Before we start ranking the latest release of Ubuntu, version 12.10, on its aesthetics, let’s get one thing out of the way: the appearance of a desktop environment is incredibly subjective, and the source of almost as many bitter flame wars as Vim versus Emacs. What follows is by no means an attempt to state that any given distribution is objectively prettier than another, but simply a subjective analysis of recent changes in Ubuntu and how other distributions have reacted.
With that out of the way – and on the understanding that a distribution isn’t tied to its desktop environment, with replacements often a single package manager command away – we can start looking at the newest Ubuntu release.