[Design-team] GNOME background in Fedora 15

[Máirín Duffy]

On Sat, 2010-12-18 at 10:10 +0100, Martin Sourada wrote:
> That's not what you see when you boot and log-in to desktop. When
> someone peeks around my shoulder he should be something like, "oh you're
> using fedora!", if I use default settings. Furthermore -- if the GDM and
> plymouth are different from wallpaper, we're breaking the smoothness in
> desktop spin.

Does this really happen to you though? To be quite honest, when I use my
laptop at a coffeeshop in the Cambridge-Boston area (arguably a pretty
tech-savvy area), I've either been asked, "Is that Linux?" or "Is that
Ubuntu?" I have never been asked, "Is that Fedora?" 

Since the wallpaper is blue and honestly not that different in style
that the wallpapers we typically do, I can't see it causing much of a
break with the other splashes, especially since we are aware of it
upfront right now and can account for it in our designs.

> Spin authors have usually two options
>       * use fedora visual identity
>       * use spin-specific visual identity
> 
> I believe the "desktop" spins, i.e. Desktop, KDE, LXDE and XFCE, should
> fall ideally into the first category, while the others, which are
> usually thematic (like Security, Education, FEL), fall into the other
> category. However the final decision is always on the spin maintainers.

But this is not a policy, and never has been. This team right now does
not have that say. It would likely be up to the board to give us that.
But it doesn't make sense according to what you said above, because if
someone is using the Education spin at a coffee shop what are they going
to say?


> > They believe the stripes is part of their upstream visual identity. To
> > be fair, they are producing a lot of nice visual materials including
> > videos that have the stripes - because as a DE they must remain neutral
> > wrt distros, so they obviously cannot pick a favorite in choosing a
> > wallpaper. They would like the visual identity then across
> > GNOME-produced materials and Fedora materials and materials produced by
> > journalists and other reviewers checking out GNOME 3 via Fedora to be
> > consistent. This makes sense to me. After F15, it won't be as big a deal
> > since all the hooplah will be over, so at that point we can go back to
> > the standard operating procedure.
> > 
> This makes perfect sense up to the first mention of Fedora to me.

Can you explain why you are confused? How does it not make sense that
Fedora is not going to get more downloads and attention as a result of
the GNOME 3 release?
> 
> > > 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 ;-)
> > 
> > I am unsure if we will be the first to ship GNOME 3. Certainly we will
> > be first to ship it by default. I don't understand how we are being
> > leaders in what you suggest here.
> > 
> Being the first community that is able to create and maintain a full
> Fedora visual identity.

I don't understand we've been doing that for a long time... what has it
bought us?

~m