[edoceo]

Someone with 5000 hours design experience needs to make a common icon theme for a few 100 GTK and QT libraries and standard-names. It feels like it's 1000s of hours of work. And then you have to make them available in a few formats, HDPI, maybe a build system, etc. there are a number of themes but the ones I try seem to be missing one or more of the icons from the set. Just need the right volunteers to build them, and also get a bunch of app-builders to adopt them, and figure out what colour the bike-shed should be (blue).

[r3trohack3r]

Why volunteer? Why not find a way to pay someone for the value of their time at market rate and release the product of their labor under a permissive license?

[edoceo]

For the last 25+ years I've been hearing folks say: "why not find a way". But then not suggest anything more than that obvious answer.

Please suggest an actual path forward, an actual plan that is more than just "figure it out". And the plan needs to address at least 1/2 of the points I made above.

It's a "Hard Problem". The answer needs lots of time, likely money and at least two humans with strong drive to fix the problem.

[troupo]

Linux these days is almost exclusively developed by companies with combined value exceeding Apple's several-fold.

Finding money and designers is not really a hard problem.

[akerl_]

We've managed to make the entire corpus of open source software but the thing that's a "Hard Problem" that nobody can find a way to do is making the icons look good?

It's almost like it's not a technical challenge, it's that getting good looking icons would require a unified userbase, and Apple has that but Linux does not.

[r3trohack3r]

Also, more importantly IMO, the corpus of open source and free software leans _hard_ towards things _programmers_ find interesting/useful.

The further from “I use this everyday to program” you get - the less concentrated/competitive open source and free software solutions are.

All programmers are programmers (this is almost as close to a tautology as you can get). Finding programmers who will write programs as an unpaid hobby to improve their SDLC experience when they program is substantially easier than finding competent UI/UX/icon designers who will do the same. The ecosystem of software under their icons is entirely inaccessible to them - the source being “free” or “open” is irrelevant to them, they can’t program so they can’t modify the system in the same way a programmer can.

My spicy take on this is that the free and open source software ecosystems have failed to deliver on their goals in any meaningful way for non technical people. The world around programs has gotten _objectively worse_ for the common man while the corpus of free and open source software has grown. The world runs on OSS and yet the world’s data is all owned by SaaS companies. Everyone has lost agency over their digital lives but at least we have Automake and emacs.

[Teever]

Yeah what if these open source developers just got jobs and then they paid someone to do what they used to do for free?

[r3trohack3r]

Yeah, it’s amazing what you can accomplish when you find a way to pay people a livable wage for the things you want.