[Design-team] GNOME background in Fedora 15

[Owen Taylor]

On Fri, 2010-12-17 at 09:10 +0200, Nicu Buculei wrote:
> On 12/17/2010 01:54 AM, Owen Taylor wrote:
> >
> > We want Fedora to be the showcase for GNOME 3 and to be a good example
> > to other distributions about how to package GNOME 3. So, to go along
> > with the release splash for Fedora 15, we'd like to make special request
> > that for this release we use the GNOME background in the Fedora GNOME
> > packages and hence in the default Fedora desktop.
> 
> As I understood the opinions in the latest team IRC meeting, blog 
> comments, mailing list discussions and direct contacts with community 
> members, the general opinion is such a move would be detrimental to 
> Fedora's own image and of little use for GNOME promotion.

There certainly have been concerns and negative opinions expressed. My
goal here is to as best as possible address those concerns and explain
how this is important to GNOME and and a good thing in terms of Fedora
and GNOME working together. Which I think is a good thing for Fedora.

> > I want to be clear that this is not in any way saying that we don't like
> > the Fedora backgrounds ... the recent Fedora backgrounds are great, and
> > keep on getting cleaner and more professional looking every release. The
> > issue is rather a question of trying to provide a single look for the
> > GNOME 3 release rather than a series of looks, one per distribution.
> 
> Can you name at least one other *relevant* distro that will use the same 
> background as default? Especially if they know this may be *our* default?

I'll certainly talk to the OpenSuSE and Debian GNOME maintainers and try
to make convince them to make the same choice. I'm much more likely to
succeed in that request if I have the support of the Fedora design team
already lined up. And I really don't think how we configure our desktop
should be held hostage to getting Debian to do the same thing. Fedora
should be a leader here in working well with upstream.

> >   * What about the rest of the artwork?
> >
> >     I think trying to adapt the entire set of artwork in Fedora to have
> >     different looks for different spins is probably more confusing then
> >     anything else. The GNOME default background matches pretty well with
> >     the Fedora look, so it's not going to be jarring to switch to it
> >     after seeing the standard Fedora artwork for boot.
> 
> Case in point: the GDM background would be the same as the GNOME 
> background or as the general-purpose background used by all the other 
> spins? Which one of the spins will have an inconsistent experience? The 
> same about the Plymouth colors. We are supposed to use *vertical 
> stripes* or not in GRUB, Anaconda, firstboot etc.? How about website 
> identity?

My proposal is is straightforward:

  Once you select a user and log in to GNOME, you get the GNOME default
  background. All other artwork follows normal Fedora procedures.

While there are some mockups about how we'd like GDM to look like to
match the rest of GNOME 3 (See
http://git.gnome.org/browse/gnome-shell-design/plain/mockups/static/user-selector.png
) they aren't going to be implemented in this cycle, so there's already
a visual transition between the login screen and the desktop.

- Owen