A good software (or web site) or other resource is aesthetically pleasing. Aesthetics in this context, does not necessarily mean very "artsy" or having a breath-taking style. But we may have run into software (usually one for internal use or one of those very costly, bad-quality, niche, software) that seemed very ugly and badly designed, with a horrible user-interface, etc.

Different types of applications, and those running on different platforms, have different conventions for what is considered aesthetic. In The Art of UNIX Programming, Eric Raymond makes the case for the "Silence is Golden" principle of designing UNIX command-line interfaces. Basically, a command line program should output as little as possible. Now observe the behaviour of aptitude (a unified interface for package management) on Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon, when trying to install a non-existing package name:

root@shlomif-desktop:/home/shlomif# aptitude install this-does-not-exist
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Reading extended state information
Initializing package states... Done
Building tag database... Done
Couldn't find any package whose name or description matched "this-does-not-exist"
The following packages have been kept back:
  firefox firefox-gnome-support
0 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 2 not upgraded.
Need to get 0B of archives. After unpacking 0B will be used.
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Reading extended state information
Initializing package states... Done
Building tag database... Done

        

15 lines of output, and only one of them in the middle is the informative one. Why is all this information a concern of mine, especially given the fact that they are all given in the same monotonous default colour.

On the other hand, here's what urpmi (a similar package management interface for Mandriva) says on Mandriva Cooker:

[root@telaviv1 ~]# urpmi this-does-not-exist
No package named this-does-not-exist
[root@telaviv1 ~]#

        

Exactly one line and it's informative. While aptitude certainly has its merits, its verbosity still makes it much more painful to use than urpmi, when I have to work on Ubuntu.