GTK+ Gets A New Default Theme

[DebianLinuxero]

My bad English

Instead I think Adwaita was.

I meant : I thought.

[RahulSundaram]

I meant : I thought.

You are probably confusing GTK default with GNOME default. Adwaita was always the GNOME default theme starting with 3.0 however GTK default has switched over. In most cases, in any Linux distribution, you won't see the GTK default anyway so it isn't as much of a difference but for other platforms, it can matter.

[Kostas]

So pretty trumps resource use. CSS parsing is not exactly lightweight by any measure.

Not that I'm contesting the above, far from it, but is anyone aware of actual metrics on how slow it is?

[dee.]

Are there even any modern theme engines that don't use CSS in one form or another?

Also, CSS parsing: slow? Can't really see why as usually you only have to parse the stylesheet once, when you load the application/theme/whatever...

[curaga]

Lightweight also includes RAM use and binary size. To parse it you need knowledge of the whole CSS standard. To display it you need to keep the DOM tree in memory, unless they flatten it somehow.

[tuubi]

Lightweight also includes RAM use and binary size. To parse it you need knowledge of the whole CSS standard. To display it you need to keep the DOM tree in memory, unless they flatten it somehow.

They only need knowledge of the relevant parts of the CSS standard. The parser might very well be more complicated than what they had for the old gtkrc themes, but on the other hand, the lack of an external theme engine might just simplify things a bit.

[jonnor]

Lightweight also includes RAM use and binary size. To parse it you need knowledge of the whole CSS standard. To display it you need to keep the DOM tree in memory, unless they flatten it somehow.

How many megabytes is the RAM use difference for a non-trivial app, say GIMP? How many percent is this of the total memory usage?

[jonnor]

How many megabytes is the RAM use difference for a non-trivial app, say GIMP? How many percent is this of the total memory usage?

I tested very quickly:
GTK_THEME=Raleigh eog
GTK_THEME=Adwaita:dark eog
GTK_THEME=Adwaita eog

It looks like Raleigh is around 18.5MB and Adwaita around 20MB resident. Shared is ~13MB for both.

[dee.]

Lightweight also includes RAM use and binary size. To parse it you need knowledge of the whole CSS standard. To display it you need to keep the DOM tree in memory, unless they flatten it somehow.

The memory footprint is pretty trivial. Especially compared to other things a theme has to do.

A theme has to keep the information about the widget styles in memory in some way in any case, using CSS for it isn't much of an additional cost.

[chinoto]

Basically everyone knows how to write CSS and it's implemented in many browsers, so even if it is slower, you get the benefit of everyone know how to use it and being able to reuse code (or at least general ideas) from browsers.