Bug 433152

Well, Christoph and I had some discussions about themes a while back. 

Currently it will use the "Clearlooks" theme if it's there, and if not it will
use the default Xfce theme. 

I guess I wouldn't care if we s/Clearlooks/Nodoka/ if thats now the default. 

I thought I had the wallpaper set, but it appears it needed one additional tweak
to make it active. It was selecting it, but not making it active. 
It should be fixed now (at least in rawhide). 

Christoph? Your thoughts? 

(In reply to comment #0)
> Description of problem:
> 
> Xfce in Fedora has a look and feel that is not consistent with the other desktop
> environments. In particular, we could use the Nodoka theme that is default in
> GNOME and use the default wallpaper that is used by both GNOME and KDE. We
> should also inherit the icon theme from GNOME. 

Why? IMHO first of all the desktop should look like upstream makes it look, so
first choice should be gtk-xfce-engine with rodent icons.

The reason for patching to Clearlooks was: Xfce uses an "initial" and a
"default" theme, where default means fallback if the initial theme is not
installed. Initial is Xfce with rodent icons and default is hicolor with gtk icons.

With the current dependency chain the fedora look and feel will always be pulled
in even if we don't want it. On the other hand it is likely that gtk-xfce-engine
and xfce4-icon-theme are not installed, so the user will see the ugly fallback
look. So we decided to use fedora look as fallback (it's installed anyway), if a
user also installs the missing packages he will see the Xfce look by default.

Yeah, we also could use Nodoka, but IMO it's not ready yet, it has too many
bugs. Some examples:
- selected but inactive text is nearly unreadable
- menus have sharp edges in firefox/thunderbird, but they should be round. It's
definitely not a ff/tb bug, because it works in Clearlooks.
- Nodoka is inconsistent even in itself: The first row of the top has "round
edges", the rest sharp ones.
- Nodoka doesn't work nicely on OpenOffice

To be honest: I dislike Nodoka a lot and from several F8 reviews I read I know
I'm not the only one. It was a mistake to introduce it in Gnome, so let's not
make the same mistake in Xfce again.

So my suggestion is: Let's not change the patches but include gtk-xfce-engine
and xfce4-icon-theme in the Xfce Spin. BTW: Where is the kickstart file? I
cannot find it at http://sundaram.fedorapeople.org/livecd-fedora-8-xfce.ks any
longer.

I agree with you in the case of the wallpaper. I've sent Kevin the patch to make
it active a while ago, so this should be fixed.

Reassigning to xfce-mcs-plugins because this is where the look and feel is
defined (except from the wallpaper).

Created attachment 295097 [details]
Nodoka: selected but inactive text is nearly unreadable

Created attachment 295098 [details]
Nodoka: GTK (left) vs. Gecko (right)

menus have sharp edges in firefox/thunderbird (left), but they should be round
like in GTK (right). It's definitely not a ff/tb bug, because it works in
Clearlooks.

Created attachment 295099 [details]
Nodoka: Another case of rounded vs. sharp edges

First row of the top menu has rounded edges, but the rest has sharp ones.

Nodoka issues should really be reported in the Nodoka trac instance. 

https://hosted.fedoraproject.org/nodoka/newticket

Posting here doesn't reach the maintainers involved. If we are not choosing a
theme due to specific bugs, reporting and keeping a tab on them would help
revisit the decision when they are fixed. Other than that, regardless of
personal tastes, it is important for Fedora to have a distinct and consistent
branding. Sure, sometimes a wallpaper or some branding items for a particular
release might not fit into a few people tastes and artwork is kind of think that
always brings out disparate opinions. Nevertheless, I believe a consistent look
and feel outweighs any disadvantages. 

Due to dependencies, we pull the branding components into the spin anyway. So
you are not really saving on disk space or anything like that.  My spins (except
the games spin which is maintained in livecd-tools package) are available at

http://sundaram.fedorapeople.org/spins/

I am working on a Fedora 9 version. Some ideas that we need to discuss (in
fedora-devel list):

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/RahulSundaram/XfceLive

- selected but inactive text is nearly unreadable

May be true.
But first you need to do before you file bug, update to Nodoka from Trunk.

- menus have sharp edges in firefox/thunderbird, but they should be round. It's
definitely not a ff/tb bug, because it works in Clearlooks.

