Why do all Gnome 3/shell distros look the same?

[BigSilly]

I'm a massive fan of Gnome 3/shell. I used it for 6 months on openSUSE, when I switched away from Ubuntu during Natty's launch, and it was just brilliant. I took to it very quickly, it seemed to make sense and was attractive. There was no distro-tailoring that said "this is openSUSE", but it didn't matter as it was released after their Gnome 2 version had already shipped and was only obtainable via a 1-click installer and not part of the main 11.4 release. Nevertheless, it worked extremely well and looked/looks fantastic. But I expected to see, as more distros adopted Gnome 3, some branding and tailoring to make each individual distro stand out, just as they had with Gnome 2.

But now I look at the next releases using Gnome 3.2, and they all look the same. There's nothing, at least visually, between the G3 offerings from openSUSE, Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch etc. They all look the same. Now obviously under the hood they'll have their differences, but I am very surprised that they haven't added their branding and identities to their Gnome 3 releases.

Is there a technical reason for this? It seems very odd if a distro cannot add their own unique ID's to their releases. On that score at the very least I can understand why Ubuntu decided to go it alone with Unity. At least when you see it, it says uniquely "this is Ubuntu".

I'm not ragging on Gnome 3/shell, as I love it, just as I do Unity. It works well and is very pretty by default to be fair. But it does strike me as odd that while people are having a go at Ubuntu for offering their vision of the desktop that the user cannot customise, no-one is saying "but hang on, Gnome 3 is inflexible too".

What gives?

[sanderd17]

Well, gnome shell is very tweak-able. You can have custom CSS themes and JavaScript extensions. So in any case, for an OS maker it should be easy to provide their branding (except for Arch, who always uses the vanilla package and nothing else, but even now, I use a theme with an Arch logo on the activities button).

There is an extension to move the activities bar to the bottom, an extension to get the old gnome menus back etc.

I wonder why no OS maker uses those things.

[BigSilly]

Well, gnome shell is very tweak-able. You can have custom CSS themes and JavaScript extensions. So in any case, for an OS maker it should be easy to provide their branding (except for Arch, who always uses the vanilla package and nothing else, but even now, I use a theme with an Arch logo on the activities button).

There is an extension to move the activities bar to the bottom, an extension to get the old gnome menus back etc.

I wonder why no OS maker uses those things.

So there is no technical reason that stops them? Then I'm really confused as to why they haven't done it! Surely it makes sense to differentiate just a little visually.

[kaldor]

I wonder this too. Even Fedora uses the GNOME icon theme by default instead of their own which is preinstalled still.

[grahammechanical]

Not knowing what you are talking about I did a search and found this:

GNOME 3.2 in openSUSE looks identical to what you'll find in the recent Fedora 16 beta release. Unlike previous versions of GNOME, where the menu layouts and desktop environment could be tweaked to create considerable variation, there is – thus far – little that downstream distros can do to customize the look of GNOME 3. A few outside GNOME Shell themes do exist, but they primarily consist of changing the menu colors.

And I found it here:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/10...oint_1_review/

There is also this comment:

Out of the box, there's now little visible difference between openSUSE 12.1, Fedora 16 or even Ubuntu 11.10 if you swap out Unity for GNOME 3.

I wonder if these other distros will get the hate mail that Unity has received?

Regards.

[sanderd17]

GNOME 3.2 in openSUSE looks identical to what you'll find in the recent Fedora 16 beta release. Unlike previous versions of GNOME, where the menu layouts and desktop environment could be tweaked to create considerable variation, there is – thus far – little that downstream distros can do to customize the look of GNOME 3. A few outside GNOME Shell themes do exist, but they primarily consist of changing the menu colors.

I don't get it. They can still change the GTK and mutter theme like before. There are no changes on that point. And for the shell interface, they can change everything too. Look at the extensions like the places menu or like the bottom panel extension. Themes only change colors and maybe things like rounded corners, but extensions can change everything.

I don't know if they are still maintained (and work with Gnome 3.2), but it should be simple for a distribution to keep it maintained. They maintained other tweaks to Gnome 2 too.

[KiwiNZ]

Change how a Distro looks? that will work and be accepted

[ratcheer]

Phoronix is currently running a Gnome survey:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...tem&px=MTAwMjI

Tim

[BigSilly]

Phoronix is currently running a Gnome survey:

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pag...tem&px=MTAwMjI

Tim

Thanks very much for that. I've filled it in and voiced a couple of issues, but to be fair I really like Gnome 3 so I had little cause for complaint about it, just a couple of suggestions.

I'm still a bit unsure about why the distros aren't adding their logos and whatnot to their Gnome 3 releases, but hopefully that will change.

[el_koraco]

Because logos look horrible on the Gnome Shell bar. Debian has the fugly spaceship wallpaper to go with Shell since yesterday, when it hit the Sid repos.