I would do them in this style:
EDIT: But might be better to get someone more qualified than me regarding licences, etc., to rule on whether we’ve interpreted things correctly.
EDIT 2: Also, due to the sheer number of Libre Office icons to make, I leave it up to you whether you want to ship the games icons, etc., while you wait 
(because it might take a few days to do LO).
Yes better be sure. I bet someone from canonical can check the for us when the stress of the 18.10 release has lifted.
Did you check out the new lo icons? They are already in the LO snap and the pictogram is a bit more flat in them
To continue over from github concerning the $jet-menus PR:
Ubuntu is used by millions of people. Millions of users. All kinds of users. And I don’t have access to canonicals data. But from my experience from back in time in university and from family members using this DE, the average user is not you and me. It’s not carlo who can code in vim like a young god. And it’s not the icon designer who keeps his design guidelines as the holy grail.
If you read through your national online press that discovered the news about this theme hitting 18.10, it’s just that: “the new theme”. “Ubuntu has a new theme”.
When the average type of new user installs 18.10 and hasn’t used Ubuntu before he will ofc not notice that anything changed.
When the Ubuntu user that used it before, for example with 14.04 or 16.04 LTS will install 18.10 he will probably think “Oh look it’s a new theme”. He will not think “Oh look, how Ubuntu uses upstream GNOME shell now and uses the Yaru theme with the Suru icons”. This will not happen. He thinks more in “oh look that’s windows/osx/ubuntu” (if even). “oh look my computer” “oh look my smartphone”.
So to come back to menus, we had a concept for the theme which changed over time. But @luxamman was quiet sure how the system should look like. Dark and transparent, with blur at best, but gnome can’t do this yet. Everything else happened in the big mockup thread when I wasn’t even yet contributing. Unity8 as an inspiration but not to copy Unity8.
The gtk3 part was first made without even thinking of the dark theme. Which is ofc bad since we should have informed ourselves better. But when we saw that no matter if we ship light and dark themes, there will always be apps that use the dark theme by default, we started to theme the dark theme, too. And that’s the point where we lost ourselves in the menus. Having dark menus for the shell, light menus for the light gtk theme and then grayish menus for the dark theme. That’s three colors of menus that can hit you when you are just opening a) gnome files, b) gnome videos, c) gnome shell calendar popup. And adwaita is not any different here. Again three types of menus.
Now try to get some distance to all that. GNOME, Ubuntu, yaru, suru and what not. Try to be your mother/father/grandmother/professor in university who uses Ubuntu without being that kind of Linux expert we are 
Then you break down to the real use cases. “Oh that new theme has three colors for menus. That’s strange.”
We have a mixed type of lightning anyhow. Adwaita is fully light in the gtk theme and fully dark in the shell theme.
We have a mixed gtk theme with the dark header bar and the light window. That’s why we have light notifications. (“wall of gray”)
For everyone else that didn’t read the mock-up thread: we are talking about this pull request. It all came together after @mpt 's design evaluation. (I was kind of defensive at first, too. Since the review came a bit… late 
)
And I think @mpt has a big advantage over our team here: He has a little distance to all this linux nerdy swamp of upstreams and downstreams. Apart from being a full time designer ofc
By the way this theme is still 95% upstream code. With dark menus for everything or with three menu colors in the desktop. A upstream “no-go” was for example the Ubuntu logo as an app grid logo replacement. Since it significantly changed the meaning of the app grid button.
