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Oxygen Icons Website Launched (KDE.News)
KDE.News notes the launch of the Oxygen web site. Oxygen is the look and feel of the upcoming (someday) KDE4 desktop, so the site gives some hints of what KDE users can expect to be working with in the future.
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Joining forces with GNOME? Posted Nov 16, 2005 20:18 UTC (Wed) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link] I wonder if Oxygen is going to be compatible with the freedesktop.org icon theme specification. Tango, the GNOME counterpart of Oxygen, is complying with the specification.Actually, why have another theme at all? I understand that GNOME and KDE have different implementations and licenses, but nothing should prevent them from having common user interface, in particular icons. Having GNOME and KDE sets of icons seems pointless to me. Having several good themes would be great, but what has it to do with KDE and GNOME?
Joining forces with GNOME? Posted Nov 17, 2005 5:42 UTC (Thu) by darthmdh (guest, #8032) [Link] It's all marketing. GNOME exists so Redhat can say they invented the Linux desktop. KDE exists so SuSE can say the same thing. Having "proprietary" themes means they have something that is unique to them, something that differentiates them from every other Linux desktop that's available.
I agree that requiring multiple copies of the same icons is pointless from an end-user perspective. Unfortunately no developers want to work on a collaborative standard. We still have arts and esd and are forced to run both due to dependencies many years after the kernel's sound drivers made both redundant; and long before that happened there was a lot of hot air about collaborating on a single server, but no practical resolution. The kinds of (intrusive) changes required, and particularly to maintain backwards compatibility, are deemed not worth the effort in order to do, what is in essence, make your thing compatible with your main competitors. Make no mistake those publically-listed Linux companies that drive these projects have a sole purpose - to make money for their shareholders. Anything else is optional (including a desktop that makes sense)
Joining forces with GNOME? Posted Nov 17, 2005 10:10 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] GNOME exists so Redhat can say they invented the Linux desktop. KDE exists so SuSE can say the same thing.Please tell me you were joking. This fails to conform to my understanding of reality in a rather extreme manner :) Eventually I'd hope that gstreamer and/or polypaudio can replace arts and esd: it can already transparently replace esd: replacing arts is more complex because of arts's loadable plugin system, but should be doable. (Lennart, are you still working on polypaudio?)
Joining forces with GNOME? Posted Nov 17, 2005 11:41 UTC (Thu) by cventers (subscriber, #31465) [Link] There has been talk that KDE4 will introduce a new multimedia library --wait - wait - I said library, not server. The idea is that rather than coupling KDE apps that use audio right to arts, hence making arts a dependency, the apps will be able to use whatever backend the system uses, whether it be native ALSA, OSS, ESD, ARTS, GStreamer or JACK. Good lord, I can't believe we've gotten ourselves into such a mess with audio :) Hopefully we'll find a way out.
Joining forces with GNOME? Posted Nov 17, 2005 17:51 UTC (Thu) by aseigo (guest, #18394) [Link] yes, we'll be providing a simple, generic API for apps that need to do thebasics ("play this bit of audio now", pause, stop, fast forward, rewind, etc). but we'll also likely be picking a "preferred" engine that we use for the bulk of our testing as well as for apps that need access to more advanced audio features.
Joining forces with GNOME? Posted Nov 18, 2005 7:31 UTC (Fri) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091) [Link] Please, please phase out arts. It is another layer, uses obscene amounts of system resources, it hangs a lot, adds more latency to audio, and has stupid capitalization (which I don't remember right now). Plain ALSA (with dmix) does the trick for me.
Joining forces with GNOME? Posted Nov 17, 2005 12:47 UTC (Thu) by pointwood (subscriber, #2814) [Link] Are you trolling?
Quote: "It's all marketing. GNOME exists so Redhat can say they invented the Linux desktop. KDE exists so SuSE can say the same thing."
That is 112% certified BS - complete nonsense.
Joining forces with GNOME? Posted Nov 17, 2005 17:50 UTC (Thu) by aseigo (guest, #18394) [Link] > KDE exists so SuSE can say the same thingactually, KDE exists because a huge community that dwarfs the (valuable) development efforts SUSE puts into it works on KDE day and night. KDE was started as a means to provide a usable desktop for the average computer user back in '96, and remains committed to that vision. there is no "joined at the hip to a corporate agenda" going on. SUSE just happens to do a good job of producing a KDE desktop. so does Linspire, Kubuntu, Mandriva, Xandros, etc...
Joining forces with GNOME? Posted Nov 17, 2005 10:31 UTC (Thu) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link] What's so great about Tango? It's nothing more than an attempt by a bunchof Gnome artists to make sure KDE doesn't have a visual identity anymore on the distributions they "own". In their arrogance, they launched this project without having even contacted any leading KDE icon artists. Oxygen is good because it will give KDE a desirable visual identity, will enable innovation through the development of a visual language that will closely fit with the way KDE works. Visual identity is the last thing a project should relinquish.
Joining forces with GNOME? Posted Nov 17, 2005 11:42 UTC (Thu) by cventers (subscriber, #31465) [Link] They have different user interfaces because they are working towardsdifferent goals. As for icons, I agree with the other posters here - icons form a visual identity. Sure, it's nice to have an icon set that can be *shared* by the projects, but asking them to agree on a common icon set is like asking Ford and GM to agree on a common body design for their sports cars.
Joining forces with GNOME? Posted Nov 17, 2005 18:05 UTC (Thu) by aseigo (guest, #18394) [Link] > I wonder if Oxygen is going to be compatible with the freedesktop.org> icon theme specification yes, just as every icon theme we (KDE) has shipped for the last few years has been. seeing as we were involved in writing that specification, it would be a bit odd if we didn't follow it ;) the naming standardization that is only now happening is also a good thing, and we're also in support of that. > why have another theme at all? if we could agree on what looked nice, then sure. but if you look at tango icons and oxygen icons, i think you'll see the difference in approach is obvious. > but what has it to do with KDE and GNOME? there are three aspects to it: visual identity, application requirements and personal taste. KDE and GNOME have different ideas of what their visual identity is. and yes, visual identity is pretty important. it's why most men don't wear dresses in public in most western societies. so rather than "project X doesn't want to look like project Y" it is a matter of "project X wishes to look like project X". ask apple why macOS looks so different from microsoft windows. applications also have some impact here. most applications ship their own custom icons, because they aren't "part" of a desktop in that they aren't shipped with it. these icons need to have a look and feel and GNOME likely isn't going to ship icons for kdissert (a rather nice little mind mapping tool) which has need for both an app icon as well as toolbar icons specific to its domain. since their art "budget" tends to be pretty thin, they only ship one set of icons. given that there is a difference in visual identity, those icons tend to match the desktop of origin. that said, with the icon spec (and now that we're moving towards standardized names) you can fairly easily switch between icon sets. so it becomes a matter of personal taste. i would like to see both GNOME and KDE ship icons that visually agree, but then we'd first have to arrive at the same visual identity. personally, i think the Oxygen icons are gorgeous and that Tango icons look very 1998 and unappealing. the Tango artists would almost certainly disagree. visual identity. =)
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