No one is stupid enough to argue against that basic usability principle on the Gnome usability mailing list. There does not need to be a splash screen to provide feedback. Feedback can be provided without making into a splash screen.
I'm sure it could, but the splash screen seems to do that effectively. Somewhere else (desktop-devel I think) there was a suggestion that "System Level" applications (metacity and nautilus for example) should not show on startup, only "user" apps. I think that's a solid idea, but the distinction may be fuzzy.
The particular choice of splash screen in Ubuntu was considered inappropriate by some more conservative users.
Its a good thing you can change the image.
There's no reason the splash screen has to be branding, any number of the splash images on art.gnome.org are completely unrelated to gnome. It makes sense for the default to be a gnome splashscreen though.I find splash screens in general to be annoying advertising and the question has already been asked if we really need this kind of advertising and branding?
Status bar or busy cursor were suggested elsewhere in thread.> Why revert it to a rather boring status bar? How about waiting until a suggestion is made on how to replace things before we decide not to try out the changes at all?
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