Sent from my iPad On Jan 30, 2012, at 3:01 PM, "Richard Brown" wrote:

Hi Andi,

I'm curious, what exactly is the intended goal of this initiative?

If it is about changing the default settings in an effort to improve usability, how do you intend to implement any changes which are identified as necessary by this initiative? Doesn't this seem to be a little weird coming from the artwork team?

It could be. Yes, it is a project that will try to understand from our user's and members' point of u what they envision a dream desktop to be like. Generally we all tweak and change the defaults that desktops environments come with. Some of us heavily tweak our desktop environment to work the way we want, there lies a strong potential for change that we could bring into the distribution, if approved.

To me, default settings of a desktop environment is probably something better investigated and implemented by the various maintainers of openSUSE's different environments.

I agree with you but as the project does not have a usability team, not only these members are fit for the task but just about any of our users. We all tweak to a degree. We change icons, wallpapers, widgets, set up default launched programs and so on. This is what we look to understand.

I really do not like the idea of KDE, GNOME, XFCE, LXDE, etc all sharing common defaults without very good reason and acceptance of all the teams involved. We have different environments for a reason, they attract different users with different needs, we should embrace those differences. I know in the GNOME team for example, we spend a lot of time discussing and collaboratively deciding on what we believe to be the best range of settings for our users, based on our own knowledge of the environment as well as user feedback. An initiative like this seems to be treading on the toes of the work already done by our GNOME, KDE, and other DE maintainers.

I think here you might be reading far. That is not the intention of the initiative. Surely each desktop environment has its own flavor and sweetness that we enjoy. We just want to establish some commonalities and clever changes in each of them.

Furthermore, some of the 'proposals' already on the wiki look like they're calling for some pretty major work (new notifications?), who do you foresee picking up and doing this sort of work? are we likely to be able to get such changes submitted upstream?

I placed that one there mostly because I wanted to have a sample for someone to follow later. It looks very radical, I doubt it will go far. I have others much better and nicer looking.

I don't mean to sound like I'm slamming this, I'm know you're trying to do something cool and help out, but I'm very confused how the art team is expecting to carry this initiative forward.. apologies for clearly not understanding the proposal when it was raised in our team meeting and now having to bring my confusion to the mailing lists

This is mostly an investigation and learning experience for the team. Nothing more than that just yet.

Richard

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andi robert 01/30/12 7:24 PM >>> Hello my dear friends

The artwork team recently had a meeting in which a couple of ideas were proposed. One of them is the Dream openSUSE Initiative. The idea behind this proposal is to have a wider understanding of what a desktop environment is for each of our users. All of us work with openSUSE and many time we tweak and change our graphical environments to fit our particular needs, we would like to know about these changes that you have made to your graphical environment under openSUSE to better determine what defaults work for our users. We are currently gathering these screenshots here

http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Dreamopensuse

The steps to be part of this investigative initiative are as follow

Set up your computer desktop they way you want it Take a screeshot Submit your screenshot at our wiki

Note: If your changes, settings or tweaks are not readily visible, show us a screenshot of your settings managers or explain the settings changes that you have made. This initiative is not about artwork as much as it is about usability among our members. Therefore, when submitting screenshots, make sure that your special usability settings are also noticeable.

Note: The wiki page is not perfect, of you feel inclined to make changes to it, please do so. :D

Andy (anditosan) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

-- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-artwork+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-artwork+owner@opensuse.org

I am also adding the KDE and Gnome mailing list to this thread. Hopefully they can also see the idea behind this initiative and we would love to hear their input as well. Surely, since this initiative will tout into usability after it is completed, KDE and Gnome would like to hear the results. Thank you Andy (anditosan) On Tue, Jan 31, 2012 at 11:26 AM, Eugene Trounev wrote:

The aim of this *contest* is to find out "general community feeling" towards OpenSUSE style, and art as it is right now. The best way to do it is by having people express their feelings visually. We will then take up all the visual data and analyse it to determine the best course of action. Meaning that - these images will tell us what is the maximum acceptable level of customisation people would like to see. How do they utilise their desktop/app suites. Color and widget style preferences. Default application set etc. Once we have the ideas we can proceed to map the actions we need to take in the future to make sure OpenSUSE visual style meets the expectations of the majority of users.

Best Regards,

Eugene Trounev

[it-s]

On Mon, Jan 30, 2012 at 5:01 PM, Richard Brown wrote:

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Hi Andi,

I'm curious, what exactly is the intended goal of this initiative?

If it is about changing the default settings in an effort to improve usability, how do you intend to implement any changes which are identified as necessary by this initiative? Doesn't this seem to be a little weird coming from the artwork team?

To me, default settings of a desktop environment is probably something better investigated and implemented by the various maintainers of openSUSE's different environments.

I really do not like the idea of KDE, GNOME, XFCE, LXDE, etc all sharing common defaults without very good reason and acceptance of all the teams involved. We have different environments for a reason, they attract different users with different needs, we should embrace those differences. I know in the GNOME team for example, we spend a lot of time discussing and collaboratively deciding on what we believe to be the best range of settings for our users, based on our own knowledge of the environment as well as user feedback. An initiative like this seems to be treading on the toes of the work already done by our GNOME, KDE, and other DE maintainers.

Furthermore, some of the 'proposals' already on the wiki look like they're calling for some pretty major work (new notifications?), who do you foresee picking up and doing this sort of work? are we likely to be able to get such changes submitted upstream?

I don't mean to sound like I'm slamming this, I'm know you're trying to do something cool and help out, but I'm very confused how the art team is expecting to carry this initiative forward.. apologies for clearly not understanding the proposal when it was raised in our team meeting and now having to bring my confusion to the mailing lists

Richard

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...

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andi robert  01/30/12 7:24 PM >>> Hello my dear friends

The artwork team recently had a meeting in which a couple of ideas were proposed. One of them is the Dream openSUSE Initiative. The idea behind this proposal is to have a wider understanding of what a desktop environment is for each of our users. All of us work with openSUSE and many time we tweak and change our graphical environments to fit our particular needs, we would like to know about these changes that you have made to your graphical environment under openSUSE to better determine what defaults work for our users. We are currently gathering these screenshots here

http://en.opensuse.org/openSUSE:Dreamopensuse

The steps to be part of this investigative initiative are as follow

Set up your computer desktop they way you want it Take a screeshot Submit your screenshot at our wiki

Note: If your changes, settings or tweaks are not readily visible, show us a screenshot of your settings managers or explain the settings changes that you have made. This initiative is not about artwork as much as it is about usability among our members. Therefore, when submitting screenshots, make sure that your special usability settings are also noticeable.

Note: The wiki page is not perfect, of you feel inclined to make changes to it, please do so. :D

Andy (anditosan) -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-project+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, email: opensuse-project+owner@opensuse.org

-- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-artwork+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-artwork+owner@opensuse.org

-- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-artwork+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-artwork+owner@opensuse.org