You might have heard about our newest Desktop Suite, Bluebird, or seen it’s project page. Bluebird is the default theme for Xubuntu 10.10, codenamed Maverick Meerkat. You can read the official announcement from the ubuntu-news-team mailing list archive. As said in that message, Xubuntu will still ship Albatross as a dark alternative. Albatross will still be maintained by Shimmer as well.

Bluebird is based on the Zuki Blues and axiom themes. Both of the original themes have been heavily modified though; most notably we’ve lost the Equinox dependency from the GTK+ theme and the window borders now have an even more sophisticated and polished look. In addition we’ve also built a small icon theme, which mostly builds on elementary, but brings you some more monochrome panel icon goodness and aims at Xfce-completeness.

Even though our theme is just as usable with Gnome it really is built for Xfce and tries to bring about a consistent desktop-experience.

The theme has had some publicity already, including articles in Webupd8 and LinuxNov. We’ve had some praising comments – thank you! People have called the new theme “amazing”, “light as air” as well as “very polished”.

We’d also like to mention Charlie Kravetz, the current Xubuntu Team Lead, who continuously supported us and gave us very positive feedback for our work. As the users of Xubuntu seem to like the new theme, Charlie is completely right in saying that the real winners are Xubuntu users, who can enjoy good looking artwork on their desktops once again. We couldn’t agree more.