GNOME Developers Are Testing A Revised GTK3 Theme

[finalzone]

I use Arc theme which is very nice.

It's too bad GTK doesn't have built in CSS class names such as .red-100, .red-200, .red-300, orange-100, etc.
Like 7 or so shades of each color.

Feel free to suggest a patch for review.

[zxy_thf]

That new dark theme....ugh....it's like they just gave it a slight red tint.

And those header buttons look flat, plain, and ugly. I greatly prefer the 3d look of the old ones.

I'm guessing the real reason I don't like the header button is... they really look like cheap plastics.

I have no such feelings on windows/mac header buttons.

[sarmad]

Some of that is the fault of the distribution. OpenSUSE (and SUSE and Tumbleweed), for example, has a horrible KDE setup due to the SUSE themes being partially done and using Breeze as a fallback so half the system is using SUSE Green and the rest is using Breeze Blue. Going through the KDE System Settings and manually setting everything to Breeze (including GTK programs) really helps a lot. Kvantum also helps a lot too.

EDIT:
Please don't take that as me being critical of SUSE. SUSE and variants, Arch and variants, & some BSD variants are all I've ran in the past year on a continual basis and it was pretty much just Antergos for years before that.

SUSE stood out the worst in regards to KDE/Plasma due to the default theme; sucks because it's a very powerful setup with some awesome management tools (though it's easy to break or make unstable if you need a whole lot of user repos...I have the same complaint with Ubuntu and PPAs). I've experienced similar KDE theme issues with Mint and Manjaro before, but I just didn't want to comment on something I haven't used in over four years.

Breeze and Breeze-GTK, regardless of the distribution, usually looks nice and unified.

There's not a whole lot the KDE devs can do about a lot of the cross UI theme issues outside of forking GTK3 and doing something like GTK3-Mushrooms.

Well, it's not just a matter of selecting the right theme. I'm using Kubuntu, which uses Breeze by default, but I still have to make tweaks if I want it to look nice across the board rather than look nice only for Qt apps. For example, I had to remove the borders in the Breeze theme to get it to look acceptable for dark apps like VS Code. Also, the infamous lack of shadows for CSD windows is another thing that isn't specific to a distro. There are other non-styling tweeks I had to make like replacing the default digital clock plasmoid with Events Calendar, which does everything the default digital clock plasmoid intended to do, only that it does it better (what's the point in defaulting to a calendar that cannot properly sync with online calendars, like Google Calendar, when you have another one that does it perfectly?).
There are also behavior that are simple to implement/fix but they don't get fixed. For example, the present-windows action shows all the windows but doesn't allow you to move them around monitors or move them to other desktops. It also shows you a close button floating on top of the window but doesn't get the same hover-scale effect that the window itself gets, making it look really ugly, something that can be really fixed by simply removing that hover-scale effect. We have the show-all-desktops action, which allows you to move a window to another monitor on another virtual desktop but not to another monitor on the same virtual desktop. I can probably find a lot more similar stuff that shows that the KDE team is missing a UI designer that can be the decision maker on what should be worked on next.

[GraysonPeddie]

I want to keep the Adwaita theme the way it is. Thank you very much.

[Guest]

This is why Gnome seems to be more polished than KDE. They give enough attention to the tiny details that make the product look polished. As a KDE user I wish if KDE does the same.

As Pc user, I'd like to use a desktop environment: simple and easy to use, without bugs, and lite. What happens today: from one version to another bugs appears without any reasons: Should I wait for the next release? What!!!; Compositing is necessary in the Gtk3 world: Gnome3 doesn't work without it, or artifact appears, e.g.: Xfce, move icons on the desktop after disablig compositing; Kde: tried some widgets, and my cpu usage raise in a crazy manner. I'd like to say to Gnome3, Gtk3 and Kde5 programmers: recode everything.

Corrigendum:
Mate instead of Xfce

[molecule-eye]

I can probably find a lot more similar stuff that shows that the KDE team is missing a UI designer that can be the decision maker on what should be worked on next.

They have the VDG (visual design group) that oversees design decisions, so they're not lacking a "UI designer". I do think that gnome looks better than plasma in many respects, but KDE works better (except on wayland), for me at least. I just tried gnome 3.30.2 on Fedora and after less than a day of uptime, gnome-shell memory usage was at 1GB and was super laggy!!!! I have over a day of uptime right now on Plasma with a bunch of widgets on my panel and it's consuming less than 200MB, and it runs like a beast on my dual core laptop.

[Guest]

Gaming computers do not use compositing and Xfce Gtk3 version works fine without it.

Yes, Xfce is a great DE.

[theghost]

Heh, our usability sucks and our applications have no usable features at all.
Alright, let's do a new theme...

[cybertraveler]

The increased contrast for header-bar, tab-buttons is an ergonomic improvement. You can now more clearly see which is the actively selected tab/button:

(top image is old. bottom image is new)



I'm glad they're doing this. It's one of the things I've struggled with sometimes with some GTK+ 3.x applications.

[Mateus Felipe]

GNOME is always improving. It's not by chance that it's the most polished DE.