This is a second reason by the way which @3v1n0 brought up in some of the pull requests , outside from consistency and usability: transition from ambiance → yaru
Most people come from ambiance (16.04, 18.04) and this is how the menus looked in ambiance
And this is how they look in the PR:
If this will hit cosmic or not, will be decided tomorrow, and the criteria for the decision is not if the design is good or bad, since 3 people from the yaru team + 3 people from ubuntu already raised their thumbs for the design. It’s about the timing, which is basically 1 day before the absolute deadline and thus the risk for shipping a visual glitch is not so low.
about this, could be nice to push new icon with separate PR, so that we can easily revert a single icon change, without touching all the others
I believe few people understood this ;D
True. I just promoted this PR again because he just started to use git. Then make a new branch first and then make the new icons @jaggers
I like it - one point though - I’m trying the new PR with the Snap channel and when I use Inkscape, the menus are white but the text is very light grey, which makes it look like they’re all greyed out and nothing is available. Options can be clicked as normal but it’s hard to read and confusing. Also weirdly my screenshot button isn’t working just now. I don’t know if the undesirable Inkscape menus are an unforeseen consequence of the changes elsewhere, but I haven’t seen this behaviour in any other app since enabling the PR channel. I’ll reboot my laptop and see if a) the problem persists and b) my screenshot button comes back.
Additional: the greyed-out-looking Inkscape menus survived a laptop reboot and another alt-f2 “r”, but returning to the normal edge channel fixed them. So, it does indeed seem to happen when I’m running the PR snap channel.
I found Andreas Kainz’s new app icons on Github. Unfortunate the file metadata lists the licence as “proprietary” for the Writer app icon at least. This may be an oversight, or it may be that the newest app icons have a more restrictive licence. In that case I wouldn’t be able to remix them 
but I could derive new icons from the older ones and flatten them a bit myself.
Let us not change the icon then. Why can’t we add shortcuts to the launcher. It is the launcher icon, not app icon.
Speaking of this distinction, what exactly happens to 18.04 Yaru snap users who upgrade to 18.10, does Ubuntu somehow detect the snap and not install the Deb, or does it remove the snap and install the Deb?
inkscape is still gtk2. If the menu color change broke inkscape or any other gtk2 apps, please mention that on the pull request that hasn’t been merged yet.
Work in progress:
@didrocks @3v1n0 @jbicha
We (@madsrh @c-lobrano and me) decided to cancel the merge of that black menu PR for 18.10 and continue to discuss/work on it in the next weeks.
Reasons:
It’s just not enough time. Compared to other bigger changes where we had weeks and months to test and iron out issues this is a high risk
The current master is stable and beautiful.
Though I became a big fan of the idea. Better be safe than sorry and there is still plenty of time until 19.4.
We would like to keep this idea but with enough time to discuss and test.
Happy beta testing 
I started typing this in the icons PR, but then it was getting longer and longer, and I decided it was probably better to have the conversation here, rather than filling up a PR with general philosophical chat-chat.
Then we ask LO and the transmission people
Personally I think there are two possible pitches Yaru could make: one is “can we display your logo on a plain squircle button, to make it consistent with the rest of the UI?” and the other is “can we rework your logo to match the house style, which is a squircle incorporating a flat pictogram matching these guidelines?”
I would be disappointed if they said no to the first proposition, because it’s no different to masking, and (IMHO) only reasonable if apps police the pixels that are present in their icon, rather than what happens in the transparent part. I mean, I could end up with the Firefox icon surrounded by a squircle just because I have squircles on my wallpaper, lol.
But I’d be very surprised if they said yes to the second idea.
If that turns out to be the case I can understand their position. Suru is very stylised and would require radical changes to most logos/brands. Also, in the ideal “full Suru” scenario, we’d have icon masking anyway, which would mean uniform shape but not uniform style, and there’d be no impetus to redesign third party icons if they were all displayed in squircles.
As a Suru fan, seeing Suru versions of established brands is quite fun. I suppose it’s why people like those Pop! figurines from Funko. I’m not sure how I would react if a different distro did it. E.g., if a Linux distro had all neon icons, that would be a cool thing to make it stand out from the crowd. But if there was a neon Firefox and a neon Chromium, I’m not 100% sure it would feel like a major OS. It might come across more like a fun project to “pimp” everything on the desktop?
But, here are some further ideas for 19.04.
