----- Original Message -----
On 11/08/2016 06:01 AM, Bastien Nocera wrote:
I'm all for investigating possibilities, especially ones which have no performance impact and reach. We should do everything we can, and we certainly *do* provides stickers and other Fedora swag. We need to work on the contrbutions of the desktop visual appearance to our brand identity as well.
I think that being the best GNOME Workstation distributor would go a long way towards making Fedora the de facto choice for GNOME use, and that would likely be more effective than slapping non-upstream logos in places.
What I think Matthew and I are trying to say is that this is a very limited and GNOME-centric perspective. Fedora is more than just GNOME. It has to be, otherwise what is the point? You can run GNOME on dozens of other distributions.
You can run it with as good an integration as Fedora on... well, Fedora and spins/remixes.
The value of Fedora is more than "well, it runs a vanilla version of GNOME". Fedora's value is that it's a source both of and for awesome open-source software. We want to encourage people to use and contribute to Fedora because *that's how open-source improves*. Fedora is one of the largest *contributor* distributions in the world and we want to continue to grow that.
And that's probably not going to work quite as well as it should when you go against the opinion of the upstream as to how to present their software, or how to integrate it in the greater whole.
Part of that means that we have to spend time and effort associating the Fedora brand with "cool new stuff". One of the easiest and most effective ways to do this is by ensuring that whenever you see "cool new stuff" showed off somewhere, there's an easy cue to the viewer that it's being done on Fedora.
That's the idea of the branding in the presentation display.
In another email, I think you misunderstood when I talked about presentations. I don't just mean formal, LibreOffice Impress presentations. I mean when someone spins their laptop around on a table to show you something cool. There should be *some* sort of sensory cue that what you're looking at is Fedora.
[1].
Like I said: Ubuntu accomplished this by establishing Unity as unique to their platform (for better or worse). If you see someone running Unity, you assume that's an Ubuntu system (even if it actually isn't; Unity *does* run on an a couple other OSes). With vanilla GNOME, all you know is that the user is running GNOME. Might be Debian, might be Fedora, might be something else. That's fine and good to positively associate with GNOME. I love GNOME. But it doesn't help *Fedora*, and we need to do that.
That means making downstream modifications to the shell or GTK+ theme, or showing a permanent logo.
I think we're better off building the best-integrated, best-tested, least-buggy, most-current version of the GNOME desktop. That doesn't stop us from using Fedora as branding where we set room aside for that purpose, from showing a logo or watermark where it doesn't change or invalidate the interaction testing or design that was done upstream.
Take for example the tidbit of integration for dual-GPU. We're fixing bugs upstream in the kernel and Xorg to enable this, we're integrating menu items upstream and in Fedora. When do you think those will land in other distributions? In 6 months? A year?
If you want to *always* know that it's running a Fedora system, that will likely lead to more work for little reward.
If you don't trust upstream to do what's right for its distributors, then I'm really not sure what to do to alleviate that fear.
Cheers
[1]: At the bottom not to make this more tense than it is, but: stickers :)