A message from snwh (Suru icon upstream maintainer)

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I understand Sam Hewitt’s feelings that it is better for the open source community to work on making the GNOME project better instead of forking and theming, basically fragmenting the Linux desktop. I, for one, was happy that Ubuntu was again reverting to GNOME Shell, because I liked it, and I think that working together is better than constantly creating different takes on the same thing.

That said, I do think GNOME should at least provide minimal branding options in its very core, if only the option to change the color schemes in de Shell and the GTK theme, and the option to replace the icons. After all, giving volunteers and people the creative freedom to start working on their own ideas about the ‘desktop of their dreams’ is, I think, core to what free software is.

Moreover, it is largely thanks to distributions provided by Canonical, Red Hat, and what have you, that desktops are able to thrive. We should at least give the distro providers a bit of freedom to brand the GNOME experience a bit. This should be part of the core functionality of GNOME, I think.

I can imagine Ubuntu - and the Yaru theme in particular - moving even closer to Adwaita and the vanilla GNOME experience, whilst maintaining a bit of branding. See for instance Pop_OS. What Pop_OS does with GNOME is very minimal, still is undeniably GNOME Shell, but it is branded in a nice fashion, with a nice color scheme, icons and default font and some nice wallpapers.

By sticking close to the vanilla GNOME experience, the default Adwaita theme can also always be provided out-of-the-box.

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Ubuntu should have branding and style.
Otherwise it will become Debian GNOME or homeopathic OS :slight_smile:
From Ubuntu will only 20 MB.

In addition, pure GNOME isn’t very comfortable.

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Ubuntu is not there to provide Gnome a showcase. Ubuntu is Ubuntu, so should have a unique look, feel, work experience and all. Ubuntu is a brand, has to stay that way. At least that was the idea since the beginning. Yaru app theme is from Ubuntu community, but not the icons. So, it maybe better, if Ubuntu community create its own icon theme, and let go of the Suru theme. There won’t be an upstream developer then to complain, would there?

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Hi all,

Here’s my thoughts on the this topic:

I think it is a sensible effort to drive for consistency across desktop icons for applications. As we ship more and more applications as snaps, and ideally directly from the upstream developer, then maintaining that icon consistency will become harder and so getting those icons upstream should be a goal. As a side note, the script idea to allow any icon to be augmented to look more integrated is also a nice idea, and could be something which becomes more and more useful in the future.

There is indeed a requirement to be careful around using trademarks in this way, for example Mozilla specifically say:

“Don’t alter a Mozilla logo design or combine it with other images.”

But perhaps they would allow it in this case? We should reach out and ask them, and I can help with that. Ditto Chrome, etc.

Later in his post, Sam points out that GNOME have an icon refresh initiative. I’ve looked at those new upstream icons, and they look really great. I would love to see us get aligned with GNOME on that front. However, please read on…

Regarding Ubuntu dropping it’s visual identity: No.
Ubuntu has spent a lot of time establishing it’s look and feel on the desktop, and that thought and consideration carry through to server and CLI based initiatives. The desktop ‘feel’ comes from extensive UX research and is backed up with evidence which has been shared with the GNOME design team where it is relevant. When we switched to GNOME Shell we took the decision to preserve as much of the feel as we could, and that was the right thing to do for our users (since they told us that’s what they wanted) and we firmly believe that it was the right approach. We’ve always been upfront and perfectly clear & open about our plans.
Nothing is changing here.

The ‘look’ has always been an important part of Ubuntu desktop, something that the Yaru team understands deeply. We want to keep the “In the wild” recognisability of Ubuntu desktop. As Ubuntu users we get excited about it, at least I know I do, and it helps to build and reinforce our community. We’re always going to want to be able to make Ubuntu stand out.
The Yaru team have moved us on to a new iteration of the look of Ubuntu desktop while keeping that familiarity which has been built up over the years.

That all said, I don’t think that icons are the hill we should die on. The upstream GNOME icons are looking sharp. We could get uniformity by using those icons if we think it will look right, and present a bit more GNOME in our desktop at the same time. Yaru is in development. It will continue to try out ideas. We can try the Yaru icons and we can try the GNOME icons, and we can see what we think looks best in each case. We can provide feedback upstream where we find something amiss.

Of course, Ubuntu desktop is much deeper than just the Ubuntu desktop session. I feel it’s worth mentioning that by offering the “vanilla GNOME session” Ubuntu are one of the few distros giving totally unfettered access to the GNOME desktop for those people who want to use it, still built on the solid underpinnings of the rest of Ubuntu. If you want pure GNOME, Ubuntu is a great place to experience it.

