DEs/WMs

[Eremiell]

So to finish off my list of 3 at this moment, I'll take a bit different route.

Let's assume, you wanna actively include more distros, linux and non-linux alike and become a come to font and de facto standard for many places online and offline alike.

Linux as a lot about choice and picking a distro is just a baseline. Putting aside stuff like text editors, media players, web browsers, programming languages and dozen of other stuff people choose and are often ready to have fight about just to "protect" their favourite, and most of which are probably quite outside the scope of this font, there's one critical component that modifies the way, the user interacts with his OS probably even more that the distro they picked.

The component some distros even decide to split into subdistros at. (kubuntu, xubuntu ,...)

It's naturally the DE or WM a person picks and when people describe their installation, it's quite often a distro/wm pair. Different distros with the same DE/WM are even more similar to use than same distro and different WM/DE.

So at this point I propose to include some major DE & WM icons to come up and pait with the distro ones, unless you feel that's outide your font scope, which would be understandable.

Icons I have in mind are GNOME, KDE, Unity, MATE, Cinnamon, LXDE, LXQt, Xfce, i3, awesome, and possibly enlightment and dwm. There's certainly more, like CDE, but I feel, those are some of the core choices people in my circles take.

Once again, let's extend this idea and ask, how you look on adding things like this into the font? They certainly tell a lot about user's OS and are a natural pairing with the distro icons. Does this make sense to you in general? Would you possibly be open to include other critical software choices that define given user's experience in the future? Possibly init systems unless systemd consumes everything? Or maybe something that doesn't cross our mind at all at this moment, but will become critical in the future? Maybe architectures? (Can imagine x86_64 vs ARM64 battles in desktop/laptop space in the future.)

Once again, thanks for your time, effort already given into this font, your consideration of my input and kind answer.

[tresf]

As a lurker, I'd like to chime... the apps could make their way in, they'd fit well into this library.

I'd vote that to keep the linux name, the graphic should represent an open-source project. As a comparison, FontAwesome has 675 icons, although they actually maintain the artwork on the vast majority of those. This library has the advantage of near exclusively re-using existing artwork, so the maintenance is much less.

Here are some common open source applications that would fall directly into scope:

• Eclipse
• Netbeans
• Notepad++
• Keypass
• Gimp
• Pidgin, Adium
• Putty, WinSCP
• VirtualBox OSE
• PowerShell (seriously)

These are just a few I use on a daily basis that I wouldn't expect to find in FontAwesome but have heavy community usage.

[tresf]

Another -- albeit offtopic -- point is that if this continues and this library grows, @Lukas-W may find himself offering access to others to help maintain it. The @font-linux ID is available, or we could create a more interesting name, such as font-laeta (Latin for "Happy"), etc. Both @font-laeta as well as @laeta are available IDs.

[Eremiell]

I have a long standing interest in fonts, but no real know-how, but if someone points me to a reasonable tutorial or gives me a quick lesson fe. though IRC or another communication channel, I'll be happy to work on icons and make pull requests.

About software in general, I wouldn't be against it, but there should be some system at least. We shouldn't put in random pieces of software up and down. There should probably be some plan and either a consensus or a blessing by our enlightened lord and dictator @Lukas-W (if he decides to take this approach, which would be completely ok, as it's his project anyway) and we should first draft fe. text editors, communication tools, virtualization platforms, shell interpreters or another category and try to have reasonable initial seed and some clear guidelines and categorization. Not just throw any software we just downloaded in just because we want to talk about it on our blog and need a shiny icon.

Fe. while I used pretty much every piece of software you listed at some point of time, they don't really build up any solid categories and look more like a list of random software found in a system menu. While I wouldn't technically be against including anything on the list, I believe in systematic approach (which doesn't contradict iteratively adding to already existing categories, like linux distros pretty much work right now).

So before adding fe. VirtualBox, I'd draft a list of some notable virtualization platforms, like VMWare, xen, qemu, kvm, ... Before adding PowerShell, I'd draft a list of common shell interpreters like bash, fish, zsh, csh, ksh, command.com, ... Your IDE list completely misses vim, of course, just as it misses Sublime Text, emacs, nano, Geany, VS, IntelliJ, Code::Blocks, neovim, gvim, CLion, XCode, Android Studio, and many many more very common ones.

So yes, let's open discussion on this. Probably let's wait what @Lukas-W has to say about that as well. He's the one in charge here. Not that we couldn't fork if we seriously dislike the decision, but collaboration always works better, because more people add work to the common goal.

