Gnome-Colors Brave in 9.04

[Pasi Lallinaho]

Daniel Fore wrote:
> Hey Team,
>
> It's come to my attention that Gnome-Colors Brave has become the
> default icon set for Xubuntu 9.04. The way I found out was that
> someone sent me a message congratulating me on the fact that the new
> Xubuntu set featured mostly elementary icons. That's right.
> elementary. Not Gnome-colors.
>
> So, I went to do some research because a couple other distos have
> asked permission to use elementary icons and I figured it'd be good
> press to say that Xubuntu used elementary icons as well. But, when I
> went to look, I saw this other theme that looked a lot like an old
> version of elementary icons, but recolored and with a couple tango
> icons here and there.
>
> What I'm getting at here is, why not use the real elementary icons
> instead of this imitation?
>
> The real elementary icons are more open. Almost all of the icons are
> in SVG format, meaning they are more open to criticism, changes,
> restyling, and every other trait we've come to love from open sourced
> code.
>
> The real elementary icons are smaller. Gnome-colors weighs in at a
> whopping 30MB where as elementary weighs in at 2.3MB. I think
> elementary follows the Xubuntu philosophy better here.
>
> The real elementary icons are pre-packaged. Every three months I
> personally create a new DEB package for elementary icons. This would
> save you the time of downloading the entire Gnome-Colors set, picking
> out the icons you want, and then repackaging.
>
> The real elementary icons use a single license. Every elementary icon
> is GPL. You don't have to worry about the multiple license issue that
> Gnome-colors has.
>
> The real elementary icons are under constant revision and
> optimization. The latest revision of elementary icons is 10x smaller
> than it was last year and renders up to 400x faster while I've
> increased the actual content of the set 4x and the level of detail is
> unrivaled by any other purely vector icon set out there.
>
> In short, don't settle for a rip-off recolor icon set. Get the real
> thing from the original artist. It'll be worth it.
>
> Best Regards,
>
> Daniel Foré
>
> http://www.elementary-project.com
Hi Daniel and thanks for your mail.

First of all, sorry for the confusion. We used the name Gnome-colors as
it was our best knowledge - the Gnome-color author only writes: "This is
an extensively complete set of icon themes based on GNOME, with
inspiration from Tango, Elementary, Discovery, Tango Generator and other
projects." [1]

At the moment there is no discussion about changing the icon theme to
anything else in the next release. However, a switch to elementary would
seem totally logical and just decision if the developer community is
happy with it. Based on the quick discussion in our developer community,
it seems there is things people (including myself) like in both of the
icon themes and I can't yet draw a conclusion on the subject.

If we decide to use elementary in the next release, we need to
investigate elementary's Xfce-completeness. At least at the moment it
lacks for example icon for xfce-settings.

Sorry again for the inconvenience we have caused you and thanks for
letting us know about the elementary icon theme.

[1] http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/GNOME-colors?content=82562

-- 
Pasi Lallinaho
Xubuntu Marketing Lead
Web-designer, graphic artist
IRC: knome @ freenode