How can we improve the spin?

[Christoph Wickert]

Am Freitag, den 29.06.2012, 11:39 -0400 schrieb Jayson Rowe:
> Thanks for getting back to me Christoph, these are exactly the types
> of answers/explanations I was looking for.

You are welcome, Jayson.

> Yes I do care about Xfce in Fedora. If there is anything I can
> do/learn to help make things better, I'm all ears. As for Greybird, I
> wasn't trying to suggest it as default, in fact, I'm still torn on it
> myself for day to day use - the Window controls for me, like you said
> the Window decorations are a usability issue, and border on 'bug' with
> me. 

Yeah, borderless windows look cool, but resizing is cumbersome.

> I have grown to quite like the decoration listed as 'default' in
> the in the appearance settings. It's nice, clean and simple and looks
> nice with Adwaita.

Yes, we are already using the default XFWM theme in rawhide, so it will
be in rawhide. We can still change it if we find something better.

> I also didn't realize that about the Fedora logo on the application menu.

Meanwhile I found a solution for this, but it doesn't work for all
themes.

GTK's icon look-up algorithm goes along the lines of:
     1. look if there is an icon by that name
        in /usr/share/icons/<currently-selected-theme>
     2. if not, look in /usr/share/icons/hicolor. As hicolor is always
        searched, installing icons here makes them show up in all
        themes.
     3. as last resort, look in /usr/share/pixmaps.

In Xfce 4.6, the panel menu icon was in /usr/share/pixmaps. This was
easy for us to overwrite it through our own icon in 
/usr/share/icons/hicolor, but as /usr/share/pixmaps only holds one size
of each icon, scaling it for different panel sizes was bad. If the
difference between the original icon and the requested size became to
big, the icon looked blurry

That's why Xfce has switched to different sizes of their icon and to
hicolor - just like it should be. The downside is that it's harder for
us to overwrite. If we want the Fedora logo in a particular theme, we
need to install it (or a symlink) in that theme. I have fixed the
fedora-logos package, to include an icon Xfce, but currently, this will
only be shown in some themes (Fedora and Bluecurve)

As an alternative, we could move Xfce's icon out of the way, say to the
Rodent theme only and install our icon to hicolor then. This will get
everybody the Fedora logo unless he selects the Rodent. But it's harder
to package. We need to make sure that at least one icon is always
provided, this means we not only need to add our icon to the
fedora-logos package but also Xfce's icon to generic-logos.

I will look into that, but first I need to look into fixing the
fedora-icon-theme as it has some issues with scaling, too that make the
icons look blurry. For now, we go with the Fedora logo in a few selected
themes only. Does this work for you?

> Thanks again for your feedback, and I'm here to help in any way I can.

One thing you definitely can help us with is QA. In Fedora 14 and 15 we
had a good QA process and a lot of testers. We have a tracking bug that
was blocked by all other bugs we wanted to fix for that release. I
didn't have the time to do that for F16 and F17, and that's how we
missed a few bugs.

Let's make it better with Xfce 4.10 in Fedora 18!

Kind regards,
Christoph