You are not alone in your dislike of the Ubuntu brown theme. That should change
soon. It has been a high ranking concern on Brainstorm for awhile. It sounds as
if with Intrepid that there is to be some movement which while it is a small
concession, it is an important acknowledgment from the powers that be that
something is amiss with the theme.

In comparison, Kubuntu's blue theme is happy and a breath of fresh air. Ubuntu
comes across as dour and muddy. Other *buntus also have a look of their own and
of all of them Ubuntu's is the worst and it is supposed to be the main version
and the flagship of the distro. I suppose that it was chosen because it looks
African and Ubuntu is an
African word, plus Shuttleworth has African roots, but there must be a
better way to pay homage to Africa.

You can install the Blubuntu look from the repositories and it is a big
improvement. Users can go to: http://www.gnome-look.org/ and download and
install as many themes as they want from Gnome. You can get Gnome to look like
anything that you want from Windows to OS/X and anything in between. I like
Gnome in general and don't think that it needs to look like anything else, but I
agree that the brown and orange Ubuntu theme has to go if Ubuntu is to take its
place with the slickest looking distros. Right now it is the ugly sister in its
own family. When compared with other distros it comes out very poorly, indeed.