On Sat, 2010-12-18 at 22:49 +0100, Martin Sourada wrote: > 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". Firstly, we don't know if other distros will do this. Certainly if we don't they're far less likely to consider it. 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 able to tell I'm from New York but they'll be able to tell I'm American. A world where 99+% of desktop users are either Windows or OS X users is essentially China, so asserting 'New York'-ness over American-ness (or Linux-ness, or even wider free-software-ness) is rather fruitless to have a noticeable impact and requires nuances most are not patient enough to listen to or care about. Since 2004 Fedora has had a distinctive visual identity of its own, and unfortunately it's just not all that recognizable in mainstream culture. This is just how it is. Certainly if I'm in New York a portion of people will be able to tell that I'm from New York City, or more specifically, Queens (a borough of New York City), maybe even the particular neighborhood. And I think right now having 'coffeshop-recognizable' Fedora brand is really only going to impact a Queens-sized or smaller sized group of people. Why don't we try for a larger impact? With the technological landscape changing so fast today - especially with the influx of mobile devices and mainstreaming of cloud-based apps - staring at a 0.010mm section of our navel without looking up to see where we're walking is probably not the smartest thing we could do if we really care about the ubiquity of free software happening in our lifetime. > 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). So personal opinion on aesthetics here is probably not a useful thread of conversation, especially given that it is clearly a professional-looking wallpaper. > 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!" 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. > 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. One thing we haven't discussed is how this proposal would, if accepted, affect the DVD download. I simply don't know. 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? 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?" > > > > 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." 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. > 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. > 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. > > 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. 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. ~m _______________________________________________ design-team mailing list design-team@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/design-team
