[FC7 theme proposal] Flying High with Fedora 7 - Round 2

[Máirín Duffy]

David Zeuthen wrote:
> On Tue, 2006-12-19 at 08:56 +0200, Nicu Buculei wrote:
>> John Baer wrote:
>>> Posted some additional artwork submissions to the round 2 page.
>>>
>>> Just for fun I made an Open Office and Gimp splash screen.
>> Question: do we want customized splash screens for such applications?
>> - the splash for OpenOffice.org was customized for a while (around 
>> FC2-FC3) in the Bluecurve style.;
>> - the GIMP splash was never (AFAIK) customized in RHL/Fedora;
>> - in the current FC6 the Eclipse splash is customized ("Fedora Eclipse") 
>> but is not related at all to the rest of the desktop theming.

I don't think we should be changing the Gimp and Open Office's splash 
screens - those products have their own brand identity. I do think, 
though, there are other themeable bits we should definitely look into - 
e.g., the default 'you've got webserver!' html for when you first setup 
apache on a Fedora system, or if we're going with a face browser, the 
default avatars available for people to choose from.

> I think we should avoid theming splash screens because
> 
>  a) splash screens are generally not themeable; hence
> 
>     a1) extra work for package owners for patching it in - including
>         all the work communicating with said maintainers; and

Right, we should definitely consider the amount of extra work involved 
for package maintainers. Although if we can provide our own patches, 
it's not really much of a load, correct?

>  b) some applications take pride in their splash screen and branding
>     it might be considered offensive. For example this applies to
>     The Gimp where there's, IIRC, a competition for splash screens

Are we required to create one for Eclipse for various reasons? (I don't 
actually know, I just assumed so.) If not is there a reason we can't use 
the upstream one? Or at least clean up the current Fedora-themed one?

>  c) many developers (including most people working on Fedora) generally
>     consider splash screens to be bad; instead applications should just
>     start up really fast.

+1

>  d) splash screens are only shown for 1) a short time (if at all); and
>     2) only when launching specific apps; so, at least to the
>     cost/benefit of doing splash screens isn't really justified

I don't think it can be argued that they will go unnoticed. The Gimp and 
OOo are definitely widely-used apps. If it was deemed important for 
Fedora branding purposes (which I don't agree it is, but w/e) it 
wouldn't be a waste of effort.

~m