KDE not only has 1 mascot, they have over 6 or more mascots!! Yet GNOME only has the foot, that’s interesting, they need a mascot. And made by Tyson Tan or someone with a similar art style, it would be amazing!!! But anyway GNOME is the best desktop environment and it’s better if it’s vanilla with some small customizations.
√ cool dragon
× stinky foot
Not everyone feels like having a mascot fits with their branding
My head canon is that Pingu is the only mascot for GNOME.
So they take a damn FOOTFUNGUS
Probably because a gnome would be silly. I presume that’s not the image they’re looking for - garden gnomes, Christmas, fairy tales.
it’d be silly, so they went with a… foot?
idk about that
Less silly than a whole goofy gnome.
It can be a badass gnome. Not many ways to represent a foot though.
At least the foot’s shape looks like G, or more like Ğ.
they can make another one, for example a squirrel would be nice, or an anime gnome.
I think they’re happy with just a slightly silly foot logo. “Gnome Network Object Model Environment” is a serious sounding name and I don’t think an animal mascot is what they had in mind for branding (seeing as, they don’t have one). An anime gnome might even be the exact opposite of what their intent is. GNOME is looking to be seen as a professional alternative to MacOS and Windows. Speaking of which, note that Windows and OSX don’t have a mascot either.
Gnome Chomsky.
Windows had Clippy then Cortana.
Gnome Chomsky would be pretty hilarious. Kinda political though.
True, Windows had a couple characters (well, Clippy was for Office). The idea of those was a digital assistant character though, not really a mascot.
Just stumbled upon this comment. Actually, Windows has been using anime mascots for years in asia. Notably, they haven’t made a new one for Windows 11.
That’s interesting. What that indicates to me is that they feel it’s not advantageous marketing-wise to have one in other regions.
I feel like every larger open source project that doesn’t have a Tyson Tan designed mascot doesn’t have one because they refused to let him make one for them.
I agree that this is a sad thing, but I guess not everyone in the Linux world is into furry waifus.
wait really?? So Tyson Tan designs a lot of mascots?? I think his characters are very cute!!! I will not allow him to make my mascot, not because I dislike his art, but because I like to make everything.
Apple doesn’t have a mascot, so gnome doesn’t have one either.
the little apple with the bite??
That’s a logo, not a mascot. A logo is a mark that denotes a brand, the apple with the bite taken out for Apple, the footprint for GNOME, the stylized and colorized G for Google…
A mascot is a character that acts as a face and a voice for a brand. The gecko for Geico, Tony the Tiger for Frosted Flakes, Flo for Progressive.
Many brands looking to keep a serious, “sophisticated” brand aesthetic eschew mascots in favor of simple logos. GNOME follows suit with that trend. Nothing wrong with it, in fact I think it works quite well for them. If they were to adopt a mascot now it would be… Strange.
Because they were smart.
