Suggestions related with "GNOME 3.0 Art Roadmap - First draft"

[Pacho Ramos <pacho condmat1 ciencias uniovi es>]

Hi all!

At first, I am a Gnome user that had just read:
http://www.bomahy.nl/hylke/blog/gnome-30-art-roadmap-first-draft/

I write to this list instead of artweb-list because last seems to be a
bit inactive and seems more close to art.gnome.org web issues, but, if I
am wrong, feel free to let me know it :-)

I have read http://www.bomahy.nl/hylke/wip/gnome-art-roadmap-draft.pdf
and I would want to make some suggestions at some points:

1. Login screen : Of course, I agree with making login process smother,
anyway I haven't tried gdm-2.24 yet for testing how does it work now (I
am still using gdm-2.20 mostly because my distribution still not ships
it and, as I have read in desktop mailling list, seems that it still
doesn't support XDMCP connections like 2.20 does, and this is used by a
lot of users of machines I maintain)

2. Splash Screen : I disagree with dropping it. I think that it's needed
because, in a lot of machines, gnome takes some seconds to start and
most of users (including me) would prefer to see a "progress" instead of
a background image stalled while disk activity is seen

This is being discussed in:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=546409

and I agree with most of arguments against dropping it. For example, I
see splash progress (I mean, that I see the notification of panel,
nautilus and metacity are started) on my Ahtlon 3200+, I know that it's
not a really new machine but I won't change it in years because I am
really happy with it :-). Same for my father's machine (a Pentium IV at
3.06GHz), or a friends machine (Pentium III at 800 MHz). 

In all these cases splash is useful for letting users know that "gnome
is starting" :-)

When you say "a lot of distributions are already turned it off by
default" I can only remember Fedora (I am not saying that you are lying
of course :-)), but take care that other important distributions like
Ubuntu, Mandriva, OpenSuSE or Gentoo still use it (and, in some cases, I
really like the look of some splash image used by some distributions)

About "flashes" issue... well, maybe this would depend in how future gdm
versions will behave but, for me, a progress bar would be enough, then,
for example, gdm could handle background image and transition to final
desktop and splash could simply be a progress bar displayed over gdb
background (maybe, even icons could be dropped if you dislike them,
having a progress bar would be enough for me)

Thanks  :-)

3. Wallpapers : I also think that new backgrounds included in 2.24 are
great then, hopefully, other contest would be great :-)

I would also comment that there is an old bug about randomly changing
backgrounds that would be interesting:
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=31319

if this would be implemented in gnome3, maybe gnome could set all
provided wallpapers to be rotated by default

4. Icons : Tango-NG (or Mango) icons looks really nice :-O
The problem is that, maybe, the transition would be too long, for
example, even in 2.22, there are still apps that still miss tango icons
and, for example, icon packs like gnome-colors:
http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/GNOME-colors?content=82562

fix this. Then, I think that decission to migrate to Mango should be
taken as soon as possible for being able to have most of icons migrated
before gnome3 is released

5. Personally I really like DejaVu fonts, then, I won't discuss much
more about this as I know that this would depend on personal
opinions :-)


Regards!