A message from snwh (Suru icon upstream maintainer)

Desktop
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I have the same conclusion as Sam — I don’t think Yaru should be trying to apply shapes to app icons — but for completely different reasons.

The Ubuntu desktop is very much part of the Ubuntu business: as Sam wrote, “Ubuntu is a serious project”. Besides the OEMs shipping it — and besides the businesses, educational and government institutions, and non-profits that use it for workstations — most people building snaps, charms, ML models etc on Linux are doing those things on an Ubuntu desktop.

And even if none of that was happening, the vast majority of Gnome users are using Ubuntu’s version of it. This was true in 2009, it was true in 2014 (with Unity on top), and it’s true in 2019. This is why, as I said in October, “The icons that Ubuntu ships matter far more than any other OS’s icon theme (and far more than the upstream Gnome theme)”.

Now, some people just don’t know this. And maybe some people would like to think it isn’t true. But Gnome is the only project I’m aware of where people treat “upstream” like it’s a commandment on a stone tablet, where diverging is a heresy. For example, consider the Linux kernel: you can run a pure upstream kernel on Ubuntu, but nobody would seriously suggest that Ubuntu doesn’t “fully embrace Linux” merely because it doesn’t ship the mainline kernel by default. Nobody condemns the Ubuntu kernel because it isn’t “upstream”. That is not a serious criticism. It’s only with Gnome that people try to make this criticism with a straight face.

On the contrary, I think a consistent icon shape can only be solved by top-down modifications and the platform exerting itself. One reason is that some app developers or icon designers will disagree, or not know, or not care about Yaru. So leaving it up to them guarantees inconsistency.

The other reason, though, is that doing it in the platform is the easiest way to allow future changes. For example…

…When anyone upgraded from iOS 6 to iOS 7, the shape of every app icon on their device changed slightly. They were all consistent beforehand, and they all changed, and they were all consistent afterwards, without app developers needing to do anything at all. Because the shape wasn’t baked into the icon provided by the publisher, or provided by an icon theme — it was a mask applied by the OS.

If you decided to tweak Yaru’s corner radius, or tweak its aspect ratio, you’d have a much harder job, because the shape is applied to icons individually. Some app developers wouldn’t bother at all. Others would have shaped their icons a year ago, but they wouldn’t know or care that the shape has changed, and now you have a mess.

As I’ve said before, I’m not a fan of shaping icons like Yaru does (and especially not for things that aren’t apps). But if that’s your preferred design, it will be more consistent to do it in the platform — in GTK and Gnome Shell — than in an icon theme.

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41

I don’t know what to think about him.

A previous post in his blog about GTK themes in August.

https://samuelhewitt.com/blog/2018-08-05-moving-beyond-themes

Visual Fragmentation
**The biggest offenders continue to be downstream projects that theme GNOME extensively by overriding the default icons and stylesheet, and insist that that’s part of their own brand identity, but so long as that practice carries on then this fragmentation will continue.**

I think what he really… really… wants is Ubuntu to drop its theme and icons and become a vanilla GNOME distro.

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if true, kinda weird he would have ever put effort into a fourth major set of icons (after Budgie, Moka, Paper) to make Ubuntu look characteristically different from default GNOME.

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He created Suru as a visual language for Unity 8/ubuntu touch, which was in no way associated with GNOME. He then kept it going as a community theme for fun. As he has stated, a community theme has a different place and role than an official one.

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No some canonical designer made the first Suru icons. Snwh ported them to gnome by making them free desktop compatible. Could be wrong though… But I’m pretty sure that’s how it was.

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That’s the idea. You don’t tell the app developer to create an icon just for you, but you create a background (or mask) hold that icon in the middle of that background for your distro. That’s what Windows does, iOS does, etc.

But, we don’t want Ubuntu to look an iOS 5 clone, do we? So, we have to drop Suru like background. The Yaru theme consists of the app theme, shell theme, sound and the icons. And, those icons are the troubling matter. There’s enough time until 20.04 LTS, so shouldn’t the Yaru team create specific Ubuntu folder icons, and a background for all apps to fix into? And, that background can be, either coloured or transparent, or coloured and transparent (example).

It should be Ubuntu, and from the Yaru team, without any upstream developer.

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Yes, this is exactly what Windows 10 does.
They add a color background in all programs in start menu (blue by default).
Has Microsoft contacted all windows app developers and asked for permission for adding the background in app icons in start menu?
I don’t think so.

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Yeah, I think some gnomers are exaggerating that a bit too much when adding a background shape should be altering the app identity. However, @mpt is correct: the only way of doing this without producing guaranteed inconsistency is to build this into either dash to dock or the shell (from the current information level I have)

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I think Sam’s point is that Ubuntu is no longer an ‘app platform’ in his view but merely a ‘GNOME vendor’ (I had a rather lengthy conversation with him on Twitter which I can’t paste here but it gave me some more clarity on what he thinks personally, but also it seems some of this is what GNOME thinks), and thus Ubuntu, as the most popular GNOME vendor, should be sticking with upstream GNOME in general, but also in terms of icon HIG, which he sees Yaru (especially for third-party apps, as Ubuntu is no longer an ‘app platform’ in his view, so it makes absolutely no sense to him) as conflicting with (unlike @jbicha who sees them as compatible). He also intended his icon theme to be an option for the few users who care about changing their theme from the default, he never wanted it to be default (from what I can tell, I should perhaps paste this post back to him so that he’s happy with what I’m saying here…).

