[Design-team] GNOME background in Fedora 15

Sat Dec 18 21:49:02 UTC 2010

On Sat, 2010-12-18 at 09:10 -0500, Máirín Duffy wrote:
> 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?" 
> 
Well, that's a bit of a problem. For many people linux=ubuntu... People
who know fedora will usually recognize it by the wallpaper, or in the
older releases with nodoka as well. I was at a scientific conference
last week and I was pretty pleased to see a few people whom I could tell
just by looking were using Fedora. With theme+wallpaper being the same
for F15 as for say Debian and OpenSUSE, we down to "just some linux".

> 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.
> 
Honestly, if I talk about the wallpaper in question specifically, I'd
have to say it would be a rather big step backwards in terms of our
artwork quality, and while it looks professional, it's over too
simplistic, generic, non-catchy and retro looking (purely my personal
opinion).

> > 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?
I didn't suggest it should be a policy, just that it's a good-to-have.
IMHO the thematic spins are beyond "just Fedora" to the point that they
could have their own visual identity, maybe based on the general fedora
look. Here the idea is not "oh, look it's fedora" but something along
the lines "oh, it's FEL Spin, that's the cool thingie for engineers,
based on Fedora!". In a way, thematic spins are downstream for fedora,
while desktop spins are just a flavour -- you want, say, LXDE desktop on
Fedora, so you go and download LXDE Spin instead of the usual one --
it's also a way to tell our users: "look we don't care about GNOME only,
we also have teams of people dedicated to make KDE users happy too!" 

What I'd like to say is that Spin maintainers are to decide what brand,
what visual identity they want to promote -- their theme, or fedora, or
some combination? And our team exists to help them achieve it (among
other things). However Fedora goes beyond spins, there's also the
traditional Installation DVD, people use applications from across all
DEs at the same time. Using a pristine upstream visual identity for some
DE would make some sense for a spin made with the exact purpose of
following upstream in every aspect, something upstream could point their
users to as a reference implementation. Not for a default flavour of a
linux distribution. Or that is what I think.

> 
> > > 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?
How I'm confused? How is a visual appearance a block for reusing a
video? There's nothing stopping us from telling users: "look this is how
awesome F15 looks and if you'd like to know more about the awesomeness
of GNOME 3, which will shortly hit other distros as well, there're tons
of videos on this project." We would have more attention if we were
promoted on gnome.org, or just because we would use GNOME 3, not because
we would use pristine GNOME 3 in terms of default look.

How does visual identity shared among distros help promoting GNOME 3? It
certainly does not help promoting the distros -- when you can't tell
them apart at first look, what the point to differentiate at all (yeah,
I know I'm oversimplifying a lot)?

> I don't understand we've been doing that for a long time... what has it
> bought us?
I believe Nicolas more-or-less answered this. But to broaden it a bit --
our artwork is not completely consistent across desktops. When you run a
QT app under GNOME or vise versa it will still look out of place and not
because of the difference of widget placing. What we've been doing these
past few releases is just a tip of the iceberg, but we've improved a
great deal. To the point that our team is well known (in a positive
sense) in the linux community and that is something to be proud of.

Martin
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