It might be better to make Linux have these gorgeous icons now that Apple locked them up.
Make the icons be Free on Free OSes like Linux.
It might be better to make Linux have these gorgeous icons now that Apple locked them up.
Make the icons be Free on Free OSes like Linux.
What's been keeping Linux from having gorgeous icons up to this point?
Someone with 5000 hours design experience needs to make a common icon theme for a few 100 GTK and QT libraries and standard-names. It feels like it's 1000s of hours of work. And then you have to make them available in a few formats, HDPI, maybe a build system, etc. there are a number of themes but the ones I try seem to be missing one or more of the icons from the set. Just need the right volunteers to build them, and also get a bunch of app-builders to adopt them, and figure out what colour the bike-shed should be (blue).
Why volunteer? Why not find a way to pay someone for the value of their time at market rate and release the product of their labor under a permissive license?
For the last 25+ years I've been hearing folks say: "why not find a way". But then not suggest anything more than that obvious answer.
Please suggest an actual path forward, an actual plan that is more than just "figure it out". And the plan needs to address at least 1/2 of the points I made above.
It's a "Hard Problem". The answer needs lots of time, likely money and at least two humans with strong drive to fix the problem.
We've managed to make the entire corpus of open source software but the thing that's a "Hard Problem" that nobody can find a way to do is making the icons look good?
It's almost like it's not a technical challenge, it's that getting good looking icons would require a unified userbase, and Apple has that but Linux does not.
Linux these days is almost exclusively developed by companies with combined value exceeding Apple's several-fold.
Finding money and designers is not really a hard problem.
Yeah what if these open source developers just got jobs and then they paid someone to do what they used to do for free?
Yeah, it’s amazing what you can accomplish when you find a way to pay people a livable wage for the things you want.
As a bit of a shameless plug, I did some in the past[0] and am working sporadically on a "fork" of those[1] but it's a whole full-time work. There are hundreds of icons to do for apps alone. Each one needs to be done in 16x16, 22x22, 32x32, 64x64, 128x128 and 256x256 so if say you have 150 icons to do for apps, you actually will need to do 900 icons. And add to that that you'll need to cover categories, places, filetypes, actions...
Granted, you can do a 256x256 and scale it down to 128x128, for example, but if you care for quality some details will be lost anyway. So that's why nowadays you'll see most icon themes are just a bunch of logos plastered over a shaped background.
And what irked me the most was that a few weeks after that I released that first set via deviantart and opendesktop.org there were websites that included them in their sets and made them available for download in their websites, not even a redirect to my deviantart or opendesktop pages or something. And found out after that that some people were using them in commercial projects and stuff so I had to chase them asking to not use them since they were cc-by-nc'ed.
Never got a single cent of any of that. I love making icons, at some point I was even working for the icons that would eventually become the Breeze set for KDE5 with their VDG, but it happens that I also need money to buy the beans.
[0] https://miler.codeberg.page/?prj=rekt
[1] https://miler.codeberg.page/?prj=betelgeuse
These are very nice (especially the Betelgeuse set), but -- unless this is just chance from the ones displayed -- don't they mostly all have the same silhouette, a rounded rectangle? While the Betelgeuse ones have more flair and are more differentiable from each other, an excellent thing, locking them in a box is the same kind of jail that this article is about.
I would love to encourage you to free your own icons from the round-rect jail. You have some fantastic designs there.
There are plenty of Icon packs suitable to all aesthetic preferences. Just nobody is going to write a blog post ragging a some Icon Pack b/c if you don't like it then it's trivial to change to a "better" one (that said I still think the arguments in the blog post are interesting and worth considering)
To the blog's point - many KDE Icon Packs have non-uniform shapes (ex: I'm currently using Newaita)
It's part of "What's been keeping Linux from having good UX up to this point?"
Making good products means lots and lots of drudgery, just for fun volunteers aren't going to touch that, and the stereotypical FOSS contributor is the type that's clueless about UX and puts stability above everything else.
Have fun convincing someone feature x is too overengineered to be usable by anyone who's not an alpha geek and should be simplified to a single switch. Not to mention proper large scale usability testing likely being unaffordable.
So designers stayed far, far away.
GNOME simplified its icons primarily to make life easier for app developers: http://jimmac.musichall.cz/blog/2019-01-23-the-big-app-icon-...
(They still have different shapes, though)
I think illustration isn't something too much in the mindshare of open source, so overall support for it isn't great. IMO this has contributed to it. The industry standard tools are all closed, with closed formats, so it just sounds like much more of a hassle vs contributing code/text.
I mean this throughout the whole process. The only standard illustration file format I can think of is SVG, but it's largely a format to export to, not one industry-standard software uses as it's main persistence format.
So for starters, contributors tend to need access to speciality software they probably don't have installed to view and edit the source of truth. This also means you're handling at least two files in your VCS, the closed format acting effectively as a blob, no diffs, etc. and an export file (usually more, for different scales) to actually interface with the rest of the ecosystem; this is the file everyone can open, inspect and compare, the one your build consumes, etc.
This already would be a good amount of friction for someone familiar with the tools, but designers are not necessarily familiar with git, the PR process, etc. Add to it that icons are more subjective than code, which overall should follow certain rules and either works or doesn't, and it overall seems not worth it for a casual contributor.
They have other, arguably more important, yaks to shave.
a question as old as Linux itself
It'll take just a few prompts to customize all your icons the way you like.