Now that the second deadline for Fedora 10 themes has been reached, the remaining theme proposals have matured and gotten much, much better. At this point, it is clear that no matter what theme is chosen, Fedora 10 will look great. Still, all themes are not equal. These are some of the best, though.
I’ve always been partial to the art design in Fedora and even back to Red Hat 8, all bar the silly “hot air balloons” a few releases back. The folks that put the time into making these simple, yet elegant themes deserve a beer!
Hey! I liked the balloons! 🙂 It was in Fedora 7 and was called “Flying High”. Though I confess that I always called it “Up, Up, and Away!”. I thought it captured the spirit of Fedora, and Linux in general, very well. Themes like “DNA” are cool and all… but sometimes they strike me as being a bit “cold”.
Edited 2008-09-07 19:21 UTC
yup – That has been my favourite background.
A close second would have been the golden gears, but I opened my mouth and mentioned the lack of blue… oops. I like the original idea more than the later ones incorporating blue.
Since when have desktop wallpapers constituted a “theme”?
Maybe it’s just me.
I guess there is more to them then just the wallpaper.
Though it’s odd that that’s the only part they show.
This is what I thought too
This is a real screenshot of the theme here though: http://fedoraproject.org/w/uploads/e/e6/Screenshot.png if you dig down a bit and here: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Artwork/F10Themes/Solar
The theme is nice although the only element of the theme that is new is the wallpaper
I would like changes and enhancements in the following elements of the theme: widgets, scrollbars, toolbars, status bars, icons, cursors. But the Gnome default theme is pretty nice and clean already. I personally like a lot RedHat-based distros themes (Fedora, Centos, RHEL) and openSUSE’s Gnome themes. Nice job.
It isn’t just wallpaper; the theme extends also to the installation window, GRUB, and others.
Check out http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Artwork/ThemingOverview which also has nice examples.
Well, going through the link you gave, we can safely say that they are indeed themes. Maybe the OP was like me, who expect over all theme, like widgets, icon and window decoration.
It still looks like a background theme only, so basically just a couple of desktop backgrounds, and matching backgrounds for maybe a GRUB and a login window too. Big amazing news… We already have dozens and hundreds of those and it is not that difficult for users to have their own personal ones either. What about theming widgets, window manager etc? That I might call worth a news entry, this, well, just some (maybe?) rather ok looking backgrounds – like what we have seen dozens of times before already.
“The Amazing Artwork of Fedora 10″ ??
Maybe a rather ok blog entry title (like it is originally), but here on Osnews it sounds like bombastic hype only. Geeks who like scifi and such stuff might like these backgrounds, however. Others? Not so sure?
Edited 2008-09-07 17:26 UTC
These guys always have good art work. I enjoy using Fedora but with my network having a 5gb limit running Fedora is kinda outta the question with the constant 100 meg downloads for updates. Until Delta rpm’s get official support i’ll be on xp
I am on a dialup connection and daily updates are also a problem for me :'(
At least Fedora developers aren’t afraid to try out new looks with each release…unlike a certain South African distribution that continues to look like dirt after nearly five years and an explosion of popularity.
Is this article really newsworth?
Was that question really comment worthy?
it is if its Ubuntu
Edited 2008-09-09 04:32 UTC
The planet wallpaper is tight.
But I must say that I’ve never been too excited about Fedora’s artwork. The echo icon theme will become the default in F10 and it’s crappy IMHO.
Who gives a crap about artwork; look at the goodies poised for the Fedora 10 release:
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Releases/10/FeatureList
I gave up on Fedora when they were only building one version of Openoffice per Fedora release. In other words, they were not keeping their builds current.
Edited 2008-09-07 16:57 UTC
Vanilla OOo sucks anyway.
If you’re going to use a free office suit make it Oxygen Office Professional.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/ooop/
VBA support is a bug.
Excellent knee-jerk response : )
Well, you gave up on Fedora for nothing then. You can get OpenOffice from openoffice.org and install the latest version yourself. Both DEBs and RPMs are provided for the current and experimental releases. Check here: http://download.openoffice.org/other.html#en-US
Now go enjoy Fedora! 🙂
So… which distro did you move to?
afaik, Fedora is one of the more cavalier distro’s when it comes to updates and if it shies away from an update there may be a reason (though it could be a lousy one, such as bandwidth for those on a narrow pipe, but they have problems anyway.).
Yes. In fact, that and the very rude and unhelpful forum were what drove me away. Don’t get me wrong. I can handle a bit of rudeness. And I can handle not getting an answer from a user forum. Especially an answer to a very sticky problem. And having used RedHat and variants since RH 4.2, I very rarely need to bother the forums. However, in an emergency situation, with dozens of users (60 actually) waiting for me to resolve a particularly recalcitrant problem (which ended up being due to a package update), Fedora’s forum failed me miserably, causing much embarrassment to me and wasted time on the part of my users. (And yes, I was walking on egg shells to be polite on the forum because I had been up all night pulling my hair out, was out of ideas, and desperately *needed* some new ideas from someone, anyone, in the forum.)
