The default theme for F12

[Martin Sourada]

On Wed, 2009-08-05 at 05:55 -0400, William Jon McCann wrote:
> Hey,
Hi,

> For now we want to stay with upstream Clearlooks.
> 
For a while now, I have been wondering what "we" stands for here... The
discussion seems to mostly happen off-list.

> There are a few reasons for this.  Roughly:
> 
>  * Goals
>     I don't agree with the stated goal of the Nodoka theme to make
> something that looks uniquely Fedora which also includes an icon
> theme.  A better goal is to look good and be well integrated with the
> platform we are building upstream in GNOME.
> 
The uniqueness is one of the goals, of course we want to both look good
and be well integrated with the platform for Nodoka. I don't personally
believe to this to be valid reason for choosing Clearlooks over Nodoka.
Although one of our goals with nodoka is to bring it to wider audience
and provide consistent look throughout whole Fedora -- i.e. even for QT.
But we are far from there...

>  * Alignment
>    We have a number of pretty major and interesting things going on in
> GNOME that will appear before, during, or shortly after the F12 cycle.
>  Some of these are client side decorations, a new theme drawing
> library, new high resolution icons, and GNOME Shell.  Any and all of
> which really change what we want from a theme.  We want to be working
> very closely with the upstream design, art, and theme community in
> order to keep the design and development loop as efficient as
> possible.  For now, it seems that the consensus opinion in the
> upstream community is that clearlooks is the best engine on which to
> base further work.
> 
This is a pretty sound argument. Surely the gtk-engines stack is more
tightly bound with upstream development than nodoka.

>  * Experience
>    This one is going to be somewhat subjective and prone to a whole
> lot of bikeshedding.  I don't think Nodoka is where we want to be.
> I'm not sure it is all that helpful to go down a list of things that
> don't look right.  Especially since there are things that we'd also
> like to change in Clearlooks.  But I think Clearlooks is currently
> closer to what we want and probably a better base on which to work.
> 
Again, I wonder who is "we" and what exactly do they want.

> The current default is Mist, right?  Can someone describe for me the
> exact differences between Mist and GNOME?  Seems to me that they are
> similar.  Looks like the folder icons are blue in Mist and tan in
> GNOME.  Given that the theme "selected" color changes the window
> decorations and controls (not to mention the wallpaper) I'm not sure I
> like choosing a non-neutral color for the folder icons.  Other than
> that what is different?
> 
> With the recent changes in GNOME to limit the number of icons used in
> menus and buttons this is less important than it would be otherwise.
> However, there are a number of key areas where icons are still very
> important.  We'll also want to keep an eye on both the high resolution
> icons stuff and the moblin icon theme.
> 
Mist just changes folders to be blue, which feels more Fedora.

Martin

PS: I'd really like to know who has the formal authority in the desktop
design area -- is it the design-team, is it the Desktop SIG for GNOME,
KDE SIG for KDE, ... or combination of both? IIRC the switch to Mist (at
that time from bluecurve via incomplete Echo) was made by the
predecessor to design-team. On the other hand this very discussion seems
to be mostly Desktop SIG centered. While I don't have any preference as
where the authority should be, I'd like it to be crystal clear... I
certainly don't want to have a ping-pong between e.g. design-team
switching icon theme to gnome-colors [1][2] while desktop SIG switching
it to gnome-icon-theme...

References:
[1] http://code.google.com/p/gnome-colors/
[2] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=515280
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