Canonical was going to handle it in Unity8 by making use of icon masking, which is why everything was in the squircle shape. So how it looks in that screenshot is how it will look like on the GNOME desktop, there’s no way around it aside from drawing an icon for every third party application.
And, aside from the iffy legal ground of brand infringement, keeping up with third-party icons is a never ending task, as I know from making the Moka and Paper sets –apps are constantly being made for Linux and other apps constantly update their brands or change their icon file names very frequently.
Thanks for that @snwh and I guess that’s true of a lot of icon themes. @d0od do you have further argument? This is the future of Ubuntu we’re talking about here!
Well, one way we could handle it is doing some research on what would be the most popular shape among third-party apps and go with that. It would make the visual gap between system and third-party less noticeable.
I think the “visual gap” is purely a subjective criticism, since there will never not be a visual gap. What many would prefer and are asking for here is a uniform set of icons.
I’ve already started the Suru set recycling the squircle shape, the Suru colour palette and the old icon design spec and I’d rather stick to a those principles and design a good first-party desktop icon set and not worry about what other apps’ icons look like alongside it. The theming community is never 100% satisfied.
What this project should be thought of as is: replacing the aging Humanity icon set, not picking a new theme.
I appreciate that, but not having a squircle in the icon set is less jarring than having one with the squircle? Humanity imho uses icons with a similar level of detail and general appearance to upstream icons. I’d really like to know what people who supported the switch (before it became official) think about this issue (because they didn’t like Humanity)…
I agree. What I realized in my years of Android theming is that there is a really thin line between theme homogeneity and a boring UI.
It would be cool if we can achieve, from the adoption of the updated Suru, is a visual guideline of sorts to be a reference among third-party developers in future updates, like Material Design was before Google just ignored all the guidelines themselves.
Every developer wants its apps to “belong” in an OS.
I’d much prefer being realistic here, a less lofty goal is simply creating (or completing in the case of Suru) a new icon set for Ubuntu desktop.
Guidelines did once exist for Ubuntu applications (once paraphrased by yours truly) when Suru was the icon set for Unity8/Ubuntu mobile, but since that endeavour is dead I suggest not being so idealistic.
Rebooted Suru is a hybrid of the original Suru icon guidelines and the Tango/FreeDesktop icon guidelines so they do not appear complete out of place on the Linux desktop.
Seems to me like the most correct solution would be to have an icon compositing service that could automatically produce squircle-framed versions of upstream…
As a big fan of this commitment to the new icons, I don’t have a big problem with third party apps having odd icons, it’s like that on the two big desktop platforms already.
I can’t wait to see the great ideas this community comes up with. I would really like to see the new icons look more modern, but maintain the consistency found in older Ubuntu releases. (Mainly, a shape around all of them)
Hi all - I think the Suru reboot is a great choice and am already using it on 17.10.
As an end user, I don’t expect universal consistency when I start installing my own apps. As people have pointed out, an OS shouldn’t hijack the branding of 3rd party apps by default. If people want that consistency they can customise the desktop to get it, by installing an icon set that does it. It’s not for Ubuntu to do out of the box however.
What I’m hoping for is consistency among the icons that appear on the launcher by default, and maybe the default apps that are most commonly added to the launcher. So, Suru icons for system apps and a squircle-shaped frame around Firefox, etc… If masking isn’t available, why not manually put the (unedited) Firefox logo in a squircle-shaped frame and save the result as the default icon? Creating <10 framed icons in this way would make a huge difference to the visual consistency of Ubuntu out of the box, IMHO.
Originally, I created this concept to inspire other theme creators and maybe give Canonical some thoughts as well. I’ve been contacted many times ever since, however I’ve never felt any right direction or I didn’t believe that it could go well with the end result (I am a senior front end developer so I know a bit about coding and precision, especially about how not precise people can be when transforming designs into real code).
So now. Maybe something is happening. AFTER 2 YEARS. Well, you might say I could be more initiative and build a team to work on a theme. But I hope it is understandable that I don’t have that luxury to manage a team with managing a team at work, having a relationship, doing other work I love (designing, photography) etc.
Since this might have some approval coming right from Canonical. I have some questions.
Why haven’t you guys (desktop design team, @didrocks) done anything in last years? The community was asking for a change for so long. Is your design team so rigid and/or stubborn? Or you just run out of ideas? I really don’t understand. There were so many resources spent and money burnt on mobile Ubuntu (which by me looks ok) but you totally forgot about the desktop version and Unity is stuck in 2010. And now aha, ok, “we might do something about it” after 7 years.
I mean. I don’t know what happened really because I stopped watching the news long time ago. But why do you guys suddenly move this development for the community, (for the community, there is nothing wrong about it, I am just really curious what is behind this decision) when you had the feedback for the whole 7 years.
If anyone will convince me that people actually know what they are doing and if I actually get some explanation from canonical what happened and what are the actual conditions to include the theme into next version (because I highly doubt that there is just sudden decision like “hey, give this shit to the community and we’ll just release it with the next version” for a most popular linux distro)… I would be really really happy to contribute and influence the course of Ubuntu if I will be happy with answers.
New theme was in development for the whole convergence story with Unity 8 so I wouldnt say design team didnt do anything, but yes Ambiance theme and icons for Unity 7 were getting old and didnt get much love.
With Unity 8 plans on the way there was no particular reason to invest resources in creating a new theme and icons for Unity 7. As for why a new GTK, shell and icon theme is necessary now, well probably due to the switch to Gnome, people realized that Ambiance theme doesnt fit too well, Ubuntu icons look a bit retro and competition in the form of community developed GTK, shell and icon themes is largely superior to Ambiance and Ubuntu icons, thus many users began suggesting a refreshed design.
Your Charmander concept is beautiful, I certainly hope you will contribute to the new Ubuntu look. The new look is a community effort with the help of Ubuntu developers, but I dont see an issue there, with so many great people and designers involved I am sure the end result will be the most beautiful and professionally looking Linux desktop ever.
Unity 7 was in maintenance mode because they wanted to put as many resources as possible into Unity 8 so that it could succeed. Sadly, Canonical wasn’t able to make it take off before they needed to go profitable, so Canonical had to end their investment in it and, given that Canonical can just adopt GNOME and reduce ‘fragmentation’ (which many in the community slated Ubuntu for producing), they also ended their investment in Unity 7 in the process.
Now Unity 7 is in the Ubuntu community’s hands and so we can do what we want with it, see here ( and ubuntu-unity ) for more. As Martin Wimpress has helpfully advised, the Ubuntu Unity team needs to get the builds going and a few releases out and then changes can start to be made on Unity 7 (also, I suppose Yunit (Unity 8 community continuation) could be brought into the picture at some point).
Excellent! I suggest that we wait to have a first solid version of the GTK theme to avoid creating too much churn for Kvantum’s author. I’ll ping you back once we are there (or you can monitor yourself the advancement ;)). Thanks for reaching him out!
