Clean up default theme and wallpaper collection

[Nick Schermer]

On Thu, Jun 23, 2011 at 12:16 AM, Pasi Lallinaho
<pasi at shimmerproject.org> wrote:
> On 06/23/2011 12:56 AM, Nick Schermer wrote:
>> On Wed, Jun 22, 2011 at 11:14 PM, Pasi Lallinaho
>> <pasi at shimmerproject.org> wrote:
>>> I just added a new item in the Design SIG wiki.
>>>
>>> The Xfce default collection of themes (both GTK and xfwm) and wallpapers
>>> is a bit out-of-date. We really should make it 2011.
>> Well the desktop will be a new module for 4.10 (if everything goes as
>> planned), but imho we should just have 1 nice Xfce wallpaper (big for
>> 2012 screens) and nothing else. It only increases the package size and
>> most people will change it anyway.
>>
>
> Okay, so why isn't this in the design SIG wikipage yet? :)

Finish one thing before starting the other? I don't know, up to
Jannis. I think we still need some deeper thoughts how to integrate
this in thunar before focusing on the looks, although the discussion
can already be started.

>>> This would mean removing a bunch of the old looking themes and include
>>> some new; I'm proposing to include the Shimmer themes, which have had
>>> good feedback when used as Xubuntu default themes.
>> The only themes are a bunch of them in the gtk engine, but for example
>> the shimmer themes depend on the murrine engine, not a dependency we
>> want for the core.
>
> Right, I didn't consider that.

>> That doesn't mean there is room for improvement, but the Xfce core
>> doesn't need to become a complete xunbuntu layout as well.
> Yes, I agree. The idea is not to make the core Xubuntu layout, but
> provide the user some theme choices which they really can consider using.
>
> I'm not saying this because I think the Shimmer themes are better than
> anything else but because the default themes in Xfce right now are quite
> ugly, and I couldn't really use those ever. And I think many people
> think the same.

I agree. I never use the Xfce themes as well, in fact, the whole thing
will get better when we switch to gtk3, but that not on the target
list of 4.10, so we need a "decent" mid solution for 4.10, without
putting new stuff in the Xfce core packages.

> There is probably quite little that the design SIG can do about this, if
> there is no consensus across the Xfce developers. I think the question
> simply is if the Xfce developer team wants Xfce core to be as small as
> possible and strip all dependencies, or, are they willing to add a
> rather small dependency to be able to ship themes that bring Xfce looks
> closer to what is objectively considered good-looking in 2011.

Well a possibility is to make shimmer-releases on xfce.org (dig up
xfce4-themes?) and make an advise to distros to include this package
in the xfce-group of their distro (and that package will depend on
murrine). That's more or less the same as we do now with the
gtk-xfce-engine, but that includes both themes and the engine.

This basically puts the shimmer project under the xfce-wing, we can
discuss how to do that (only tarballs on archive.xfce.org, also on
git.xfce.org etc).

Anyway, not only for me do decide if this is a good solution, but it
is a flexible one for sure. It requires a one-liner in xfce4-settings
to make the whole switch.

Nick