I’m a big proponent of Free/Open Source Software, commonly shortened to FOSS. I gave up on Windows and most of the proprietary world of software in January 2007, and have been running Ubuntu in various incarnations on my desktop since then.
I’m not a newbie to Linux however, since I’ve been dabbling in it since I first came in contact with it around 1995. The server that serves up what you read here has run on Linux since 2003, and in waves I’ve been a lot more of an open-source nazi than usual. For example, most of 1998-2000 I ran nothing but Linux on my desktop.
Currently I have three computers in my home. My workstation, my server and a broken laptop which I managed to fix to somewhat working state. The workstation and the laptop both run Ubuntu 9.04 and the server runs Debian 4.0.
However, I’m no stranger to handing out criticism in areas where FOSS deserves it. Unlike the world of proprietary software which encourages a see-no-evil attitude and is very dependent on self-censorship in order to maintain the illusion of perfection, FOSS needs the criticism in order to survive. Of course, we’re talking about constructive criticism and preferably the attitude that you can fix it yourself. Simply saying “linux sucks!” is not constructive.
As stated, I prefer the Ubuntu-flavor of Linux, at least on the desktop-machines. To use a tired old cliché, it just works.
A while back (quite a while actually, October 2006) Mark Shuttleworth posted an article on his blog claiming that “pretty is a feature” and that Ubuntu needed to put priority on not only functioning well, but also looking good while doing it. Mark, as most people know, is the founder of Canonical, which in turn is the financial backer behind Ubuntu.
More than two years have passed and in many aspects his wish has been granted. The new notification system in 9.04 (aka Jaunty Jackal) is actually quite lovely and in my opinion both prettier and more functional than the old style of balloon-notification. The themes look better, and more options for good-looking themes are included out of the box for those who don’t like the default brown-ish theme.
But there’s still an area of prettiness which is in dire need of being taken care of, and that’s the default icons. Recently I got tired of using the icon-theme from Ubuntu Studio (which are black/blue in style) and went back to using the original Human theme. Unfortunately, just like most other icon themes out there, the maintenance is spotty.
The goal for the default icon theme is to provide all icons in scalable SVG-format. That means that not only can you scale the icons on your desktop without them looking like crap, but the applications under the Gnome desktop can use them in any size. Unfortunately, a lot of icons are missing in SVG format, and the fallback is to use the non-scalable PNG versions. Those are good-looking, but don’t scale well.
Here’s an example of a pretty SVG icon being scaled.First normal size, and then scaled up to a much bigger size.
You see, it looks just as pretty. Just a lot bigger.
Unfortunately, like I said. Not all icons are freely scalable. For example the search-tool icon only exists in a 22×22 pixels PNG, which looks like crap when Gnome Do tries to use it as a default icon when expecting input.
Not exactly pretty, right? Especially ugly in such an otherwise good-looking app as Do.