Finally, and not really related to icons, but since I’m here anyway… I don’t like the suggestion in the blog post that Ubuntu is not “working together with GNOME on making the desktop experience better”. We very clearly are. Ubuntu desktop engineers are tackling hard problems within the GNOME desktop as well as triaging bug reports, making decisions about which ones are the most impactful and fixing them. Ubuntu has a huge user base, and the bugs that we are fixing in GNOME are making a real difference to GNOME users everywhere. We have five people in the GNOME Foundation, we attend GUADEC, Canonical is on the GNOME Advisory Board. This is not the ‘us-vs-them’ scenario I feel that Sam is presenting in his argument. Ubuntu is pulling its weight on GNOME.

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I can’t remember sorry, was this in one of the two surveys? A reference here (if possible) would be great for the sake of having confidence in Ubuntu’s current approach!

I think I’ve seen mention of bugs (might just be babyWOGUE saying that but perhaps also others) which make the vanilla session (to them) not worth using over a vanilla install on another distro (the main example being Fedora) but unfortunately don’t seem to want to report this bugs. I should probably use the session more and report bugs I come across… I do think though that having it only as a command-line install where you have to know the command to install the session, then know how to switch to it, is not a particularly user-friendly way of getting the session, but desktop environments aren’t listed in Software, as far as I’m aware? Perhaps there should be a dedicated app for switching between Deb-based desktop environments? But I don’t think I have the time or ability to make this so is just a suggestion :slight_smile: Alternatively, more work perhaps could be done on snaps of desktop environments (since these can be more readily surfaced in Ubuntu Software and more easily updated and used since they can have isolated applications etc?). There is an edge snap of KDE Plasma but it’s very buggy at the moment (e.g. I can’t run snaps within it) and not confined.

@snwh for the sake of ‘right of reply’ hopefully you’ll read this (ideally all of Will’s comment) and consider responding either here, on your blog, or elsewhere :slight_smile: I’d also hope that you’d consider looking at commits to GNOME and seeing Canonical’s comments there (even Canonical/Ubuntu/Shuttleworth critic and GNOME observer Alex (‘babyWOGUE’ on Twitter) would concede that Canonical/Ubuntu have certainly upped their contributions since the switch to GNOME from Unity) but also on the Ubuntu Desktop team’s Trello and on this Discourse for evidence of a huge number of contributions from Canonical/Ubuntu, particularly obvious in @vanvugt’s performance improvements. Also, if you’d like to see even more convergence between the Ubuntu session and the GNOME session on Ubuntu, perhaps you could persuade GNOME devs to create a theme API (even though one was said to be impossible, though Adwaita Dark is part of GNOME…) that allows minor colouring changes? Yaru could be made conformant with that, and thus perhaps more acceptable in the eyes of yourself and others? Is just a suggestion :slight_smile:

I also find it irritating that Ubuntu is so consistently slated for deviation from GNOME and not really other distributions, is this because Ubuntu probably the most popular distro and so an easy and impactful target? Do you also condemn elementaryOS, Endless, Deepin, Mint, Zorin, and Manjaro for what they do and have done to the GNOME desktop? Edit: yes he does!

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Three off-topic posts removed.

  • The subject of this thread is NOT the appearance of icons.
  • Do not call other folks names (like ‘troll’). Constructive engagement only.
  • It’s NOT about who is right or wrong. It’s not about ignoring the main thrust of a point in order to nitpick. It’s about finding a way forward for everybody.

At the moment, the play on the field seems to be how to find a balance between “consistency across the desktop” and the technical debt and bad feelings caused by modifying upstream icons. A balance that both the Ubuntu community and upstream designers can be happy with.

Reminder: A core element of @snwh’s post is his call for just such balance in The Force.

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I was willing to give Sam the benefit of the doubt because I talked to him about it and I can see where he’s coming from and what he meant, but this tweet is absolutely uncalled for and completely absurd.

I wish the rest of Yaru efforts and GNOME efforts the best in order to hopefully reconciliate, but this sort of aggressive, taunting behavior has left me completely disfavored in GNOME development, and as such I’m closing my GNOME GitLab account and leaving all GNOME communication channels.

If GNOME Design consensus is that they want Yaru to be more cooperative with upstream, posting outreach material that mocks Yaru isn’t the way forward. Although I do definitely disagree with the squircle icons and would like to see less deviation from upstream application icons for the desktop, if this is the way newcomers are treated it is not a community and ecosystem I wish to engage in or develop for.

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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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