Another solution, if @Lukas-W does not want to include user space software might be to support this font for distros and instead of forking just make a software icons font that complements it. But let's not have more fragmentation unless we need to.

[tresf]

Necessity drives innovation and the beauty of GitHub is that people can have their itches scratched regardless of the reasoning. Total world domination of icons is fine, but it's pointless.

Open source requirement is a good idea. IntelliJ, CLion and VMWare fail in this category and they should be included no more than OS2/Warp should be included in the OS listing.

they don't really build up any solid categories and look more like a list of random software found in a system menu

If the need is "major DE & WM icons", well, I've named some major apps. This isn't a democracy, it's just some icons. People go shopping from a grocery list, not a isle listing, so the list I've provided is exactly what it is, nothing more, nothing less. If you want classification, organization, categorization, knock yourself out. 👍

[Eremiell]

Let's say I'm a very organized kind of person when it comes to tech. (I wish to be so organized when it comes to some other things.)

But ofc, I have no license of rightness. That's why we have discussion, to express different ideas and find out what they have in common, how they differ, if the differences support or contradict each other, and to find a way that fulfills everyone's needs the most.

[lukas-w]

@Eremiell, thanks for your interest and the time you put into writing up your thoughts in such a coherent way. I'll use this issue to address the general question #30, #31 and #32 rise, as this one would introduce the greatest change in the project's scope.

font-linux was created for the download page of LMMS (a cross-platform digital audio workstation), where we list installation instructions for several Linux distributions. So the original use case is websites, although I've seen people use it on their desktop/terminals, mostly through nerd-fonts. I reckon the latter use case would benefit from the suggestions made here. Just out of curiosity @Eremiell, what's your use case?

Generally speaking, I'm not going to stand in people's way when it comes to this project taking any direction that matches their needs, as long as it's not a 180° turn and doesn't defeat the original purpose (download page).

At least for websites, I believe that icon fonts will slowly disappear with better support for inline SVGs, HTTP2, Web Components and similar technologies. So it's entirely possible this project will transform into something that's merely a collection of stylised (=black+white) software logos.

As long as it's widely used as an icon font though, I'd like to provide a few subset fonts (e.g. one font only providing OS logos, one providing DEs etc) to keep a lightweight option for each use case. I think this is a better option than fragmenting a project this small.

I like the idea of only including open source project's logos. However, we already break this rule by providing the Apple logo. For the download-page use case, it would make sense to include a Windows logo as well. We could try keeping these the only two exceptions, but likely we won't be able to as the project grows.

As for the name: I like having a descriptive name, so the first that comes to mind is font-logos. Suggestions welcome. :)

[tresf]

However, we already break this rule by providing the Apple logo.

@Lukas-W font-awesome already provides this. We should be safe to replace.

[lukas-w]

font-awesome already provides this.

@tresf True, but the very reason it was included was to provide a collection of OS logos without the overhead font-awesome imposes. See #18.

[tresf]

See #18.

👍

one font only providing OS logos, one providing DEs etc

I'd vote there's still an all-encompassing one, e.g. font-logos-all with the lighter-weight font-logos-os, font-logos-apps and perhaps even a rights-signifying font-logos-cc which strips out any that can't be used outside of fair-use. I say this because unlike the OP in #18, I don't personally consider 118KB font file to be "giant".

[lukas-w]

I'd vote there's still an all-encompassing one

Sure, the subsets would be offered in addition – if at all. 👍

[lukas-w]

So the only thing left to do to make this change "official" is to rename this repo. I'm not sure what the consequences are, does anyone know if GitHub sets up forwards automatically?

I'm not quite happy with font-logos, but at least it's not worse than font-linux... Still, I'd be happy to hear ideas.

[tresf]

does anyone know if GitHub sets up forwards automatically?

https://github.com/LMMS/samples 🍕

[lukas-w]

Great, thanks @tresf 🍏. https://help.github.com/articles/renaming-a-repository/ says Project Pages URLs won't redirect though, so https://lukas-w.github.io/font-linux/ will be inaccessible after renaming...

[lukas-w]

Project was renamed to font-logos.

Pull requests for any open-source DEs/WMs/whatever welcome 👍

[ryanoasis]

So we are working on a new release of Nerd Fonts, please let us know if we are representing "font-logos" correctly or any change you'd like to see: https://github.com/ryanoasis/nerd-fonts#font-logos-formerly-font-linux

Internally mostly the project will still be referred to as font-linux but we are using both names in many places publicly. 😄

[lukas-w]

@ryanoasis That's just fine. Thanks for checking with me.