[Design-team] GNOME background in Fedora 15

[Martin Sourada]

On Sat, 2010-12-18 at 18:48 -0500, Máirín Duffy wrote:
> Firstly, we don't know if other distros will do this. Certainly if we
> don't they're far less likely to consider it.
> 
That's my point. If no-one does it, it wouldn't affect us and it would
do nothing to GNOME 3, be it for good or for bad. If we do it, we lessen
our visual identity for one release to celebrate a major release of one
of the major components of our default desktop. Will GNOME gain from it?
I doubt it. When talking about gnome 3, no-one cares about wallpaper,
everybody cares about gnome-shell.

> Secondly, there's a big difference between recognizing Fedora and
> recognizing Linux. If I'm in China, most of the people there will not be
<snip>
I don't think we're in a direct agreement here. I don't need random
windows/mac people to recognize fedora, I'm fine with linux users being
able to tell it apart from other distros just by looking. That's not
happening if we and at least one another distro uses default gnome
settings.

> So personal opinion on aesthetics here is probably not a useful thread
> of conversation, especially given that it is clearly a
> professional-looking wallpaper.
Wasn't looking to start a thread on this, just a sidenote that in
addition that I believe that "politically" I'm against the gnome
wallpaper, I also consider it aesthetically less pleasing and modern
than what we produced in past few releases.

> But you missed my point - on the one hand you want Fedora to look the
> same for recognition's sake, but on the other hand it's okay for over
> half the Fedora spins to not look recognizably Fedora. Why do you make
> this distinction, I don't understand? Because FEL has a specific purpose
> it's okay for you if it forsakes Fedora's identity? Spins with the
> Fedora brand are absolutely *NOT* downstreams... downstreams are
> 'remixes' which do not qualify to be called Fedora for specific &
> detailed reasons. The spins hosted on spins.fedoraproject.org are very
> much fully Fedora.
As I said, or implied, to put it simply: if you do net/DVD install you
have to, ideally, end up with fedora visual identity. Since the desktop
spins are more or less shorthand for installing one of the DEs, along
with a selected number of apps as set in comps, via DVD install, it
makes sense for them to use the same visual identity. 

Specific purposed spins might or might not want to have their own visual
identity. It's up to them, but given their target audience it usually
makes sense to have some customizations. Yes, it's lessening fedora
visual identity, just like having our own wallpaper for DVD installs
lessens GNOME visual identity. In that sense, these spins are
downstream, even though they're still Fedora.

> One thing we haven't discussed is how this proposal would, if accepted,
> affect the DVD download. I simply don't know.
> 
But that's an important aspect to discuss!

> People use applications from across DEs at the same time yes, but I do
> not understand this all-or-nothing visual identity point you're making
> and why it only applies to a default install. As has already been stated
> numerous times, this is a request from upstream to use the default
> upstream wallpaper - only the wallpaper, not replacing any other artwork
> - to mark the occasion of 10 years of GNOME development. It's a
> celebratory type of deal. Why everything else would have to be
> GNOME-flavored in your view I simply do not understand? 
So do we want to directly help marketing GNOME 3 (which is IMHO dubious)
or simply celebrate their major release? If it's just celebration, why
wallpaper? If it's different reasons why only wallpaper?

> How then are we to explain to our users the difference between the
> default spin and this super-GNOME spin? "Oh, we don't get along with
> each other and decided not to do upstream a favor? Oh by the way, use
> Fedora! We work well with upstream, that's why you should use us over
> other distros?"
> 
No, no, you misunderstood. I don't imply we should ship to gnome spins.
We should either ship in F15 gnome as pristine as possible or just do it
they way we do it usually. Neither of these should of course affect
other spins and IMHO also not DVD install.

> You've got it backwards. GNOME is making the videos. If Fedora were to
> use them, it's certainly not a block, but it would look a little weird.
> 
What's weird with pointing to upstream videos which use different
wallpaper?

> > 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.
> 
> Why would gnome.org have any reason to promote us if we do not provide
> some quid pro quo? They asked us for something first, if we say no we
> surely would be conceited to ask for something in return for nothing.
Either we're shipping F15 Desktop Spin as close to upstream gnome as
possible and thus doing a favour to them and so they promote our desktop
spin on their page as suggested download of Gnome 3 (or something along
these lines), or we do it like we usually do and they don't promote us
either. But it would be the promotion on gnome.org (along with the fact
that we're shipping gnome 3 by default), not the fact that we're almost
canonical implementation of gnome 3 that would gain us more attention.
Sorry that I worded it bad.

> > 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)?
> 
> It absolutely would help in promoting GNOME 3. It would the other brands
> - Debian, SuSe, Fedora, etc. - out of the spotlight in news articles and
> would make it easier to focus on GNOME alone. It would give GNOME and
> that project's artists an opportunity to get a spotlight they have never
> had as distros for many, many years now have always plastered on top of
> their artwork. 
While this is probably true about gnome artists, I don't believe it
would have direct impact on the project as a whole. All the headlines
will be the same anyways: "Fedora 15 Delivers the Long Awaited GNOME
3", "Fedora 15: Desktop Redefined", etc.


> Yes, our team is well known for producing solid artwork, and I really
> don't understand how honoring a reasoned request from an upstream we
> could not exist without affects that at all. 
Minds of people don't work this easily. See just the amount of negative
reactions here on list (not big, but still present). People will notice
that we have failed to produce artwork for F15 that could "beat" the
stripes, not that we honored a reasoned request. And those that will
notice that it was on a request will ask how big the project must be for
us to honor their request. Do we have special dealings with GNOME, or
will we grant such request to other DEs? How frequent will that be? Is
fedora-design-team going to be squashed by other teams?

Martin

PS: I think we should slowly kill this thread, I'm running "out of
ammo", your arguments also haven't been strong enough to make me change
my mind and I wouldn't want to make this into a flame...
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