Well 2010 probably will not be the ‘year of linux’ that open-source enthusiasts are constantly hoping for.  However, it does appear to be the year that several much-needed improvements to the ecosystem will take place.  Linux has long suffered from design flaws – looking clunky and amateurish by modern OS standards and several key players are slated to make major improvements in their graphical design.

A preview of one the new default themes in the upcoming Ubuntu 10.04 relase (via Ars Technica)

The first big event this year is Canonical’s graphical overhaul of Ubuntu.  Ditching the brown color-scheme that has dominated the distribution since its inception, Ubuntu will be moving to a purple and orange theme that, while by no means perfect, certainly moves the distribution much further in the direction of not-ugly.

One of the mockups for Gnome 3 (from Ars Technica)

The other development, which is much further down the road before it hits mainstream is the planning for the upcoming release of Gnome v3.0.  Gnome is the most graphical shell environment for Linux, partly due to its stability and that it shies away from making large changes in the user experience.  However, the consequence is that the environment feels old and looks pale in comparison with modern for-sale operating systems like OSX and Windows 7.  Several mock-ups have been released from a recent Gnome 3 development conference that are quite promising.

Why does design in Linux matter?  After all, regardless of what the default environment looks like, users can go onto Gnome-look.org or other customization site and download any of a massive library of themes, skins, mods and utilities for their desktop environment.  Linux is absolutely the most customizable operating system out there.  However, most users – even power users like me – don’t want to have to spend forever tweaking a new install (especially since Linux users tend to re-install pretty regularly).  The ugliness turns off new users too.  Linux users need to stop pretending that looks don’t matter in an OS.  Linux is a powerful and elegant OS that should reflect that in its design.