No, but I will try it again once I get a new laptop. It might also have been an issue of Java versions / Ubuntu versions / Fontconfig settings.

I already noticed a big difference, roughly comparing PyCharm when it first came out, and the new experimental Android SDK a few months ago - both based on JetBrains code, the latter was much more polished.

The latest release, v13, has moved towards a more agnostic style that keeps a lot of the same widgets but doesn't try to feel like it belongs to any one platform. Definitely give it a try if you haven't used intellij in a few versions.

A big thing is whether you are using openjdk or Oracle's JDK(IIRC Oracle's makes IntelliJ look a lot better). OpenJDK generally makes interfaces look bad.