GNOME Developers Are Testing A Revised GTK3 Theme

[cybertraveler]

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

Would you say it's more polished than the Windows 7 DE, Windows 10 DE or the Mac OS X DE?

I'm not so sure myself. I find all of them pretty nice and easy to use. I naturally tend towards Gnome out of the lot though because Gnome is Open Source.

[Vistaus]

Are they testing this still? 'Cause a few days ago, I noticed the GTK+ team reverted the new theme commits.

[Vistaus]

Because theming is the most important thing in the world...

Well, a good theme is key IMHO, but in this case, I wonder if it really matters. I mean: who is actually using Adwaita? And NO people, don't go all "I'm using it" on me. What I mean is that I'm 100% sure that the majority of GNOME/GTK-based desktop users use a 3rd party theme anyway.

[Vistaus]

Raleigh? That's '95 era bezel design...

I agree. I don't hate old themes, some of them are nice, but Raleigh? Yuck!

[Vistaus]

I can not express my hatred for CSD. Hey let's make something like macOS with idea of saving horizontal space for lower resolutions, lets create top bar that has only clock and few indicators in it. Altho our top bar has a lot of room lets cram everything in hamburger menu that if you dont want to overflow screen vertically you have to remove or hide features from your app.

1 Both CSD and the hamburger menu were created by Xerox for their GlobalView OS back in 1996: http://toastytech.com/guis/gv.html
2 The top bar resembles webOS, not macOS. Quite a lot, actually. (I'm a former webOS user, but also, the GNOME Team really did use webOS as their primary example)

You're welcome for the free history lesson.

[Weasel]

The new theme resembles macOS even further.

This is exactly the problem with Linux userland devs. They keep copying from the losers and failures and then wonder why the market share is so shit on the desktop (not like themes are important for servers).

Well, if you copy from the loser, you're gonna be a loser.

[sarmad]

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.

Hmmm... I wonder if their VDG is using Plasma on their main daily machines then, coz I honestly doubt. If they do then they should've been able to notice that Chrome or Steam look out of place without the shadows, or that Discover or Konsole look broken with the white border that doesn't match the color of the title bar.
However, like you, I also chose Plasma over Gnome mainly because of the performance. But I had to do a lot of tweaking that most people won't be willing to spend the time on. If KDE wants to increase the adoption they need to change how their VDG runs, or maybe give them more authority over UI decision making.

[dankles]

Source?

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/conjecture

[skeevy420]

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.

Most of that is down to how the distribution sets stuff up. If it wouldn't have been deleted, I did a post earlier with shadows on a CSD program on Plasma. All I did was install GTK3-Mushrooms. That's it. IIRC, Manjaro uses it with their Plasma and LXQT desktops.

The clock/calendar is a personal preference, IMHO (and I'd guess the point is using the default one that doesn't sync with online stuff makes it more secure or some nonsense...you know how Linux people get about stuff that syncs online by default...could also be considered a distribution issue as well).

I don't think I use any electron based programs like VS Code so I'm not gonna comment on that part of the theme issue, but it sounds like Plasma's per-program WM overrides might help. It's also something we have to deal with when mixing UI toolkits. It's an XKCD Competing Standards issue.

The Present-Windows issues, and others, seem like both issues to bring up in bug reports and as suggestions for improvements.