For the launcher, one option would be to have a generic launcher button for “default web browser” (which would be Suru). There are multiple ways this button could behave. The first time a new user presses this, it could say, “Your default browser is set to Firefox, but you can change this from settings” - or maybe it opens a little folder containing all the web browsers you have installed, with their normal icons. A full UI implementation of that second approach could involve “launcher folders”:
…but, less ambitiously, the Suru web button could take you to a folder in the Gnome overlay, or even just open the app grid with the search box pre-populated with the words “web browser” to act as a filter.
Obviously individual users would be free to take the button off the launcher and just “favourite” their preferred one, but that’s individual choice - you can only control out-of-the-box appearance.
There could also be a generic office icon that opens a folder containing LibreOffice, Things to Do, and any other office/productivity apps you have installed. Ditto for graphics: a generic Suru icon for “artwork” that opens a folder of GIMP, Inkscape and so on. I actually like this approach. It would circle back to the Gnome 2 style where apps are helpfully grouped, rather than displayed smartphone-style in alphabetical order. And it would give a pleasingly uniform Ubuntu launcher. EDIT: Also, this structure would help new users and give the launcher a clear USP over the existing “frequent” view in the shell.
Copyright prevents you reinventing, replacing or redrawing app logos, but I’m aware of no rule in copyright that says the only permissible way for the app to be launched, is to have users clicking on the logo for the app. I don’t think that would be enforceable. You can imagine a completely icon-free OS where you launch Firefox by choosing “Search the Web” on a dropdown menu, or typing the URL you want in a terminal-style window. So as long as no one is doctoring or reinventing the logo for third party apps, it’s possible to think creatively about how to make the visuals more uniform, and expose Suru icons as much as possible to the end user.
Sounds a sane decision to me. Thanks for trying to push it hard and keeping us informed
Today, I’ll cut a release of Yaru in cosmic without this then!
18.04 users will be upgraded to the “ubuntu” session (instead the one with the communitheme snap), which will use the .deb version by default to ensure consistency.
I have created a new separate package communitheme-snap-session for developers and enthousiast users who still want to use the snap on that version (and so, people will have to install/reinstall it after upgrade).
Let us just put this into launcher with a link to the corresponding app. Since they are preset, Ubuntu developers can choose it works
On behalf of the Yaru team, I’m happy to announce a new release to the stable channel of the communitheme snap and Yaru package in cosmic.
You can see the changes since latest upload to cosmic in https://github.com/ubuntu/yaru/blob/master/debian/changelog#L1, knowing that snap users got an additional release in between and so are already benefiting from some of those changes.
Hoping that you will all enjoy it, as usual, keep up the good work and let give us feedback on this thread!
This release is dedicated to @c-lobrano. We all hope you will get back in a wonderful state from your back surgery!
I’ve been playing around with the launcher and app folders and here’s a slightly more detailed proposal for 19.04, which elaborates why I think it would be good for usability as well as visuals. It includes real screenshots from my own install rather than mockups.
Launcher
By default, my preferred out-of-the-box launcher only includes Suru icons. The Suru web browser icon checks the default browser and launches that. Right click options for the web browser icon could be: Change Default Browser; a small number of quick links (e.g., Google, Amazon, Youtube); and Edit Quick Links. That means the Suru web button is a feature rather than a purely cosmetic choice, and users may keep it on the launcher if they find custom quick links handy. EDIT for clarity: from the follow-up post below, “I wasn’t clear enough here - by ‘default web browser button’ I mean a shortcut to the default browser, which is Firefox out-of-the-box, but which the user would be free to change… I wasn’t suggesting Ubuntu could ship with its own browser.”
By default, the top icon should be the Welcome App and the bottom icon should be Help. I have no strong feelings about the rest. Of course, the user is free to remove the newbie-focussed icons and add non-Suru ones, but these out-of-the-box settings are attractive, uniform, and accessible to new users, with the Welcome App providing Ubuntu branding where established Linux users expect it:
Requirements on Ubuntu for this to work: a simple app for default web browser and the inclusion of the Welcome App at the top.
