Ubuntu 12.04 has been gaining more visible UI changes in recent updates due to the looming ‘freezes’ on features and interface changes.

Below I present a handful of the more ‘prominent’ visual changes that have landed in Precise since the last lot of ‘prominent visual changes‘. To avoid confusion: tweaks to the look of Ubuntu do not come at the expense of other work; there is still plenty of development going on ‘under the hood’ too.

Updates

Something many will be pleased to see: the Unity Greeter now handles screen locking: –

And gains newly styled dialogs/buttons: –

The recently redesigned Sound Settings panel offers an option to switch off the Sound Indicator:

Similarly, the Power Menu lets you choose when/if the Power Indicator should be be displayed in the panel:

The Workspace Switcher icon has been redesigned to denote the ‘workspace’ idea more prominently:

The Messaging Menu has seen some small tweaks to the look of the message count ‘lozenges’: –

Coming Soon

Below are a handful of additional changes currently showing their faces in the Unity Staging PPA. It’s likely that most of these will land in Ubuntu 12.04 proper shortly as part of the next Unity milestone.

The Ubuntu button and trash icons have gone ‘chameleonic’. Both derive the bulk of their colouring from the average tone of that in desktop wallpaper: –

The look of Launcher item tooltips and quicklists have been tweaked: –

The Dash window controls now match those of the default system theme:-

The Workspace Switcher is also set to go ‘chameleonic’: –