A message from snwh (Suru icon upstream maintainer)

Desktop
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(All this is purely IMO - I try to help the Yaru team out on an ad hoc basis but don’t speak for them.)

@ian-weisser

“bad feelings caused by modifying upstream icons”

IMO, because of what icons are, they’ll always have foreign elements from the desktop theme behind them.

Even when the desktop doesn’t use an organising device like blue tiles (Windows 10) or squircles (various iterations of Ubuntu), the icon will at least appear on top of the wallpaper. That has patterns and colours of its own.

Aside from personal taste, I’m not sure how putting an unaltered icon on a green or grey squircle is worse than putting it on a dark purple rectangle (i.e., directly on the Ubuntu launcher).

Actually redrawing icons to fit the aesthetic of a theme is a different matter, and I’ve experimented with that myself - at least once successfully (the maintainer of an app said we could do what we liked for Suru and actually liked our new icon).

But the blog post and tweet have called Yaru out for early experiments that put official upstream icons on top of coloured squircles. I’m surprised if that causes bad feelings because of the very nature of how icons work. They’re like stickers that get put on someone else’s desktop. They’ll appear with foreign elements behind them. The lawyer for another major app was perfectly happy for me to proceed with the mockup I sent, showing their (fully trademarked) icon on a Suru squircle. I guess they knew it would always appear on something that wasn’t part of their brand.

Also: not all icons are fully trademarked. It would be good if we could assume straight-talking when we read licences. They should be honest statements of what the creator is happy for people to do. If someone puts out a basket of apples with a sign saying, “Help yourself! Do what you want with these apples! You can even sell them if you like!” - it’s a bit unhelpful if there’s an extra layer of etiquette around what people should really do with the apples (especially when the farmer hasn’t complained yet, and it’s someone else feeling aggrieved on the farmer’s behalf).

Often, in the world of open source, the T&Cs are as liberal as that sign. When they are, it would be helpful if we could take it for granted that people would be fairly relaxed about a coloured shape behind the icon. But it seems we have to second-guess ourselves?

I’m happy to reach to developers and ask about icons. But, in cases where the licence says, "Help yourself! Do what you want!" then I almost feel a bit self-conscious, asking for permission to put the icon on a squircle. Example: in the video, the use of GIMP struck me as an odd choice, when the readme for that logo is so generous (“the use of Wilber.xcf.gz is free, though it would be kind of you to mention the original author… enjoy”).

Like I say, all IMO - but I think redrawing an icon and putting it as-in on a squircle are two very different propositions.

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  1. A squire or a circle cannot be trademarked. The idea of having curved corners on square, rectangle or any geometric figure had been there for ages. Ubuntu had it all the time; have a look at Ubuntu’s former DE’s login, logout, dash etc.

  2. Suru is not a finished icon set, just an idea of a background template under it. Suru is also not an original idea of a background template. That kind of template was there - a square with curved corners in iOS 5. Just google AppIconTemplate and you’d get enough info. For example here. Someone might say Ubuntu is copying iOS 6…

  3. The people in the Yaru team can make their own template, with radius of the corner different to iOS template and Suru. It could be a square, rectangle, vertical, horizontal as they like. Curved corners looks quite nice. That template could be like Unity Greeter’s logout template, with a transparent border around it.

  4. Putting any app’s icon on our template is not a trademark infringement. It is our distro and our template. Any icon would automatically fall inside it in the centre. Our Yaru team is quite capable of creating its own background.

  5. The Yaru app theme and gnome-shell theme is original to Yaru team, so only the folder icons and the background has to be done. The team is on it for a long time. (I don’t know how to code or design, but still playing with it, and with nice results.)

  6. Use svg format, not png. Some info.

So, its better to drop Suru, and create Ubuntu’s own icon theme.

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I emailed @snwh with the comments from @willcooke and myself and received the following response:

I have to make clear that, I don’t speak for the GNOME project. My views being conflated with GNOME’s is not super fair to the GNOME project, I’m just one person over there (though I will express an opinion on how thing relate to GNOME, as that is the project I am presently associated with, as I would when I was working on elementary). My GNOME Blog blog would have more official statements about my work on GNOME (though I’ve yet to post on it).

I’ll address a few things.

