customization of themes and colors in gnome 3 desktop in Fedora 15

[bookwar]

Hello everyone,

I would like to raise up the question of possibilities user have to
customize the look and feel of his desktop. And let us limit our
consideration to Fedora 15 release only. I don't have enough
information to speak about future plans and their realization yet.

1) Why this is important:

After one week of testing gnome-shell and Gnome3 by community i've
made a list of things people complain most in Gnome3 (Fortunately this
list contains only cosmetic issues. Many thanks to gnome developers
for that.)

The list is:

- window titlebar size
 Window titles of the same color as a window background, without much
meaning since they have only one button, make almost everyone think
about wasting vertical space. This very expensive vertical space which
is already taken by "top bar".

- icon size in Applications menu
 The bug is here https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=636655.
And discussion is still open.

- color scheme
 Dark black-blue default color scheme with deep shadows seems to be
too dark and grim for many users. Once I published the light grey
version of default gnome-shell, at least 10 users changed their mind
about Gnome3 and decided to try it.

- fonts
 Default fonts are bad for non-english speaking users, who work with
non-Latin characters.
 Bug https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=695405 still open.

( After three days of using gnome-shell i fixed all four and made this
picture to promote Gnome 3 http://www.linux.org.ru/gallery/6144374.jpg
And people do like it. )

I don't want to open discussion with designers team here. Artwork is
always controversial, so let default setting be as they are now,
except may be fedora logo improvement suggested here:
http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/design-team/2011-April/004215.html
. Please, consider it.

I want to emphasize that changing default settings is not an
exceptional use-case for F15 Gnome users. It is a normal thing which
will be used very often.

2) The gnome-developers point of view

I have found these opinions on theming the gnome desktop:

Bastien Nocera said at
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2011-March/msg00059.html
===============================================================
Changing either theme or font would detract from our visual identity.
And we also cannot offer users to switch to different themes and expect
all those themes to be of the high quality one would expect from the one
shipped in GNOME 3. My guess is that if you're willing to possibly break
the appearance of a number of applications, we want to make it clear
that you shouldn't start filing bugs against whichever product offered
you that ability.

There are however some missing parts to the customisation that we might
want to revisit, such allowing users to tweak colours, but this would
need to be designed, and thought out.
================================================================

Owen Taylor said at
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=647686
================================================================
>From the perspective of the GNOME Shell team, GNOME Shell themes are
both not interesting and not supportable
================================================================

If I understood correctly, this means that till at least Gnome 3.2,
may be later, user is not supposed to do all the things I mentioned in
1). Although this may be reasonable from developers point of view
(they have a lot of more important things to do), I think from the
point of Fedora 15 it is wrong. Things that i listed above have much
more impact on the end-user experience then integration of empathy
into desktop environment, for example. Desktop settings are urgent for
user-oriented distro release.

3) What I think Fedora Desktop and Fedora QA Team could and should do
in this case.

Fortunately, current gnome-shell does have tools to solve almost all
the problems. But what is needed to be done is to change their
priority from "strange things no one cares about" to the "must(or at
least nice) to have in current release".

I suggest

a) state that theming _is_ a feature of Gnome 3 Desktop in F15

b) add gnome-tweaks-tool to the default @gnome-desktop group of
packages, put it on Live images and so on
Probably add gnome-shell user-theme extension package by default also.

c) raise the priority and help with the bugs

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=647599 user-theme
extension: support globally installed extension
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=644271 [PATCH] Add
extension that prefers local theme to system theme
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=647386 [PATCH] The
user-theme extension doesn't revert to the original theme immediately

and others in gnome-tweak-tools component.

d) consider to add gnome-tweak-tool's bugs as a blocker or
nice-to-have or any other good status in Red Hat Bugzilla.

--
Best regards,
Aleksandra Bookwar