I’d like to know @mpt’s thoughts on this article’s contributions and/or perhaps @didrocks if they’re feeling bold. I think Matthew has said before that maybe the forced-shape idea itself is flawed and he’d prefer if Ubuntu retreats back from that? But if we do, do we use GNOME’s icons and is Yaru Ubuntu-y enough without the icon theme, especially considering Yaru (the GTK and shell theme) could transition to being a more minimal difference from the GNOME reference (Adwaita) in accordance with a theme API (though this is just speculation at the moment), or does Yaru need to create completely new icons?
Despite what @snwh says in his article about how he thinks community designing is poor compared to professional designing, I think it would be preferable if Canonical employees didn’t have to impose their opinion on this matter, but I think it would be good to hear their thoughts and reasoning regardless to be considered by the whole community and as valued as a community voice would be.
We may not be professionals, and we need to think about how Ubuntu looks to non-users, whether we’re drawing users in or not, but it’s ultimately Ubuntu users, not design professionals, who Ubuntu should aim to please, and I think the comments on OMG!, for example, seem to be in support of the Yaru squircle theme being for all applications. I think it’s reasonable too, given the salient comments about Windows 10’s app icon backgrounds being considered acceptable! But I also understand that Sam and others would like Ubuntu to go full GNOME upstream like Fedora (no extensions, Adwaita theme, and default icons), but I don’t know how they think Ubuntu could maintain its separate image without some theming customization or similar, @snwh?
This wouldn’t help those of Sam’s persuasion on this matter, but perhaps Canonical could run a consultation/poll (on Ubuntu Insights and big enough that OMG! would hopefully run an article on it) on the issue, as it has done for GNOME Extensions in the past, so that we could get a better idea of what the community feels about this matter, not just what the loudest voices on OMG! and on the forum think?