I don’t like the suggestion in the blog post that Ubuntu is not “working together with GNOME on making the desktop experience better”.

Please let me be clear: I absolutely did not mean to suggest that Ubuntu engineers aren’t pulling their weight on the desktop (and I did not foresee that reading) and I’m totally aware of the Ubuntu engineer contributions, I was trying to say that perhaps after all these years 100% convergence with GNOME goals would be super ideal. Writing a blog post out of frustration isn’t wise, it turns out.

perhaps you could persuade GNOME devs to create a theme API

No need, GNOME (at least the design team) wants to create a theme API, but things aren’t super simple in that respect and there are a lot of technical things in GTK that would need to be worked out. The messaging around that was lost as well in the “gnome wants to kill themes” brouhaha.

RE: altering logos, like Firefox: this becomes an unending task as how do you determine which logos (and therefore icons) you alter? While free software project’s logos are not as strictly protected as proprietary ones, don’t they deserve the same courtesy of unaltering or asking to alter?

RE: using upstream GNOME icons vs. Suru/Yaru icons: well this is a similar case to above, not all GNOME apps are upstream “GNOME Apps” and app made with GNOME HIG != GNOME App, it’s more an app for GNOME (on all distros).

We (I will speak on behalf of GNOME now) would like people who make GNOME applications to follow the Human Interface Guidelines, but we have downstreams/distributions making choices on icon sets that don’t fit the HIG so there’s a mixed intention here as downstreams aren’t application platforms (usually). Ostensibly as the most popular distribution to embrace the GNOME desktop (again), having Ubuntu completely sharing the application development and human interface guideline goals would be ideal in advancing application development on the GNOME/GTK platform, which is why I’m perhaps most critical (it’s the biggest player). Since Ubuntu no longer has it’s own HIG or application development guidelines, promoting GNOME’s (which in part means using the GNOME look and feel) would go a long way to getting more GNOME apps made, but conflict arises when Ubuntu is trying to have an application icon story (Yaru) without having an application platform anymore.

This is something I feel like I’ve been saying repeatedly over the years, personally, as I’ve worked on various projects. Perhaps my own perception of my clarity on this issue (and that I deleted my Google+ where I was sharing these opinions) is off.

–

While I personally avoid the comment sections on blogs, reddit, forums, etc. because in my limited time contributing to free software stuff/GNOME they can be a time suck, I am always reachable by email, or on IRC, if there needs to be a conversation.

Do pass along what you feel is appropriate, and I’m always open to discussion.

You can find Sam’s email address here. It imagine it would be ideal if Will / the Ubuntu Desktop team could email him directly rather than be forced to trust that I’m reproducing his emails accurately but I’m happy to continue to do so if good replies are posted here. The following quote in particular, I think, should be addressed by the Ubuntu Desktop team:

Since Ubuntu no longer has it’s own HIG or application development guidelines, promoting GNOME’s (which in part means using the GNOME look and feel) would go a long way to getting more GNOME apps made, but conflict arises when Ubuntu is trying to have an application icon story (Yaru) without having an application platform anymore.

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As I already wrote to @snwh, my understanding is that Yaru peole working on the icons are actually following Suru guidelines hosted by Sam. I didn’t think we needed to move the guidelines in somewhere else’s place (like inside the wiki), because I thought he wasn’t contributing for a lack of time, not because of a clear choice.
I do regret I didn’t think about contacting the application maintainers in the first place, it would have been actually awsome to have their contribution or ideas.

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The following quote in particular, I think, should be addressed by the Ubuntu Desktop team:

Ubuntu Desktop follows the GNOME HIG. App developers should follow that.

Ubuntu currently also uses a custom icon theme so app developers can work with the Yaru team to also have a Yaru icon, but we don’t want that to take away from the need to also have an app icon that looks good in vanilla GNOME.

I don’t really see a conflict here between Ubuntu and GNOME’s HIG.

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All other icons, other than the folder icons are from respective app developers, Gnome or otherwise, which could either be left alone as is, or placed over a background. You, @c-lobrano know how to do that. The background doesn’t do anything to the icon, and the background is what that differentiate Ubuntu from other distros.

There’s only 14 icons as folder icons in Yaru, and they can be Ubuntu specific, without any copy of others’.

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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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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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