After I got the problem resolved on my own, after 20 non-stop hours, the only comments coming from the forum having been to advise me that it was “very rude of me” to mention that the issue was “kind of urgent” in my post, since everyone’s problems are supposedly of equal importance, and never mind that I apologized in advance for having to use the word “urgent”, I had time to get suitably irritated about the situation and decided that the Fedora community could just stick their distro where the sun doesn’t shine. (Sorry to be so negative, but even a few months later I am still fuming about the damage to Linux’ reputation that occurred at that client site, as they stood by and criticized from their ivory towers.) I will not let it happen again. Fedora, a distro which actually has a lot going for it in other ways, totally blew it when it mattered most.
It is not my intent to get into a flame war, or even an extended discussion on this topic. And some may disagree with me. That’s OK. But I’ve said my piece, and perhaps this will click with someone and make a positive difference for some future forum poster some day.
But as situations permit, I am migrating remaining Fedora boxes under my administration, which are of any importance, to other distros. And I have no doubt that I am doing the right thing.
Edited 2008-09-07 21:11 UTC
That’s a shame, as when things go wrong (which will happen at some point with any distro), the end user advice/mop-up afterwards is very important.
I personally like the rapid updates in Fedora and have generally benefited from them (like the 3d support for R500 class Radeons being available within the Fedora 9 release instead of having to wait for Fedora 10).
Course that could be because Fedora/Linux is more a hobby for me and I use Vista for work (too tempting to fiddle with things in linux and I have no willpower to resist
)
Quote
But as situations permit, I am migrating remaining Fedora boxes under my administration, which are of any importance, to other distros. And I have no doubt that I am doing the right thing.
End Quote
I take it from that you are running Fedora on Production Systems. Well, that is a risk you take and is one that is not advised by the Fedora Team.
Anyway, you say you went to the Fedora Forums about a bug. Did you not report it with Bugzilla? Did any of the other people suffering from it do the same?
I have reported many problems via Bugzilla and had have an excellent response and even on one occasion worked with the assigned developer to fix the problem.
Fedora is a community. As with many other Linux distros, you only get out of it what you put back in.
Also, ya have to remember on a lot of these forums, that many many people say things to make it sound very urgent, and it ends up being that xmms wont play mp3’s or something rubbish like that so many people get aggravated when anybody says that for any reason. Should they be rude about it? no, but will it happen in any distro’s community you could go to? yes.
Its hard to explain, but in each forum you find out there is a certain way to say the same thing as you had said before, but get a completely different result from the ones that know your issue. Call it a dialect in the open source language. People are rude, and snobby, and will say things that are uncalled for left and right, but rarely is it the majority, and once you learn your community, you can ask even the most dimwitted questions without too much flak.
Giving up on a good distro because of one, or even a couple bad run in’s will keep you running for a long time.
As I said in my original post, I really don’t want to drag this out into a flame war or anything. But I should probably briefly respond to the comments:
1. Yes. Sometimes it is nice that Fedora is bleeding edge. It is, however, a mixed bag.
2. The Fedora community tries to have it both ways. I have been attacked repeatedly in this forum (osnews), by Fedora community members, for suggesting that Fedora is not really a production OS. But as soon as one tries to use it as such, and has problems, the story from community members is that “it’s your own fault because we never recommended that”. True, I should not have allowed myself to be persuaded, and will not make that mistake again.
3a. Regarding whether I decided to “get involved” in helping the project by filing a detailed bug report after that disaster was over… Hell no! (There is really no other way to say that adequately.) Please read my original post. I rightfully and understandably voted with my feet.
3b. I have filed and contributed to Fedora bug tickets in the past and have not been particularly impressed by the response.
4. This kind of rudeness does not happen in “any distro’s community”. At least not to the extent that I have seen it in Fedora’s forums and (in even worse form) the mailing list. Perhaps *some* distro communities are rude, too. But I’ve been involved with the two distros I am replacing Fedora with for years and have never considered their communities rude.
5. I have actually had far more than “one or a couple of bad experiences” with Fedora. This one was the one really worth highlighting. I (now) have 2 distros that I use in my work and don’t distro hop in that context. In the last 12 years that I have used Linux professionally, I’ve essentially added two distros to the mix and had to drop only one. The Fedora boxes have been/are being/will be migrated to the remaining two.
I should note that Fedora has actually worked OK for web servers, and for XDMCP servers with less than about 16 users.
I should stop there because I’ve probably already said too much.
-Steve
Edited 2008-09-08 13:31 UTC
Don’t take this the wrong way, but that’s why you always get a support agreement with any OS that you run in a live, production environment. Whether that OS is Windows, Linux, or Mac – you should always have a contract in which you can contact someone that is a bit more expert than yourself on matters. I don’t think I’d ever run a community distro in a “production” environment because of that. I do run Ubuntu on my laptop and desktop at home, but wouldn’t do such a thing in the workplace. Chances are, there is always going to be a problem that you don’t know the answer to, and you’ll need help. That’s where that support contract comes into play. It would have made up for the cost that you spent 20 straight hours working on.
I’d just spend that money towards an expert who works for me and probably knows alot more than the support guy you’d end up having to phone 20 times.
I’d rather have Red Hat and their engineers contracted out to help me. I’d take the company over someone else.
I wouldn’t quite go as far as saying any of these are amazing, but they do give a good starting point as a rough draft