Comment 102 for bug 407621

Style or Usability ?
The eternal debate between graphic designers and people from ergonomics.
Each group evaluates usability its own way. Basically:
One says nicer is better (because aesthetic design ...),
the other focus on methods and numbers (measuring user efficiency ...).

I've seen them fighting at work for such a long time...

Let's forget this debate for a while,
and let the user choose, in the easiest manner.
The user should be able to decide what's better for him.
He should not be imposed choices by some pretending to know the way he works better than him.

For now, to choose you want icons in both menus and buttons is just a pain.
If you don't have read it from other people complaining,
you have no chance to find it.
Especially, the Gnome Registry should not be considered as a gui and therefore is not the way to go.

PROPOSAL:

When you open "Appearance Preference", the first thing you see are visual summary of themes.
If we put those 2 preferences (icons in menus and buttons) directly inside themes,
we could see in a glance themes with or without icons.
http://img255.imageshack.us/img255/6513/themes.png

The customize theme dialog would have a new tab "Controls Icons" containing those 2 prefs.
Then let theme designers create clean themes or themes with icons.
For example, Ubuntu could have a "Human" and a "Human Clean" theme,
and choose which one is the default (by voting or whatever).
And the default theme in Gnome, Clearlooks, would have no icons.

So graphic designers would be happy to have more control on the design of their themes.
And users would be happy to easily choose the aesthetic/usability they prefer.

Firefox is using this way with its theme.
For example, when you are on Mac OS with Firefox, the default theme has no icon in bookmarks, just like Safari.
If you feel that makes bookmarks unusable, and you want them back like on Linux or Windows, you just pick-up another theme and problem solved.