It's Firefox' problem. Fixed in Nodoka Trunk from months.

- Nodoka is inconsistent even in itself: The first row of the top has "round
edges", the rest sharp ones.

Maybe...

- Nodoka doesn't work nicely on OpenOffice

OO.org's issue. See pushed buttons - probably only Industrial looks nice in
OO.org. It just doesn't use GTK natively.




I like Nodoka very much - subtle style with some Mac inspiration (I like Mac
solutions like dock, scrollbars, window button's layout, menu on top), but it's
only my opinion that I like it, you can like it like me, or like it not (; .

(In reply to comment #2)
> Yeah, we also could use Nodoka, but IMO it's not ready yet, it has too many
> bugs. Some examples:
> - selected but inactive text is nearly unreadable
This is really a problem in Evolution due to way how they use colours set in
gtkrc. Everywhere else it is OK.

> - menus have sharp edges in firefox/thunderbird, but they should be round. It's
> definitely not a ff/tb bug, because it works in Clearlooks.
Definitely a firefox bug. It's fixed in FF3.

> - Nodoka is inconsistent even in itself: The first row of the top has "round
> edges", the rest sharp ones.
> - Nodoka doesn't work nicely on OpenOffice
> 
As livio said, nothing work nicely with OpenOffice. When using Clearlooks I
noticed exatly the same issues I noticed with Nodoka.

> To be honest: I dislike Nodoka a lot and from several F8 reviews I read I know
> I'm not the only one. It was a mistake to introduce it in Gnome, so let's not
> make the same mistake in Xfce again.
> 
Yeah, now that I look back, I think the inclusion in F8 was a little premature,
Nodoka now looks a lot better as is in rawhide.

See: https://fedorahosted.org/nodoka/wiki/Screenshots

And use nodoka trac for filling bugs, I cannot notice every single issue by
myself and if I don't know about issue, I'll not fix it ;-)

https://fedorahosted.org/nodoka/newticket

ATM feedback is crucial, because we are in beta stage and we need to catch most
of the bugs/issues before final release.

(In reply to comment #2)
> - Nodoka is inconsistent even in itself: The first row of the top has "round
> edges", the rest sharp ones.
I forgot to answer on this one... It is intentional, the reasoning being that
menu item in menu bar is different from menu item in menu, that's why we use
tab-like appearance for "the top row" and squarish design for menu items in the
menu itself.

First of all I did not want to start a flame war on Nodoka, I just wanted to
point out that there are valid points not to use it, at least in F8 and it Xfce
Spin.

(In reply to comment #6)
> Other than that, regardless of
> personal tastes, it is important for Fedora to have a distinct and consistent
> branding. Sure, sometimes a wallpaper or some branding items for a particular
> release might not fit into a few people tastes and artwork is kind of think that
> always brings out disparate opinions. Nevertheless, I believe a consistent look
> and feel outweighs any disadvantages.

You are right that a consistent look is an advantage, for example for GTK and
QT. But I disagree with you on desktops. The Xfce Spin is targeted to users who
want a small and lightweight desktop, otherwise they would be using Gnome or
KDE. So it is most likely that these users will only use one desktop/will have
one desktop installed, so everything they see is GTK and we could easily stick
with upstream.

I always thought the fedora way was to get changes upstream, so IMHO there
shouldn't be a need for a fedora branding at all.

> Due to dependencies, we pull the branding components into the spin anyway. So
> you are not really saving on disk space or anything like that.

I know that it's not about space. But pulling in branding themes renders the
patching partly useless. First we wanted to patch Xfce the "other way round",
Fedora artwork as "initial" and Xfce as fallback. But this is not possible ATM.

Kevin, what was the reason we made Thunar and xfce4-panel depend on
xfce4-icon-theme? Was it just the dir ownership for /usr/share/icons/hicolor/?
I think we should remove this dependency, because ATM we pull in both
fedora-icon-theme and xfce4-icon-theme.

> I am working on a Fedora 9 version. Some ideas that we need to discuss (in
> fedora-devel list):
> 
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/RahulSundaram/XfceLive

Rahul, I appreciate your work, but I would have liked a little more discussion
on the spin before announcing it officially. :(


(In reply to comment #8)
> (In reply to comment #2)
> > - menus have sharp edges in firefox/thunderbird, but they should be round. It's
> > definitely not a ff/tb bug, because it works in Clearlooks.
> Definitely a firefox bug. It's fixed in FF3.

