As many of you know, I tend to be the first to criticize anything in this community of people who are often afraid to voice their opinion about something. This time, however, I’m not going to do the talking, I’m just going to share some comments.
A couple of days ago we revealed the new default wallpaper for Ubuntu 10.10 over on OMG! Ubuntu! The new wallpaper is so bad, that Joey thought it was a joke. There’s even a bug reported on Launchpad.
This is what it looks like:
Here is a selection of comments from the OMG! Ubuntu! article:
“This is like “Chuck Norris fart on my screen, and i can’t clean it.”
“Never commented before despite reading religiously, this was just TOO ugly to dignify with mental distaste, it had to be made public.”
“Looks like I was eating a burrito over the 10.04 one and some hot sauce dripped.”
“I’ve seen many bad things in my life and it hurts me to say this, but this is in that list.”
“Worst wallpaper in the existence of the universe. This has to be a joke!”
“All this talk about “paper-cuts,” and the face of OS for newbies, first of all, looks like a piece of crap.”
“When I find out who designed this wall paper I’m going to give them a brain slushie.”
“I’ve been looking at this for a while now trying to think of what it reminds me of, and I finally realised, and dare i say it, it looks like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hemorrhoids.jpg“
With over 200 comments on that post, almost all of them unanimously expressing disgust at the new wallpaper (not to mention quite a few on Twitter) I have to wonder why this crap is still the first thing millions of new users will see come October 10th.
If this isn’t the final wallpaper, then why land it on the day of the UI freeze and set it as the GDM, then not explain anything? Why land it at all if it’s not final?
I have an entire team of people in the Ubuntu Manual Project who need to start taking screenshots for the next release of the book in multiple languages, but we can’t start until we have the final interface to screenshot!
Isn’t that the entire idea behind freezes?
