Is operating system beauty skin deep?

You should not judge a book by its cover, nor an operating system.

But we do.

Right now the folks at Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, are busy changing theirs. It's out with the brown, in with the purple. The theme here is "light," says the Ubuntu Wiki, as in lighter colors, "it denotes both warmth and clarity," and "the idea that 'light' is a good value in software."

You can't judge a book by its cover, not that this stops publishers from making a science of cover design. The same is true in operating systems.

Microsoft made a lot of its redesign in Windows7. It went with blue and white, instead of the gray borders of Windows XP. This was not a big deal. More processes are supposed to be automatic. I don't like my operating system to pretend I'm stupid.

The biggest problem with the look-and-feel of Windows hasn't changed. That is, Microsoft treats its screen as real estate -- valuable real estate. Every PC sold with Windows comes with a host of offers from "business partners," and an expectation that Microsoft applications will be your default choice.

Ubuntu has the opposite problem. It's just an operating system. What it needs is a standard application bundle, shipped together or in conjunction with it, to make it useful. An operating system, a graphics program, a browser, and basic utilities people use every day.

While Microsoft is anxious to create these bundles, seeing it as opportunity, however, Ubuntu seems to see this as a Hobson's Choice. Since open source programs carry no price, there is little basis on which it can make these choices.

It needs to make them.

What I want in an operating system isn't something that runs a computer. What I want is a computer that runs. I want it to be simple, I want it to be fast, I want it to be complete.

That's more than skin deep.

This post was originally published on Smartplanet.com