Sam finds forums (and Twitter) unproductive and said if I really wanted to find reconciliation I could start an email thread with the interested parties so I’ll try and do this when I get the chance and we’ll see if there’s any possible reconciliation between these conflicting positions of Ubuntu/Yaru and Sam/GNOME which is possible…

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If we take this way, I believe we should implement the mechanism in both.
However, is the squircle so distinctive that we want to diverge (talking about the shell) for having it? Consider that it appeared on Ubuntu only in Cosmic release, since version 18.04 does not have Yaru by default.

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No need @ads20000 , I’m already in conversation with the other gnome designers (jimmac and tbernard)

I didn’t say that we should make the squircle BG in the dock I just think that’s the only way of having the guaranteed consistency :slight_smile:

I’m more and more for dropping the Suru app icons and “only” keep all the rest: folders, symbolic system icons, mimetypes and so on.

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I don’t like how we can’t see what their arguments are but I’m glad Sam has made some of his clear… If you do choose to drop Suru (which could be a fine decision and I think I do buy the GNOME argument that we should be going more upstream) then please either write a forum topic or a blog post (maybe via @didrocks blog or if one of you is an Ubuntu Member then you could get a blog aggregated via Planet Ubuntu and then post it to the blog) on the decision so that we know the full justification.

@mpt thanks for your contribution! :smiley: I thought I have read in places that people don’t like how Ubuntu has modified kernels but I can’t remember where. I suppose the usual question is ‘why isn’t upstream good enough for us and why can’t we merge the changes upstream?’ Sometimes there’s a divergence in design philosophy and desires over branding etc but as a ‘GNOME vendor’, as Sam puts it (I suppose we’re also a ‘Linux vendor’), should we be having that divergence?

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I think the arguments are pretty much clear from their point of view.
Their vision is to build a consistent app platform.
Ubuntus idea is a little bit different. So we need to meet a good mix for both, Ubuntu and gnome.
Which will probably be to use our theme which is very close to adwaita code wise yet provides the Ubuntu feeling but without overwriting their app “branding”

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Which is not their preferred stance (since their preferred stance seems to be that Ubuntu goes full upstream so that we can fully promote their ‘app platform’) but hopefully it’s a compromise that they’ll find acceptable? Or, at least, more acceptable than the status quo… Hopefully eventually there’ll be a GNOME theme API that allows branding differences but until then perhaps we’ll just have to disagree with them and cope with the tension…

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Yeah it’s not what they prefer but it is what we prefer and it looks like what @willcooke prefers.

Also, I’m trying to make yaru a second upstream theme. Which has a very low success chance, but I will give my best to convince them :slight_smile:

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Squircle or any other background, but not the Suru squircle, but an Ubuntu distinct squircle. Create another squircle, without touching Suru. Have a different corner radius, have a different amount of layers, or just one layer. No need of all that superimposed layers with all kinds of levels of gradients, transparencies. Windows has one colour, and everyone recognises that’s Windows. The squircle background should point to, remind people to Ubuntu brand, not Suru brand.

In Gimp, new > 512x 512 > fill in the colour > right click > select > rounded rectangle > choose your radius > select again > invert > push delete button, and you got your squircle.

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Unlikely. Imagine that Google made Samsung One UI second official launcher.

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I don’t believe changing the radius will make any real difference

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Well, even if not, doesn’t change the very post by Will up in this thread and the fact that Ubuntu is not dropping it’s visual identity.

Soooo back to the icon discussion:

Let’s see when the 3.32 app stack hits disco daily how everything looks without the Suru app icons.

Maybe it’s better than we imagine. As long as we keep the symbolic icons and the folders as @taciturasa suggested

Edit: Also,… thanks @ads20000 for the efforts to bring transparency to the community but if SNWH wants to communicate with us he could have done it already either in the big thread of doom (now closed) or otherwise.

Again: GNOME designers have other goals. That does not mean that they are wrong or we are right, it is just different.
Speaking of myself, I am very fine to live with that differences without bursting into pieces.
Thus Ubuntu has a dock (yay) and ubuntu has a systray extension (yay). And thus ubuntu has an own theme (yay).

We are already contributing to the upstream theme additionally to our daily Yaru business (not much, but it could increases in the future, especially since they want to improve the upstream shell theme in the next cycle). From my private communications with tbernard I can say, that the issues with the Yaru theme are far less problematic than to overwrite their new app icons with a different icon.

They dream of: app developer develops his/her app including a unique icon → app developer publishes his/her app → user uses the app developers app (including their unique icon).
Overwriting this with a custom icon set is not what they want, thus their feedback was… rather negative :stuck_out_tongue:

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59

What if we create another extension that will insert icons into shape? I suggested this idea earlier.