Hoary : where have Gnome's new wall papers gone ?

[Eric Dunbar]

On Sun, 13 Feb 2005 16:14:21 +0100, Vincent Trouilliez
<vincent.trouilliez@> wrote:
> I just looked at Gnome 2.10 preview on :
> http://www.gnome.org/~davyd/gnome-2-10/
> 
> It seems that Gnome now comes (at last) with a few nice wall papers. but
> I notice that none of them made it into Hoary, which only have a couple
> brown/depressing images. :-(
> Why is that ? I understand that we need simplicity, but I think that
> having only a couple "chocolate" images is not enough. Adding the new
> Gnome images would make it eaasy for people to quickly put a more lively
> and elegant pic. I guess people can always download what they want, but
> it's not like we had too much choice. If we had say 12 ince Gnome
> wallpapers, that would be great. There are for example literrally 200
> screen savers ! Way to omany screensavers, and way too few wall papers.
> What about making things more consistent, and find a compromise ? Less
> screen savers, and more quality wall papers.

My vote would be to settle on 6 or 7 GOOD screen savers, in addition
to a "blank"/EnergyStar screen and maybe a "time" or "message"
text-only screen (there is a *lot* of junk in the screen savers
collection) and perhaps a dozen or so decent default desktop "wall
papers" (pictures), including one or two recognisably "Linux" ones, a
few (one of which ought to be the default) Ubuntu-specific ones, and
perhaps a few generic "anyone on any OS could use these wall papers
WITHOUT making a political or philosophical statement.

It has always been a mystery to me as to why a "slim" OS like Ubuntu
comes with sooooo many screen savers -- yeah, they probably don't take
up a whole lot of room, but they are a waste of precious KB in terms
of the single-CD installed distro. And, they also fly in the face of
"simplicity" -- too much choice which in turn provides no value to the
users. If a "power user" has a specific screen saver that they use as
a UTILITY they'll have the knowledge needed to install it anyway. If
they just "like" a specific screen saver because it looks cool,
they'll be able to install it from universe if they're that attached
to it.

There's no real functional loss by paring down the screen saver
collection, and, arguably there's a *gain* in functionality since it
opens up the use of the screen saver to more people.

Eric.