I have been using Ubuntu for a while now and I love it. I was just wondering, which Linux distro can give Vista & Leopard a run for thr money(at least Vista) in the UI department?

Any distro could give Vista a run for it's money. Vista sucks serious balls man. Most IT shops and businesses are not upgrading. They're either sticking with what they have or switching to Linux, well, at least from what I've read online and the internet never lies..

When I, and more importantly the wife, switched from Windows (XP Vista), to Ubuntu no questions about the UI came up, Period. When the wife uses my Mac she sometimes has a minor question or two but nothing of import.

Cart

"Better" is a subjective thing. Please ask more specific questions - what specific criteria are you interested in? What specific aspects of Vista and/or Leopard's UI's do you consider to be good and in need to besting?

Try Sabayon if you're into eye-candy.

You don't even need to change distribution. Try to install compiz-fusion. I think it should already be avalable in your Synaptic.

Pure eye candy is what am looking for! Tried installing Beryl on my system but I guess it needs a GFX card, which I don't have.Checked Sabayon, looked impressive, is it a free OS?.Any other choice?

Bad question (in some respects): Whether something can give other OSs a run around in the UI department is a function of the UI. And many distros give a choice of UI.

-Have a look at enlightenment. Try it on any distro on which it will run, which is probably most, but only a few ship with it. For the rest, you'll have to install it separately.

- Something like kde is very configurable and I've never thought I was really being held back by the available config options.

- One of the advantages of the big distros (SuSE, RedHat, Debian...) is that you get a choice of UIs out of the box, if you choose to install them. And they tend to have a full-ish choice of wallpapers and stuff, so you can configure to your heart's content (although you can find add-on eye candy on, e.g., kde-look).

-The 3 D stuff is impressive, but I'm not convinced that it does much for usability. But, if eye candy is your thing...

- OTOH, bear in mind that for a more constrained distro, while you get less eye candy and less options, you tend to start being productive more quickly.

- And there is a distro (Vixta?) which intends to give you a vista-like UI experience. Which sounds pretty horrid to me, but if that's what you want...

trickykid wrote:
True, but...
The reasons Corporates aren't switching aren't primarily the UI. Firstly, even if they wanted to, it would take them some time. Secondly, the paranoid (and I'm not saying that paranoid equals completely effective) security model breaks a lot of stuff.

OK, retraining for a new UI doesn't help, but that's not the primary factor.

Smaller businesses probably don't plan this stuff as much. They buy computers with whatever OS they get from Dell (or HP...) or the local box shifter and cope with the fact that they've got a mish-mash of systems in use. OTOH, they aren't showing any actual enthusiasm for Vista, either.

Any distribution with a 3d desktop (such as Compiz Fusion) and maybe a few desklets of user's choice would kick both OS X and especially Vista. OS X has a chosen set of good-looking things but I still don't think it's superior to everything else

I would get a stable Linux distribution, which doesn't consume 20+ gigabytes of disk space right out of the box (such as Slackware; it's cool), then ditch KDE or Gnome and instead get a window manager that doesn't add a ugly-looking panel (your choice, of course), add the preferred desklets there to get (or write from scratch) a nice looking panel for it that fits nicely in, then run Compiz Fusion that would make the windows go rubber. KDE or Gnome would of course do if you're fine with having Windows/OSX-looking panels there, but..why not make Linux different?

@Salasi I don't think its a bad question, for all the proprietary OSs, how much can you customize? May be a theme here or there. The reason why I have asked this question is I have seen some amazing desktops on the web. Also with a plethora of distros & sub distros around, you may find that perfect mix of productivity and eye candy.

Install whatever Linux distro you want and then install (if not already installed) Beryl. You can edit all sorts of settings with Beryl and it can make your computer do all sorts of neat things. I know you said you can't install Beryl but if you can run Sabayon live then that means your computer can handle Beryl (because Sabayon has Beryl already set up for you). And if Beryl is not your thing check out gnome-look.org or kde-look.org (depending on what desktop environment you are in). There are all sorts of eyecandy downloads on these two sites.

You were comparing to proprietary OSs and there the question of distros would be completely meaningless. You get what the proprietary supplier choses to give you. That does give you customisation options, but not the ability to dramatically change how the UI works.

However, the issue that I was pointing up was that you were asking about which distro gives which appearance. Which distro, rather than which GUI, is almost irrelevant, with the exception of a few cases.

The GUIs are what give you the appearance and you can change the GUI without changing distro, although some make it easier than others and some come with more wallpapers than others.

In that respect, I felt the question, as asked, was bad. 'Which GUI...' would have been a good question, but you didn't ask that.

i'd say mint.

and also look at http://tuxenclave.wordpress.com/2007...tion-guide-v2/
for Gnome.

Thanks all.

Esp. Salasi, thats what I was looking for.