But I am wondering… Since Nautilus 3.28 removed the desktop… Will Ubuntu 18.10 which ships gnome 3.30 will still use Nautilus 3.26 for the sake of desktop icons? If not there won’t be a need for that desktop icon or am I overlooking something here? Need more coffee
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I agree. Even on Macos the radius is the same as in windows (no pun intended :D)
Wouldn’t it be interesting if the Desktop icon could reflected the actual users wallpaper ?
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I partly agree with you but only about the color choice : - ) , The way I see it :
The pallet of my choice :
The way it looks now:
There for, the pale purple of the desktop icon is out of place 
…and it is not about desktop yes or no, it’s just about color … 
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First of all, bit of positive feedback for everyone - I’m still very very very happy with Communitheme! Starting up my laptop is always a huge treat nowadays 
and I think the decision to wait for 18.10 has been fully vindicated by all the improvements made since 18.04.
Quick Q about icons though:
But if it’s just superimposing them, unmodified, on the same shape background to make them uniform… how is that different to what Suru already does for file icons? I mean, there’s already a strong precedent for taking branded logos (Microsoft Office, Java, etc.) and putting them on the same shape for the sake of consistency. The file icons even put origami folds behind the logos!
In terms of apps, I think I’m right in saying that there’s now a Suru version of the Amazon web app which puts the (unmodified) Amazon logo on a white squircle. So I think we have multiple precedents for this?
If the legal point isn’t insurmountable… I fully appreciate why people don’t want to take “the file types” approach for apps because there’s simply too many but I still think it would make a huge difference to out-of-the-box appearance, if Ubuntu did it for apps that ship by default (i.e., Suru icon for default app = unmodified logo + Suru shaped background). Even if it only covered the tiny number of apps that appear on the launcher by default. In fact, now Amazon has a Suru icon… would that just mean doing one for Firefox? It’s a long time since I’ve seen a clean install
Just my two-penn’orth. I’m a happy camper with Communitheme in any case so well done and please keep up the good work.
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I also find it a bit out of place, it doesn’t match with suru icons
In term of precedence, remember that we don’t ship any Suru version officially by default. So, there is no “precedence” per see.
It feels weird to have some branded icons modified, but most of them are not, and we are not going to catchup the word if we don’t do programmatically, what we told we wouldn’t do anyway in this discussion. This is why I don’t think it’s a road we should go to, we have precedence of having been asked by companies to revert in ubuntu itself their branded icon modification. I think in our suru icon fork, we should look really closely to this amazon webapp icon.
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Does anyone else notice that the Suru “Trash” icon is in fact a Recycling Bin?
In addition to being sensible, I’d like to say that I think it looks good to have a contrast in styles between the default system apps and the familiar, same-on-all-platforms, branded logos for third party apps.
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Just as a general reminder, note that even if we are working with at least 4-6 people, sam works basically almost alone.
I think he welcomes any PR for icons that uses his design guidelines: https://snwh.org/suru/guidelines
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Then, that brings me to an alternate solution - instead of going for programmatic (which would be the best solution, imo, as we could add back the glow as well and expose it all in the system settings, for pretty minimal maintenance and upkeep; i believe the code is already there in upstream Dash to Dock, we’d just need to modify it for our shape needs, and bring it into other parts of the shell),
or modifying other branded icons (legally, a no go, though the amazon style sounds interesting, it would still be inconsistent for less popular applications),
why not drop the shape requirement for the internal apps? Yes, I know, it’s controversial, since the squircle shape is so known and recognizable, but think about it a little more. Like on other platforms that have tried it (pre-adaptive icons TouchWiz), our problem right now is that the internal applications and their consistency clashes with the different design lingo/shapes of that which we cannot touch.
There are other elements to the Suru design language that stay in effect: stuff like borders and lines, gradient use, color use, folds, shadows, etc. that can stay in play and be visually recognizable, while minimizing the effect or feeling that there’s something half baked. The squircle shape can remain in other instances, like with the folders and file icons.
Personally, I’m still all for the idea of incorporating the glow and shape as a minimal extension, and just as was done with the dock, give it its space in the system settings (as well as bringing some other important features out from tweak tool into settings - there’s a lot of stuff missing that should be there!), but if we cannot do that, I feel this is a better option.
Note that being that this is different enough from default Suru, it would probably warrant a new name as a new fork. If we went with Yaru for the gtk/shell theme, there’s no reason it couldn’t apply to the new icons as well, while being absolutely recognizable as inspired by Suru/using the Suru design language.
Not the worst idea!
Yet this comes almost too late (I fear).
Suru has a hell lot of icons now and reversing this to something different, can only end up in a chaos.
We want to ship this theme in 18.10 as the default theme. And these ground breaking ideas fit better into phases that are made in the beginning of such a design process
I don’t think that this looks so bad after all, even when you mix the icons with none suru icons.
Right; nothing says this has to be 18.10. I expect, like Ambiance, that communitheme/yaru/w/e would receive multiple refinements over time, and this is one that could come at a later date. If this WAS a path decided on, the app icons could easily be pulled for now for 18.10, or just shipped and redone in 19.04 or whenever it could be finished.
I agree, those look good there, but a reminder that those icons ARE very flat and minimal. there are certainly legacy apps with much shinier, more skeuomorphic icons that will more than certainly clash.
Windows and MacOS don’t theme every possible application icon neither. I think this would never be something ubuntu would do (as far as I know). I know that this is a common practice in the linux world and that’s freaking cool since many nice icon themes change the icons of hundreds of applications. But you could just install one of those “more complete” icon themes OR change the index of the icon theme to inherit them. For example use the suru icon theme and change inherit=XXX to SURU-PLUS https://github.com/Magog64/SURU-PLUS =)
Yet these are two different topics. Shipping a default theme in a DE which come with default applications (and only those should be themed) in GNOME and tweaking your desktop to the level of design you like. Firefox and thunderbird are kind of special here because they are not part of GNOME. I know this is hard to accept in the beginning but makes sense when you think about this for a while.
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Thing I’m thinking is that they don’t have the same shape for all their builtin icons, either. This move would simple bring the default theme more in line with their way of handling default apps 
. iOS always had shape guidelines from the beginning, so it was never a problem; Ubuntu didn’t, so that path would be weird and tricky.
Right, this is unwieldy for new or basic users. A lot of Linux users are power users, but there ARE those that use Ubuntu since it’s the most used Linux distro that don’t have that experience.
I have to say, I am quite impressed with the work this community has been able to accomplish in 7-8 months. I think we should have some kind of “advertisement” for this new Ubuntu era. I didn’t want to suggest an idea without any contribution this time… so here is something I think we should provide users with:
Hope this helps rally support for the project.
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By advertisement, I just mean informative visual.
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That looks great! I bet we can use this for upcoming announcements! Thank you
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Amazon in Ubuntu is unofficial web app by Canonical. In link inserted referral code. The company get a small % of purchases made in this web app.
I’m having a hard time seeing how that is related to the discussion here 
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