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…

First of all I have to say that I am a big fan of Ubuntu because they do a lot of good for Linux. They productize the most popular(?) Linux distribution, provide good infrastructure for the user communities and gain a lot of positive publicity for Linux. I have also the understanding that Ubuntu contributes significantly to the upstream projects (Gnome, Debian, GNU/Linux). On the other hand I have a hard time understanding parts of their strategy, which in my opinion leads to intermediate releases. Pretty good, but boring, non-innovative and after all pretty damn close to the mother Debian.

From the live CD boot the latest Ubuntu looks and feels…well Ubuntu, and there has not been a lot of development for the last couple of years (6.10 Edgy Eft was the first Ubuntu version I tried). I have to say that the improvements so far to the visual aspects were a big turn-off. They consisted of a few changed icons, slight gradients in Gnome panels and a new (rather good) wallpaper and thats it. Oh yes, there is the new theme called ‘dark room’, which is even more brownish than the default. I really expected a bolder approach in re-working the user interface as Ibex is the first release after the previous Long Term Supported edition, so it would be justified to drive more radical changes and development. There are many small distributions that have been able to come out with slick visuals, so the required pieces for the puzzle do exist. For an example openSUSE, Ubuntu’s strongest contender on the Linux field, is able to deliver much more pleasing visuals that are more professionally finalized, well thought and more intuitive.

Under the hood the Ibex brings many improvements from the upstream. Gnome has been updated to 2.24 with slight improvements, the new Network Manager being perhaps the most interesting one as it now provides improvements for Wiress and GPRS/3G connectivity. The 2.6.27 Linux kernel should improve the hardware support in many areas, which is always welcomed and always an issue with Linux on the latest or less common hardware. New X.org 7.4 brings improved multi monitor support, but caused a gap in graphics card drivers which have not been updated to latest X.org revision yet (this should obviously improve over time).

The word intrepid mean something like ‘fearless’, ‘brave’ or ‘courageous’. 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. I would really like to see the most popular Linux distribution to innovate something that would make it stand out from the crows, and especially Debian, more. Competitors like openSUSE and Mandriva are much better in this sense as they are delivering their own value adding features like YaST or Control Center for system administration. Version 8.10 Intrepid Ibex is a small incremental upgrade on the solid foundation of Ubuntu (or Debian), but are these changes worthy a new release? They seem more like a ’service pack’ to Ubuntu v8.04 Hardy Heron, if a Microsoft Windows expression is allowed here.