I doubt that it's really a FF2/TB2 bug because it works with ClearlooksClassic
and other themes. I guess it's only fixed because FF3 no longer uses Gecko but
XULRunner. Anyway: This won't help us with FF2/F8 or the F8-Xfce-Spin here.

I updated to gtk-nodoka-engine-0.6.90.2-2, nodoka-theme-gnome-0.3.90-1 and
nodoka-metacity-theme-0.3.90-1 on my F8 box and now some things like the
scrollbars in FF are even worse now. Is it worth filing a bug or is the
combination with FF2 unsupported?

(In reply to comment #10)
> I doubt that it's really a FF2/TB2 bug because it works with ClearlooksClassic
> and other themes. I guess it's only fixed because FF3 no longer uses Gecko but
> XULRunner. Anyway: This won't help us with FF2/F8 or the F8-Xfce-Spin here.
> 
I clearly remember that the behaviour was broken in clearlooks as well at the
time when I was implementing this feature, maybe it has chagned since then.
Anyway, for F9 spin this should be OK, as FF3 fixes this, for F8 spin it is
questionable...

> I updated to gtk-nodoka-engine-0.6.90.2-2, nodoka-theme-gnome-0.3.90-1 and
> nodoka-metacity-theme-0.3.90-1 on my F8 box and now some things like the
> scrollbars in FF are even worse now. Is it worth filing a bug or is the
> combination with FF2 unsupported?
Yep, problem with FF2, they set alloxation.{x,y} to -1 on scrollbar steppers
which results in broken detection of what stepper are we drawing. It's fixed in
FF3. You might want to file an enhancement request on nodoka trac asking for
workaround, though ATM I don't know if the situation allows a workaround... And
with release of FF3 (and probably TB3?) this will become obsolete.

I CC'ed you in some of the earlier discussions and my final proposal along with
Kevin Fenzi to rel-eng and board. The spin ks file has always been public
throughout my efforts. I also posted to fedora-devel list, fedora list, fedora
forum and in my blog asking for feedback and listened carefully to every single
suggestion that I have got. I also suggested forming a SIG to coordinate such
discussions. Anyway if you have further concerns, feel free to mail me. That
discussion doesn't belong here. 

This has gotten a bit offtopic here. ;) 

Perhaps we can revisit switching to Nodoka before the rc phase of this devel
cycle? I don't care too much, as I don't use clearlooks either.

>Kevin, what was the reason we made Thunar and xfce4-panel depend on
>xfce4-icon-theme? Was it just the dir ownership for /usr/share/icons/hicolor/?
>I think we should remove this dependency, because ATM we pull in both
>fedora-icon-theme and xfce4-icon-theme.

For Thunar: 
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=209592

I'm not sure not on xfce4-panel. 

Thoughts?

After thinking about this deeper changed my mind and fully agree with Rahul. We
need a branding. Nodoka is a Fedora (hosted) project, so we should promote and
support it wherever possible. I will try to be more constructive and provide
some patches.

(In reply to comment #1)
> I thought I had the wallpaper set, but it appears it needed one additional tweak
> to make it active. It was selecting it, but not making it active. 
> It should be fixed now (at least in rawhide). 

No it's not. I sent your the necessary patch for xfdesktop by mail on Dec 16.

I'm attaching an updated xfce-mcs-plugins-4.4.2-fedora.patch attached below, I
can commit it if you like. This one sets the branded artwork as "initial",
fallback is gtk default/hicolor, because I don't want to depend on yet another
theme(engine) and icon set. So we can remove the dependencies on gtk-xfce-engine
and xfce4-icon-theme and make both optional for comps and livecd


(In reply to comment #8)
> https://fedorahosted.org/nodoka/newticket
> 
> ATM feedback is crucial, because we are in beta stage and we need to catch most
> of the bugs/issues before final release.

Will try to provide some constructive feedback there.


(In reply to comment #13)
> 
> For Thunar: 
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=209592
> 
> I'm not sure not on xfce4-panel. 

Ahh, I remember it was the "add new start" dialog, but I verified that the
attached patch everything works fine.

> Thoughts?

Switch to nodoka and remove xfce4-icon-theme from default installations. Remove
the dependencies from panel and Thuns. This will save us ~12,5 MB (unpackaged)
on the livecd. gtk-xfce-engine can stay (on the livecd), it is only 150 KB.

