I'd say all the things you mention – nice effects, clean windows and nice themes – are examples of where Ubuntu is beautiful. I agree that Ubuntu is quite beaut

I'd say all the things you mention – nice effects, clean windows and nice themes – are examples of where Ubuntu is beautiful. I agree that Ubuntu is quite beautiful, and it is getting better and better. I'd say what is lacking most in Ubuntu is elegance, which I define as it having strong vision about how things should look and behave. On a Mac you can quite clearly see when an application does not fit, for example Google Earth and Firefox. I think this is in large part due to the elegance of the platform. Ubuntu is also somewhat lacking in simplicity. I think in large due to their attempts to hide accidental complexity instead of working to fix it. This has gotten a lot better, but as an example, Ubuntu still spews files for applications all over the place instead of having them as an application bundle as on a Mac. Then you get desktop files to give you a single icon to click, but they hide the complexity instead of removing it. Reading what I wrote I realize that there is quite a bit of overlap between simplicity and elegance. App bundles are both simpler and more elegant than spewing files for an application all over the place.