[Design-team] GNOME background in Fedora 15

[Nicu Buculei]

On 12/21/2010 05:09 PM, Fabian A. Scherschel wrote:
> Just a few points I wanted to get across after reading my backlog in
> this thread:
>
> 1) Fedora's branding, IMHO, isn't close to strong enough. Compared to
> Ubuntu we suck in this department. So I see no reason to weaken it
> further at all. Mo is right, we do NOT have coffee shop recognition but
> that doesn't mean we should give up, bend over (as Nicu put it) and
> surrender our efforts - even if it's only for one release. What we NEED
> to do, is strengthen our branding and work harder. That is why I believe
> we should reject this proposal.

The truth is, is was our deliberate decision to make the branding soft 
to encourage the re-use of our artwork and derivatives. It was also made 
to avoid possible trademark problems.

> 2) I strongly believe this move won't help Gnome. I love what they are
> doing with Shell and Gnome 3 but I think they are badly mistaken in
> thinking that establishing a default look via a wallpaper (of all
> things) across their different distribution channels will strengthen
> their brand. Gnome is a desktop, it doesn't have need for a brand in
> this respect. What they need is rock-solid software with awesome
> features (just think of the Zeitgeist mess for a second) and a
> well-planned release. If they spend their time and energy on that it
> will benefit them a lot more than us shipping their default wallpaper.
> If the time we wasted with this decision would have been spend on
> hacking on or thinking about Shell, we and they would already be better off.

GNOME is just one piece from the Fedora Desktop (and the Fedora OS  for 
that matters). X.org is another piece, Firefox is another piece and so on.

> 3) What Fedora needs most of all is more end-user focus, IMO. I love the
> upstream work we are doing, but the areas we need to improve is UI
> polish, marketing and quality control. The first two things are areas
> where we in the design team can help. We need to develop a strong visual
> brand that the Marketing Team can use to propel us to a place on the
> desktop alongside people like Ubuntu. We are technically better, let's
> also be better in the other areas too!

Fully agreed, our desktop is full of flaws and deliberated 
regressions... in F14 I can't even set my desktop wallpaper to be used 
ad default, also in GDM???

-- 
nicu :: http://nicubunu.ro :: http://nicubunu.blogspot.com/