The new Ubuntu "light" theme(s)

General Image: 

A couple of sources, Ars Technica and the more thorough Web Upd8 are reporting on Ubuntu's new theme. The Ars article seems to buy the "we assembled a team of artists" line, while the Web Upd8 article is critical of the new theme, basically saying it's a rip off of Mac OS X.

Judging from some of the comments on Web Upd8 this early theme release appears to be cloning a lot of Mac OS X... and that's not necessarily a good thing. The trend that seems to be happening with Ubuntu is a dumbing down of it's interface, and this trend appears to be continuing if the screenshot above is any indication -- no panel at the bottom.

We want to see an Ubuntu with more or equal features, not less at the expense of relearning the OS usability. There's mention in one of the articles that Gnome Do might feature prominently. I tried it and wasn't a big fan, but OS X fans will probably like it because it's inspired by Quicksilver.

In the off chance that one of the Ubuntu/Cannonical team do read this: Ubuntu 9.10 is a regression in my eyes, here's why:

• GDM2 - security risk. I don't want to show people's names or user names. This is just stupid not allowing a blank login.
• GDM2 - community loss. All those themes for GDM are useless. Who wants to theme a sucky login manager?
• Power management - on a number of notebooks that ran Ubuntu 9.04 just fine before we experienced overheating with Ubuntu 9.10.
• Intel video chipset performance - A mythTV machine we built that ran just fine on 9.04 blew monkey chunks when we upgraded to 9.10. Karmic Koala's video performance was so bad we actually moved the Myth box to MythDora.
• Grub2 - who can read the new UUID-10x98-dhj-94789 devices? Couldn't you stick with /dev/hda or was that /dev/sda?

I realise technology changes, but change isn't always for the best. I know that I'm not the only person who has complained about each one of these issues. Considering that I support Ubuntu on the desktop, and promote Ubuntu on the desktop as an alternative to Windows, I hope Canonical will make changes... if they don't, I just might, and it would be a sad day dropping what was a pretty good Linux distribution.