[Design-team] GNOME background in Fedora 15
Jaroslav Reznik
jreznik at redhat.com
Fri Dec 17 09:19:25 UTC 2010
On Friday, December 17, 2010 05:26:57 am tshimulu at gmail.com wrote:
> Thank you for providing summary about bg theme proposal for fedora 15.
> Issue on kde side was the absence of such request with kde 4.0 release
> triggering the unfortunate "DE wars."
Which request? Long time ago - we were thinking about actually the same as the
plan for merging Gnome theme with Fedora is now. It wasn't received very well
and I'm happy it wasn't accepted - instead we have now a great Fedora themes all
around the whole Fedora as a project! We have real Fedora identity!!! I don't
want to be just a demo version for any desktop - Gnome, KDE, whatever ;-)
Make Love(lock), not war ;-)
R.
> Having looked at the bg i think it
> works well with Fedora. The fact spin versions can use them helps. because
> rquest is only for f15 i favour it thus giving time to explore gnome3.
>
> ----------
> Sent via Mobile Mail
>
> ------Original Message------
> From: Owen Taylor <otaylor at redhat.com>
> To: <design-team at lists.fedoraproject.org>
> Date: Thursday, December 16, 2010 6:54:33 PM GMT-0500
> Subject: [Design-team] GNOME background in Fedora 15
>
> Hi design team -
>
> So, obviously there has been a lot of discussion over the last few days
> about the desktop background in Fedora 15 and GNOME 3 but since there
> seems to be still a bit of confusion about it, I wanted to step back and
> try to write things down a little more formally and hopefully explain
> better why we'd like to do something a little different for GNOME in
> Fedora 15.
>
> ("We" here is basically the set of people who work to package up GNOME
> for Fedora - almost all of us combine upstream maintainership of modules
> within GNOME with work on making the Fedora desktop. For example,
> I'm the lead maintainer of GNOME Shell and the Mutter compositor
> upstream, and also handle gnome-shell, mutter, metacity, and several
> other packages within Fedora.)
>
> GNOME 3 in Fedora 15 is a big deal. For perspective, GNOME 2.0 was
> released in June of 2002, and it was first shipped in Red Hat Linux 8.
> We started specific work on the GNOME 3 release in October of 2008, over
> 2 years ago. So, as you can imagine, there's a lot of effort being put
> in on the GNOME side to make a big splash about the GNOME 3 release and
> really do a good job about getting information out to people about
> what's new and exciting in GNOME 3.
>
> Part of publicity about GNOME 3 is establishing an image in people's
> minds about what GNOME looks like. The GNOME 3 look has many
> elements ... the widget theme, the black top panel and status icon drop
> downs, the fonts we use, and so forth. One prominent part of the
> appearance is the background. (The background has a new functional role
> in GNOME 3. As well as being behind all the users windows, it also
> provides the background to the GNOME "Activities Overview". You can see
> how this works, for example, in the screenshot in
> http://blogs.gnome.org/fmuellner/2010/11/16/moving-forward/)
>
> If someone reads about GNOME 3 and gets excited about it and wants to
> try it out, then they'll need to try it out within a Linux distribution
> There's no way to install and try out "GNOME" by itself. Quite a few
> different distributions will be shipping GNOME 3 this spring, but we
> expect Fedora to be one of the most popular, if not the most popular of
> those distributions. (Ubuntu is going their own way with Unity and will
> not be featuring GNOME 3.)
>
> After going and getting GNOME on some distribution, the user blogs about
> their experiences or writes an article, we'd really like it if the focus
> was on what's new in GNOME 3 not how it was integrated and modified for
> one distribution or another distribution. Changing the background seems
> like a pretty minor modification, and functionally it is a pretty minor
> modification, but it is also a major visual modification. Suddenly a
> screenshot is no longer a screenshot of GNOME 3, it's a screenshot of
> GNOME 3 as modified for a particular distribution.
>
> 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.
>
> 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.
>
> To try and provide a few answers to questions that already have come up:
>
> * Is this really just for Fedora 15?
>
> Yes. The request is specifically to ship the GNOME background as the
> default for Fedora 15.
>
> * Would the Fedora background be available for GNOME users?
>
> Yes. The desktop background is a place for users to customize their
> desktop and express their personality ... there is no idea that we'd
> restrict that customization. GNOME will ship a varied collection of
> different backgrounds. Providing the Fedora design
> team's background as another option makes a ton of sense to me.
>
> * Is the GNOME background really that distinctive?
>
> A background that looked like nothing anybody had ever seen before
> would likely be a pretty strange background. So, yes, it's possible
> to find previously released backgrounds that are very similar. But
> that doesn't mean that the overall combination of visual features
> involved in GNOME 3 isn't distinctive and memorable.
>
> * 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.
>
> * What about other desktops in Fedora?
>
> We're not trying to say that there is anything fundamentally
> different about the GNOME desktop in Fedora than any other desktop;
> While we do think GNOME 3 is a special occasion for GNOME, every
> desktop should be able to work with the Fedora design team to figure
> out what makes the most sense for a release.
>
> And while I think it would be a bit strange and confusing for other
> desktops to use a GNOME background as their default, there's
> no barrier for other spins to include the gnome-themes-standard
> package and depend on the
> /usr/share/themes/Adwaita/backgrounds/stripes.jpg
> if they want.
>
> I know the desktop is a big part of the expression of Fedora's design
> personality and its a lot to ask of the design team to have something
> else as the default background for the default desktop for this release,
> but I think it is a distinct positive for the release of GNOME 3. And
> working together with upstream well is something that's fundamental to
> Fedora. So hopefully a lot to ask is not too much to ask :-)
>
> Please let me know what additional questions and concerns you have and
> if we can move forward on this. Thanks!
>
> - Owen
>
>
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--
Jaroslav Řezník <jreznik at redhat.com>
Software Engineer - Base Operating Systems Brno
Office: +420 532 294 275
Mobile: +420 602 797 774
Red Hat, Inc. http://cz.redhat.com/
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