Linked by Thom Holwerda on Sun 2nd Aug 2009 20:12 UTC, submitted by kiddo
A common complaint about GNOME is that it has a certain fetish for icons. Menu entries, buttons - everything has an icon attached to it which often wastes space needlessly by making buttons larger than they need to be, as well as menus wider than they need to be. The good news (for me, at least) is that the next GNOME release will have all these icons removed.
Thread beginning with comment 376693
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Recent Original Stories
Recent Comments
Headlines
Random Comments
Random Stories
Random OS Link
Member since:
2006-09-12
I like the icons on buttons and menus, I find they are great visual cues and supplement muscle memory well. I would really miss them, and if there is an option to enable them, I will.
But really, this is also aggravated by GTK themes. GTK theming isn't exactly the most pleasant or comprehensive a themer could wish for. There is only limited control over spacing, especially for compound widgets like buttons (with icons.) That, and most themes are essentially copy/paste hack-jobs of other themes, and errors/bad ideas accumulate. Sadly, this even goes for "official" themes, be it GNOME's or a distribution's.
The icon size of quite a few interface elements can be set by a GTK theme, and I modify nearly all themes I like to use smaller icons on buttons, it frees up a lot of space. However, dialog buttons include some spacing that can't be controlled by a GTK theme. They actually are supposed to be bigger (according to GNOME HID guidlines), to be more readily identified as "important action" buttons.
So, what I am getting at is, I guess, GNOME/GTK should improve theming and users/distributions should choose a good (attractive) theme and there you are! No need to kludge this by completely disabling icons!
Edited 2009-08-03 07:24 UTC