior. That goes especially for the window manager [xwinman.org]. You can do more with the window manager than deciding to have jiggly jello effects or not. When you talk about the GUI on a Linux, Solaris or BSD distro you're usually conflating about three things : the desktop environment, the window manager, and the settings for those two. It's not even necessary to run a full desktop, you can get by quite handily with just a window manager. Check out Enlightenment, OpenBox, Scrotwm,

Of course the desktop environment and window manager will come with default settings but those can be changed. If an in-your-face example is needed for just how much these can be configure to meet your needs install plain vanilla FVWM and give it a try. Then after that, install FVWM-crystal theme. Night and day different is there.

Yes, but unfortunately, they chose to take tons of horribly bad concepts from Windows. Down to little things. It’s only a surprise that there is no Clippy in KOffice (but there is something like it in OpenOffice).

Don’t get me wrong, I really like KDE. And I am not only saying this for KDE, but for Gnome and XFCE too.
Examples where it’s like windows (XP mostly):

• Task bar
• Start menu
• Little things like search in the start menu
• Clock on the right.
• Little icons next to the clock
• HAL
• HAL-Icons next to the little icons next to the clock
• Windows (instead of the better tiling system)
• Window borders
• The position, function and even the symbol of the buttons in the window border.
• All the UI elements widgets are practically the same.
• Icons on the desktop.
• Recycle bin on the desktop, down to how it works.
• Worst of all: The file manager is a window with massive HUGE icons showing a thumbnail of the content.
• The file tree that you manually have to toggle does by default not resemble the actual structure on the disk, but has imaginary components like the “computer” etc. as the root.
• etc, etc, etc.

Now of course OS X and others have those things too. But that’s the point!. Everybody is imitating everybody else. (Back then it was Xerox -> MacOS -> Windows -> others.)

And nobody is actually thinking if this is really the best solution we can come up with after all these years. (In is not. Not even remotely. Actually it’s really slowing us down and an annoying convoluted mess. I know because I’m working on it right now.)

That’s why I really applaud the KDE team, for finally working on the semantic desktop, and a general concept for desktop modules. Of course it’s what I thought up years ago, and I’m way beyond it. (No, I’m not special. I just took the time and thought outside the box. A job that anyone of us can do.) But at least it’s way better than any idea we had before.

Or you can go direct to the actual Ubuntu Brand [ubuntu.com] page and see the new screenshots as they were meant to be viewed, i.e. larger.

NSFW links above (n/t)