Joey Hess commented in his blog about my wish for Debian branding.

I agree with a couple of the points he has brought up:

First of all, the focus must clearly lie on usability and not cool-looking screenshots, and that most themes are pretty much unusable (maybe that is why I stick to the standard engines and colorschemes).

The militaristic theme suggestion came to me due to the “sarge” name. I guess I wouldn’t use it myself (I refused military service and did alternative civilian service, I have never fired a real weapon, and I do not intend to)

But this very much depends on how it really is made. What I’d image is just something using these colors, maybe a background image with a plastic toy Debian army (just like in Toy Story, where the name Sarge comes from after all), Splash screen etc. Maybe camouflage-like window frames.

It’s a bit about being unique, and it doesn’t even have to be the default theme. It should just be something you could use if you want to show “we’re running Debian sarge”.

I actually don’t care that much if we do ship “upstream defaults”. IMHO, we should consider changing things if we believe them to be better. And we often already do anyway. Just to give a stupid example: upstream apache calls the daemon “httpd” (which I find annoying whenever I work on a non-Debian box)

But such changes should usually be as easily to revert as removing a patch file from the source package and rebuilding it.

Doing the same as RedHat, unifying the looks of KDE and Gnome, isn’t something I’d suggest to do, OTOH.

Recently we had a meeting with Siemens, and some BA guys of us asked me while chatting idly what “this Debian thing” actually is. I replied “A linux distribution” and was asked “Like SuSE?” (we’re in Germany, SuSE is the biggest Linux player here, with trials given away in magazines etc.) The Siemens guy threw in “only better”. Nice. ;-)

Many users of Debian are proud of their systems, and proud of Debian. They sometimes want to show not only that they are running Linux, but that they are running Debian GNU/Linux. And maybe to show off, that they run sarge/sid/etch. Merchandizing. Wheter the default setting will then be the Debian theme or not is a separate decision we can only make, if we have these themes available…

On the other hand, we could use such themes etc. also for presentations, for example at the SYSTEMS in Munich. I had forgotten about the Debian-colored gtk themes by then, all we had was the DebBlue background image. At a Debian booth, this is a bit disappointing. Heck, we could use a Debian screensaver.

On Gnome-Look.org, you can find a Debian Icons theme. They look basically like other icon sets, but with the typical Debian color used for color parts. I like this approach, albeit it already is a bit too much for me. There a dozen of nice backgrounds, gdm or gnome-splash graphics, but no “overall” set.