[ubuntu-art] Quick Update

[Mark Shuttleworth]

OK, I think we are making progress here!

Michiel Sikma wrote:
> What I do appreciate is that Human was used in Dapper while it was
> incomplete as an extra impulse to get people to complete it. I'll
> definitely make it one of my things to do to point out things which I
> believe are bad choices in Human. Because, like I've said, Human isn't
> a bad icon set (at all), to me personally, there are small things that
> add up and make a large difference. These aren't things that are
> difficult to solve. 

You have a good eye for those inconsistencies. Would you like to join
the team improving Human? As I see it the process would be:

 - continue to identify and prioritise icons on the page at:
     http://daniel.holba.ch/ubuntu/ic/
 - discuss inconsistencies and give the AIC feedback
 - develop a set of "style guidelines" that capture the essence of what
has been done
 - not change the key style established in Human (i.e. the folder icon
and others)
 - not redo icons unless there is a significant inconsistency
 - contribute icons that fit with the emerging style of Human

We would like to flesh out and complete Human during Edgy, and will
backport that to Dapper (along with Frank's Firefox-Human theme) in a
point release.

> I think that I've been misunderstood on this point a little, though. I
> don't think that it's not a good idea for Ubuntu to make itself
> distinct as a Linux distribution, as it _is_ a very important and
> unique one. I do support the "Ubuntufication" of the user interface,
> but feel that the way to go about this is by ensuring that such an
> attribute does not get in the way of usability, consistency and
> affiliation with the general user interface system of operating
> systems as a whole.

OK. Then help us make Human even better!

I happen to think we have improved on Tango in a number of ways. I think
when Human is great, it's far more attractive than Tango. Yes, it has
more warts, but we will take care of those over the course of Edgy. To
my eyes, Tango is a little dry and dull. It lacks the austere beauty of
OS X, and the cheerful beauty of Win XP.

> There is another thing that I would like to address, and it is the
> fact that Tango aims to give people a method of aligning the user
> interfaces of all Linux programs onto one centrally decided standard
> by means of (mainly) guidelines. This is, to me, an extremely
> interesting project, as it's usually consistency that is sometimes
> missing in Linux user interfaces. 
It also misses the basic fact that the KDE community wants different
things from the Gnome community. While you may want consistency, that's
a little bit like trying to make the Mac and Windows look the same. You
could probably do it but you would end up with a bastard halfbreed that
pleased nobody.

Gnome and KDE are not just different colours. They have different
philosophies. One of the key ingredients of our success in this project
has been that we respected the difference rather than trying to shoehorn
their vision into a combined platform. Red Hat and SUSE have done the
shoehorning, we have quite deliberately allowed the Gnome and KDE
communities to express their differences.

If you want to be involved in the art in this project, then you really
need to grasp how important that distinction is. While a "consistent
user interface" is a beautiful idea, it should not come at the price of
the feeling that KDE and Gnome have that Ubuntu / Kubuntu are the best
places for THEM to express their ideas. THEY write the software, we just
package it.

This is absolutely essential for everyone to understand.

Tango misses this.

Now, don't get me wrong. We want the different desktop environments to
learn from one another. We learned a bunch of stuff during Breezy with
Ubuntu, and as a result we tuned the Kubuntu desktop in Dapper. But we
did not try to make them look the same. Just like we have not tried to
make either of them look like Windows (one common request) or like the
Mac (another common request).


> I feel that the Tango project will be very important to Linux user
> interface development in the future and that it should expand beyond
> just providing an icon set. I think that it's important to realize
> that outside development will always be the largest portion of an
> operating system, and that once this portion becomes consistent with
> itself, Linux will become a whole lot more interesting for lots of
> people to use. Ubuntu should not blindly follow this, I agree, but
> should also not stray too far from what could be a great collaboration
> in the Linux community as a whole.
>
> Of course, I don't have a crystal ball. I can't tell what the future
> will bring. But allowing Human to blend in with Tango will definitely
> be a good thing. It's already well on its way, and in that sense,
> Ubuntu is leading the way (especially when compared to, for example,
> Fedora). This, however, is the reason why I feel that it's not always
> necessary for the Human icon theme to "re-invent the wheel". Such a
> feeling is partially philosophical.

We can agree to disagree. I have explicitly made space for your opinion
by asking for Tangerine and Tango to be packaged in the distro. You may
be right, and if you believe that you should devote yourself to that
vision by making those packages ROCK.

I, however, think differently. I think that Ubuntu and Kubuntu need
unique, distinctive, world class, consistent icon sets and interface
themes. And I'm investing my own time in helping make that happen.

Mark
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