Lars Wirzenius wrote:
> Indeed. With people using tiny laptops with 640x480 pixel screens to
> people using high-end workstations with two (or three?) multi-megapixel
> screens, there isn't any one size that will fit all.
>
> What Gnome, OS X, and KDE do is to provide icons in a large size that is
> then automatically scaled to the desired size. This doesn't provide for
> an optimal visual experience (an icon custom-designed for a given size
> is likely to be better than one resized), but the drop in quality is
> usually not that great, if the original icon is designed for this.
Of course you'll get better results in such scaling if you have more
colors available. The problem, I think, is that some of the window
managers that support icons, like fvwm, do not do scaling, or don't do
it very well.
> (Given that most people rarely see the icons in Debian-provided menus,
> and this includes me, I don't think a radical change in Debian's policy
> is needed, however.)
Not sure I understand. Do you mean that you rarely see them because you
use one of the window managers that does not display them, or because
you turn them off, or because only 7% of menu entries[1] include an icon
in the first place?
Unless you mean something else, none of those seems like reason to keep
things as they are, presumably some users use window managers that
display them, don't turn them off, and see the low-quality, spottily
available set of icons that we ship.
The 7% figure is interesting. The typical leaf menu on my system has
between 5 and 15 items in it. If the distribution of items that have
icons is fairly random, most menus will have one or two icons on them,
and the remainder of items with no icons. I have not checked this, but
it seems rather nasty.
I still think that dropping icons entirely and pushing the icons off
into whatever desktop environments want to bother with them is a good
approach. We might use some kind of hints, so that eg, the gnome
menu[2] could know that a given program is a mail reader or web browser,
and insert a generic icon if it doesn't have a specific one for that
program. This could also allow someone to set up an 8-bit icons package
if they really wanted to, or even a 2-bit set of icons.
--
see shy jo
[1] on my laptop
[2] assuming it stopped treating the debian menu as a second-class
add-on
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