The previous post is one of the few reasonable ones and a fairer assessment than Preston St. Pierre's was. Mr St. Pierre, it's a freaking *theme*, for God's sake! You don't like it, fine - change it to something else, including the original Ubuntu brown complete with the heron wallpaper. Just how lazy and/or incompetent are you, that you can't be bothered to find a theme you like and change your desktop to it with a few mouse clicks?
I've noticed this divide before, between fans of dark themes, who tend to be younger and maybe also gamers (most first person shooter games are quite dark-looking), and fans of traditional light themes who tend to be older and to be users of traditional productivity apps like word processing. I fall into the latter category myself, for what it's worth. I try out a lot of distros. If I don't like a default theme, I change it and move on. Suggestions for Ultimate Edition users who don't like the default theme here but aren't fans of Ubuntu brown either:
aptitude|apt-get install blubuntu-look for a mainstream blue theme, or
aptitude|apt-get install tropic-look for an interesting orange theme.
Each of these comes with a matching gdm (login window) theme and desktop wallpaper.
Getting beyond Mr. St. Pierre's silly railing about the dark theme, Ultimate Edition seems to be a nice collection of software added to standard Ubuntu, much of it geared toward multimedia-oriented users. It covers some of the same ground as Ubuntu Studio, with perhaps less emphasis on multimedia production and more on playback. I couldn't find some of the preinstalled apps in the repositories - they may have been built and installed by hand to the Ultimate Edition live DVD image, so they would be hard (but not impossible) to add to a standard Ubuntu installation. Note that I installed the 64-bit version, so my experience may have some differences to that of 32-bit users.
