Hello everyone, I would like to raise up the question of possibilities user have to customize the look and feel of his desktop. And let us limit our consideration to Fedora 15 release only. I don't have enough information to speak about future plans and their realization yet. 1) Why this is important: After one week of testing gnome-shell and Gnome3 by community i've made a list of things people complain most in Gnome3 (Fortunately this list contains only cosmetic issues. Many thanks to gnome developers for that.) The list is: - window titlebar size Window titles of the same color as a window background, without much meaning since they have only one button, make almost everyone think about wasting vertical space. This very expensive vertical space which is already taken by "top bar". - icon size in Applications menu The bug is here https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=636655. And discussion is still open. - color scheme Dark black-blue default color scheme with deep shadows seems to be too dark and grim for many users. Once I published the light grey version of default gnome-shell, at least 10 users changed their mind about Gnome3 and decided to try it. - fonts Default fonts are bad for non-english speaking users, who work with non-Latin characters. Bug https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=695405 still open. ( After three days of using gnome-shell i fixed all four and made this picture to promote Gnome 3 http://www.linux.org.ru/gallery/6144374.jpg And people do like it. ) I don't want to open discussion with designers team here. Artwork is always controversial, so let default setting be as they are now, except may be fedora logo improvement suggested here: http://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/design-team/2011-April/004215.html . Please, consider it. I want to emphasize that changing default settings is not an exceptional use-case for F15 Gnome users. It is a normal thing which will be used very often. 2) The gnome-developers point of view I have found these opinions on theming the gnome desktop: Bastien Nocera said at http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2011-March/msg00059.html =============================================================== Changing either theme or font would detract from our visual identity. And we also cannot offer users to switch to different themes and expect all those themes to be of the high quality one would expect from the one shipped in GNOME 3. My guess is that if you're willing to possibly break the appearance of a number of applications, we want to make it clear that you shouldn't start filing bugs against whichever product offered you that ability. There are however some missing parts to the customisation that we might want to revisit, such allowing users to tweak colours, but this would need to be designed, and thought out. ================================================================ Owen Taylor said at https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=647686 ================================================================ >From the perspective of the GNOME Shell team, GNOME Shell themes are both not interesting and not supportable ================================================================ If I understood correctly, this means that till at least Gnome 3.2, may be later, user is not supposed to do all the things I mentioned in 1). Although this may be reasonable from developers point of view (they have a lot of more important things to do), I think from the point of Fedora 15 it is wrong. Things that i listed above have much more impact on the end-user experience then integration of empathy into desktop environment, for example. Desktop settings are urgent for user-oriented distro release. 3) What I think Fedora Desktop and Fedora QA Team could and should do in this case. Fortunately, current gnome-shell does have tools to solve almost all the problems. But what is needed to be done is to change their priority from "strange things no one cares about" to the "must(or at least nice) to have in current release". I suggest a) state that theming _is_ a feature of Gnome 3 Desktop in F15 b) add gnome-tweaks-tool to the default @gnome-desktop group of packages, put it on Live images and so on Probably add gnome-shell user-theme extension package by default also. c) raise the priority and help with the bugs https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=647599 user-theme extension: support globally installed extension https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=644271 [PATCH] Add extension that prefers local theme to system theme https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=647386 [PATCH] The user-theme extension doesn't revert to the original theme immediately and others in gnome-tweak-tools component. d) consider to add gnome-tweak-tool's bugs as a blocker or nice-to-have or any other good status in Red Hat Bugzilla. -- Best regards, Aleksandra Bookwar -- desktop mailing list desktop@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/desktop
