Ubuntu has just released the results of their design team’s rebrand. You can read more here:
http://www.markshuttleworth.com/archives/308
Any comments? I’ve heard a range from love to “it’s a confused steve envy” so far…
I had a quick look and my first impression was ‘I like that’ but after consideration, I think it was just the purple wallpaper that I liked… ‘I’ consider it a step sideways (never liked brown anyway), and its panel colour scheme now looks similar to Mint (which I use), as for the logos… they seem a bit bland… ok maybe bland ‘lite’ 
Hmm, I can’t help thinking that Mr Shuttleworth is a little bit too ‘full of himself’.
They’ve added a new default theme … whoopie do! 
I’m thinking this highlights the generic lack of working themes supplied by Ubuntu … (!)
I’m still waiting for critical bug fixes for 9.10 so I’m not “too” worried about 10.4 just yet;
- X memory usage, I had to restart my box last night because memory usage reached 3G with no apps running (!)
- Compiz don’t work properly on an Nvidia card with multiple screens - it tends to crash X
- Not sure if this is fixed, but until very recently every FF upgrade was screwing flash requiring a flash remove / re-add
- virt-manager, the desktop and server distro’s (for 9.10) use different versions (!)
- Empathy to replace pidgin - doesn’t work properly / very well and video support doesn’t work
- There’s a massive memory leak in Google Chrome for Linux, you can hit 1G memory usage for a tab within 3 minutes of using one Google’s own chart vizualization demo pages.
Incidentally, Mr Shuttlewordth’s motd reads;
“When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there you will always long to return”
- This a quote from a man who came up with lots of ideas about flight … but never flew … :-X
Shall we take it that Mark Shuttleworth is not on your Christmas card list then, and probably shouldn’t spend too much time waiting for one? 
Aye… but Shuttleworth has been in space…
to be honest prefer the old logo with the circle of friends more prominent but suppose with everything else a change is needed.
i dont think this is relavent to this form but i think the writing fire on the desktop is cool! i was watchin my mate do it
Aye… but Shuttleworth has been in space…
And sometimes I think he’s still there (!)
One of the things that’s worrying me is the way they’re pushing cloud computing … they make it sound like anyone can do it, and what they supply is a commercially viable solution in it’s own right. Anyone trying to set up a server farm using Ubuntu 9.10 and expecting it to perform even reasonably well is likely to be disappointed and as a result their impression of Linux may also become tainted.
It really should really carry ‘great for playing with’ and ‘needs expensive hardware to perform as you would expect’ warning labels! Oh, and charging for platform management software when the platform really isn’t going to perform terribly well … not cool!
Ubuntu doesn’t seem to have a coherant strategy for beating bug #1. They seem to be flailing around trying everything whichway to get something that’ll make them popular.
Desktop search, case in point. Where is the desktop search box now?
Dunno, it used to be the first thing I disabled historically after installing a system.
Do you remember the effect it had on multi-user systems … 20 people log in, 20 home folder and mail folder indexes going on at once, on one machine. Someone didn’t think that one through … (!)