There's no requirement to re-brand upstream stuff. After all,
we
don't change the appearance or logos in Eclipse, GIMP, Inkscape, etc.
In this case, why do we rebrand KDE, Xfce, and all other desktop
environments that are included in Fedora?
I think it would be more useful to work on something like the
start.fedoraproject.org site, and have that page be a better resource
for building brand. (If you look at it currently, you'll find that
it's improved, but still has a lot of room for improvement.)
That is a completely unrelated issue. But I agree, that site could use
some improvements.
After all, this start page is part of the new browser tabs in
Firefox
that the vast majority of users will open. It has more room for
meaningful content than a simple logo on a menu. Putting worthwhile,
substantial material where people will see it is more effective for
building our brand than trying to force an old idiom into a design
that doesn't need it.
You didn't really answer my question.
If we don't have any branding on Fedora's default installation, how will
users be able to distinguish between Fedora and any other Gnome
distribution? Changing a start page in Firefox doesn't really cut it.
I'll give you an example. Back then when I was about to decide which
distribution to use, Ubuntu and Fedora looked largely the same, they
only differed from each other in a few colors and a logo.
Having no expertise with Linux at all, I liked Fedora's artwork better,
so I decided to choose Fedora. (And I haven't regret it.) However, by
giving up all Fedora identity from our default desktop, users will see
no difference from other distros either. And this is a mistake.
By giving up its identity, not only will Fedora look the same as any
other distro that happens to package Gnome 3, but none of their users
will feel like trying it either, becuse to them, looks are the deciding
factor.
Cheers,
Timur