[Design-team] GNOME background in Fedora 15

[Owen Taylor]

On Fri, 2010-12-17 at 22:28 +0100, Martin Sourada wrote:
> Hi Máirín,
> 
> On Fri, 2010-12-17 at 11:03 -0500, Máirín Duffy wrote:
> > So there's a few things to consider here.... for example, the GNOME
> > marketing team is actually engaged in an effort to create a series of
> > videos showing off different aspects of GNOME 3 for the launch (some
> > details here: http://live.gnome.org/GnomeMarketing/Gnome3In30Seconds ...
> > I saw one of the videos at the Boston Summit but I'm not sure where they
> > are online, I'll look for a copy though - they are impressive!) If they
> > use the default GNOME wallpaper, but we use a different wallpaper,
> > there's a missed opportunity for shared materials there. E.g., we could
> > use the videos (which are openly licensed of course!) as part of our
> > website without having to modify them or re-shoot them.
> > 
> > It is true that KDE 4.5 shipped with a wallpaper that is strikingly
> > similar to the GNOME 3 wallpaper, but I've talked to a few KDE users and
> > it seems that it was not ever set as the default wallpaper for a KDE
> > release so it doesn't have the same brand attachment to KDE that the
> > GNOME 3 team is looking to achieve.
> > 
> > Another thing to think about is the larger struggle between upstreams'
> > branding and downstream branding. GNOME 3 isn't trying to produce a
> > desktop that shoves the GNOME foot in your face constantly and competes
> > with the Fedora brand. The GNOME logo really doesn't appear anywhere. I
> > think they are going for a more neutral look that won't override the
> > distro branding leading up to the desktop, and won't confuse users over
> > what they are using. 
> IMHO this would lessen Fedora's visual identity a lot. Imagine you boot
> a F15 Desktop Live and what you see is almost pristine GNOME 3 desktop.
> Where's Fedora in it? Where's our own visual identity in it? Moreover,
> KDE shipped our wallpaper with the 4.0 release, why should we treat
> GNOME differently? Is it some new trend?

I don't think that what was done for the KDE spin for KDE 4 has to be
considered some sort of precedent - as far as I know the equivalent
request was never made, and if the KDE SIG had made the equivalent
request, I hope the the design team would have been open to it.

In general, the way we try to create the Fedora desktop is to create a
great desktop upstream and then ship that in GNOME. So, in most ways the
Fedora desktop is in fact pretty close to a pristine GNOME desktop.

I know that the tension between this approach and the desire of the
Fedora design team to create a distinct Fedora visual identity is
probably a sore subject, especially when it comes to theming and the
switch from Nodoka to the standard GNOME theme.

But I want to be very clear that we're not trying to conflate together
widget theme and background here. They are quite different - in the area
of widget theme, GNOME is moving towards having only a single standard
theme - it's very hard on application authors to have to make their
application look good with many different themes. But the background is
absolutely a point of user personalization. And it's a point of
distribution customization as well.

We're simply making the request for this release, for Fedora 15, we not
do that customization. Because we think that it will make the story we
tell to the media and to the user about GNOME 3 and Fedora better and
more compelling.

> OK, so upstream wants to promote GNOME 3. I'm not a fan of gnome-shell
> (quite the contrary), but let them do it. But why the visual identity?
> It's the behaviour, the work-flow, the experience that makes GNOME 3
> from end-user point of view, and it's the visual identity that makes our
> distro Fedora from end-user POV (among other things, but the visual
> identity is the first thing you see).

Visual identity is powerful. That's, in fact, why we care so much about
the artwork in Fedora. If visual identity didn't matter, we wouldn't be
having this conversation. Most of the time GNOME is pretty much
inevitably something that fades into the background. If the user
downloaded and installed something called Fedora the fact that a large
fraction of the user experience is "GNOME" is just completely irrelevant
to them. But with GNOME 3, we want a big splash; I think the thousands
of people that contribute to GNOME deserve a big splash every decade or
so :-) ... and that's much more effective if we can have a single visual
identity for the GNOME 3 rather than a series of visual identities.

> So in short, let's be *first* to ship GNOME 3 and let's be *first* to
> ship it with our own visual identity. We, the fedora design team, should
> be leaders in our area as well ;-)

> PS: If majority would support us shipping default GNOME 3 wallpaper as
> our default in GNOME 3 "spin", instead of having it in prominent place
> in bg-chooser applet, I'd yield.

The reasons why I think a GNOME spin doesn't really make sense were
explained in an earlier email.

- Owen