On my default Ubuntu server installation vi is very colorful. However, most of colors are so dark that I cannot really see what's written against dark window background. This is fortunately mitigated by setting background into "dark mode".
/etc/vim/vimrcset background=dark
Second issue I faced was inability to copy/paste from other applications without the whole text being indented like crazy. Of course, there is setting for that too.
/etc/vim/vimrcfiletype indent off
With these two settings, my vi was usable again.