Created attachment 295325 [details]
Updated xfce-mcs-plugins-4.4.2-fedora.patch for Nodoka

> No it's not. I sent your the necessary patch for xfdesktop by mail on Dec 16.

Yeah, I applied it on Dec 17th, but then didn't push a build. ;( 
It was pushed with the recent gcc43 rebuild. So, it should be there in rawhide. 

> I'm attaching an updated xfce-mcs-plugins-4.4.2-fedora.patch attached below

Looks good to me. Feel free to commit/built in rawhide, or if you prefer I can
do so later tonight... 

Created attachment 295327 [details]
Patch for xfce-mcs-plugins.spec

Proposed changes to the specfile based on latest cvs.

Looks good to me. ;) Feel free to commit/build, or I can later today when I am
not in the middle of work. 

(In reply to comment #16)
> > No it's not. I sent your the necessary patch for xfdesktop by mail on Dec 16.
> 
> Yeah, I applied it on Dec 17th, but then didn't push a build. ;( 
> It was pushed with the recent gcc43 rebuild. So, it should be there in rawhide.

Really? I still can't see it in a fresh cvs co and in the log ether.
cvs log:
...
revision 1.19
date: 2008/02/10 23:38:21;  author: kevin;  state: Exp;  lines: +4 -1
Rebuild for gcc43
----------------------------
revision 1.18
date: 2007/12/19 03:06:11;  author: kevin;  state: Exp;  lines: +6 -1
Add patch for mouse button crash (fixes #425925)
----------------------------
revision 1.17
date: 2007/12/03 06:01:11;  author: kevin;  state: Exp;  lines: +8 -7
Update to 4.4.2
...

Oh yeah... this is xfdesktop. 

It's currently not building in rawhide with gcc 4.3. ;( 
If you have ideas on that I would love to hear them... I posted to fedora-devel
and didn't get much reply on it. 

It's refusing to link and says that everything needs to be compiled with -fPIC. 
However, as far as I can tell, everything _is_ compiled with -fPIC. ;( 

(In reply to comment #20)
> Oh yeah... this is xfdesktop. 
> 
> It's currently not building in rawhide with gcc 4.3. ;( 

I did not se your mail on devel-list and had the same problem when I tried a
mockbuild for rawhide, but F8 works fine, so I added the patch to devel branch.
I have not changed the spec to include it.

Nodoka patch for xfce-mcs-plugins.spec is applied, doing a new build now.

I got a patch that seems to work to build xfdesktop, and it's now built in rawhide. 

Shall we go ahead and close this bug now? Rahul: Anything else we still need to
address here? 

I haven't seen the latest rawhide Xfce yet but if we are getting Nodoka by
default, we are good. Thanks everyone for their input and work. Feel free to
close this. 

While on the subject of look and feel, here is a set of instructions I picked up
that enables transparent icons on the desktop.  Maybe we should consider this
for the default setup.

Drop this in ~/.gtkrc

style "xfdesktop-icon-view" {

XfdesktopIconView::label-alpha = 20
font_name=”Sans Bold”

base[NORMAL] = “#ffffff”
base[SELECTED] = “#ffffff”
base[ACTIVE] = “#fefefe”

fg[NORMAL] = “#ffffff”
fg[SELECTED] = “#73B2D0″
fg[ACTIVE] = “#D17100″
}
widget_class “*XfdesktopIconView*” style “xfdesktop-icon-view”

(In reply to comment #22)
> 
> Shall we go ahead and close this bug now?

Sorry I could not reply earlier. I going to submit another patch for
xfce-mcs-plugins and a couple of patches for xfdesktop, that's why I did not
kick a build yesterday. Please wait a few hours.

I suggest from now on we should address all changes to xfdesktop in bug #433573

I built xfce-mcs-plugins for devel now. There's nothing left to do for this
component, so I'm closing this bug. Nevertheless I filed bug # 433838 against
xfdesktop, because I think we should do some more branding and replace the Xfce
icon in the desktop menu with the Fedora logo.

Kevin: Don't forget to remove the deps on xfce-icon-theme from Thunar and
xfce4-panel in the next builds.

FYI, I have just removed those deps and rebuild Thunar and xfce4-panel in rawhide.