Ubuntu's Yaru Desktop Theme Seeing Updates - Big Update Against GTK's Latest Adwaita

[Vistaus]

I can highly recommend Arc theme, it is very beautiful.

I disagree. It's too flat and I don't like the window buttons either.

[dh04000]

I can't believe what I'm reading. Theming and customization is the enemy now? In Linux?

This is how freedom dies, to thunderous applause.

[Jumbotron]

I can't believe what I'm reading. Theming and customization is the enemy now? In Linux?

This is how freedom dies, to thunderous applause.

Get over it and grow up. There's always Mate and Xfce and Deepin and Elementary and Endless and Haiku and FreeBSD just to name a few. You still have choices. Stop bitching like a little kid.

[Marc Driftmeyer]

Theming is a complete waste of time. It reminds me of the old MacOS crap. Butt ugly for the most part and producing nothing but an inconsistent look n' feel all around.

[betam4x]

This is still going to cause breakage in applications simply because of how GTK does styling and custom widgets. There's no "sane" theming API.

If I create a widget on a headerbar that's black, under GTK without any theme, this is fine because the header is light-grey. If I now apply Yaru, that widget is now now broken. Even if I made light and dark variants, I still couldn't fix it because Yaru is stupid and applies a dark headerbar to everything even when GTK thinks the theme is a light theme.

I can now either put theme specific fixes in my application (but I can't do that for every theme), ignore it and let people think the app is broken or force Adwaita (which hurts people who like to tinker).

I work on some GTK applications and I'm now considering blacklisting distro themes to try and get a compromise.

Try QT, especially QML, the designer, etc. I find it's much easier to get a uniform QT application working over a GTK one.

[betam4x]

Get over it and grow up. There's always Mate and Xfce and Deepin and Elementary and Endless and Haiku and FreeBSD just to name a few. You still have choices. Stop bitching like a little kid.

XFCE has a tiny bit of customization you could do via CSS. It's too bad they didn't go down THAT route. Would be interested to see a CSS driven UI, maybe with some JS for widgets. It doesn't have to be dog slow either. this code can be compiled ahead of time or on demand into native code. It would definitely draw a ton more interest to XFCE (though IIRC XFCE is already pretty popular). Could even use a variant of SCSS:

.titlebar {
background-color: black;
height: 2.2rem;
.close-button { ... }
.minimize-button {..}
.maximize-button { .. }
}

etc. You could even take it a step further by allowing apps to define their own styles and have global SCSS variables ($titlebar-background-color) to help apps be more consistent with the rest of the UI. Once you get web technologies involved, theming becomes a whole lot easier. Hide the titlebar completely? .titlebar { display: none }

[jacob]

Theming is an inherently silly concept. It can work for individual apps, where a theme is designed and tested for that particular application with all its quirks and specificities, but it makes no sense on a system-wide level, where the designer of a theme by definition cannot anticipate all the custom widgets, properties and rendering needs of all existing and future applications.

Also, designing a good theme is a very nontrivial task. It has to be clear, provide sufficient contrast and at the same time minimise eye fatigue, it must be usable by the colourblind, it must work across many screen resolutions, it must be friendly to languages that write right to left etc etc etc. All that requires expert skills that are very different to those of a software developer and that also will not be found with Joe Random.