App Grid
The current approach of listing all apps in alphabetical order is a bit bewildering, and presenting a mix of Suru icons and non-Suru icons makes the experience feel more (rather than less) unstructured. My preferred out-of-the-box experience is to only have core apps, which should all have Suru icons, outside of folders - and third party apps with non-Suru icons in folders (I’ll explain below why I think this is also good for usability, rather than purely cosmetic).
I suggest three default folders for the first attempt at this: /Mozilla (Firefox and Thunderbird); /LibreOffice (Writer, Calc, etc.); and /MyApps, where the user’s installed apps go. The two company-themed folders will cause less confusion than thematic ones like /Web or /Office, because (e.g.) users who installed Chromium might look for it in /Web.
The forward slash is important because punctuation comes before letters in alphanumeric ordering, and this forces the folders to be grouped at the start of the app grid, rather than interspersed throughout. Any third party apps that aren’t Mozilla or LibreOffice (e.g., Transmission) can go in /MyApps to “get the ball rolling” for that folder.
I think it looks really polished:
/MyApps is a helpful name because it leads to an intuitive distinction between default apps that users might not be interested in, versus non-default ones that they choose to add and will look for immediately after. This represents a small usability improvement because users don’t have to scroll through a list of default apps like Tweaks, Language Settings, etc., to find apps they chose to install and intend to use. The extra click into a folder still represents a net efficiency, because the “All Apps” view should aspire for maximum clarity rather than minimum clicks (when the user wants the latter, Ubuntu offers two more efficient routes: the launcher and Gnome Shell’s Frequent lens). IMO, after just a few minutes playing around with folders on my own system, this is less formless and looks much nicer too, because it’s visually a lot more uniform.
Future iterations could be more ambitious and have /MyMedia, /MyGraphics, /MyGames and so on. The use of the “My” prefix means the user won’t be confused if core apps aren’t found in the obvious thematic folders. For instance: being core apps that ship with Ubuntu and therefore have Suru-style icons, Mahjongg, Mines and Aisleriot would appear outside folders rather than in /MyGames - but the concept of “My” (versus default) makes this seem considered rather than random.
Requirements on Ubuntu for this to work: a script to edit the dconf keys that control app folders in Gnome. The script should be triggered on first login and again each time the user installs a new app.
EDIT: Wishlist for/suggestions to Gnome devs: greater support and ease of use for people who want to manually edit app folders in the shell (drag n’ drop, click to rename folder, etc.).
So, if Ubuntu 19.04 adopted these suggestions, I think the desktop would be more user-friendly (especially if you progressed to multiple thematic folders for /My…) and have much better visual unity, with the Suru/non-Suru distinction being meaningful and attractive because it’s honoured throughout the UI.
I also feel that the new requirements on Ubuntu itself are very modest, because it’s one launcher app and one script to edit dconf keys when appropriate. Obviously I’m not a developer but I suspect (or should that be hope?!) that adding them to Ubuntu would be a small task and a small maintenance burden.
Thanks for the detail write-up!
I must say I strongly disagree with the launcher selection being only driven by Suru icon inclusion or not. Also, maintaining another browser isn’t an option. There is some deal and trust with Mozilla that we can’t break. There is no “maintaining a simple web browser”. This is a critical piece, with a js engine, network layers, some millions of lines of code just to have an average browsing experience. We can’t also ask the security team to maintain 2 applications for the same functionality.
I think the same applies to the application grid, categories as functionalities makes sense, categories based on what kind of icons they have isn’t really IMHO.
I think the main driver for launcher selection should (as it was) be what users are going to use at first. On those, Firefox and Thunderbird should be near the top, even if we can’t have Suru icons IMHO.
Hopes that makes sense.
@mpt do you mind looking at the above proposal? ^
