Curious why Fedora manages to actually make some useful system sounds while Ubuntu continues to be oddly mute, I looked at the version number for sound-theme-freedesktop. It is (*gasp*) now at 0.7 upstream, while the one packaged in Ubuntu is 0.4. In fairness, it looks like 0.4 was released on August 23, with 0.5 tailing it on August 26. It just so happens that one tiny 3 day amendment alone would have made a huge difference.
I grabbed the upstream version from git, installed it and was overjoyed by my desktop now making useful sounds from time to time (instead of just an obnoxious desktop-login noise). For example, the volume applet makes a cute little pop now when I adjust the volume. (Although, oddly, the keyboard-driven volume control via gnome-settings-daemon doesn't make that sound even though it did in Fedora. I guess that's a patch waiting for GNOME 2.30). However, the Ubuntu sound theme, which remains the default, is thus far very empty and doesn't inherit from the FreeDesktop one. I think this could be improved in a huge way! There are a lot of things which can be done here, and all the sounds (even the Freedesktop ones which I like) could use a bit of touching up. For example, many of them are just loud pops where something simpler and more relevant could fit and the button sounds don't sound anything like buttons. (Not that I use them anyway, but for those who wish to know when they click buttons I am sure more pleasant sounds would be appreciated). Oh, and I swear the instant messaging login and logout sounds are reminiscent of MSN Messenger, although I may be mistaken as I haven't used that in 5 years... Basically, I haven't seen much interest in the sound effects thing in Ubuntu, which is a shame because we now have a really good thing (the Freedesktop sound themes spec) to make them happen. I'm not proposing a desktop that doubles as a musical instrument, but this stuff allows aural notifications to be way more helpful and possibly less obtrusive as they produce less confusion for the end user. Perhaps this would be a good thing to have in mind for Lucid, now that the visual icons have been given so much love :) Thanks, Dylan -- ubuntu-art mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-art
