4.12 Default Gtk+ theme

[Peter de Ridder]

Hi,

We do have a set of themes for Gtk3, but they only work up to 3.4 or maybe
not even.
Of these themes some of the Gtk2 versions are broken as well.
Depending on what we deside for Gtk3 I would like to see what we will do
with the Gtk2 themes and engine.
It is probably best to address that in a different thread.

Related to Gtk3 if we provide a theme we need to support it, that would be
2.
I would say we need alteast 2 variations of the theme, light and dark.
Theoretically this provides 3 themes:
A pure light theme, a pure dark theme and a theme with default light and
dark with the theme variant set.

In case of 3 or 4. It would be nice to put a page on the wiki (linked from
the FAQ) to point them to Gtk2/Gtk3 themes.
This would probebly mean that Xfce4 wouldn't be used as much, the same
would go for the xfce engine.
This would mean that the users will "need" to change there look of there
current desktop (if they didn't already).
And the user would need to install another Gtk2 engine (and not the light
weight xfce engine).

Between 3 and 4. We used to have a new default theme every release. The
later ones were just some slight color changes.
I don't think we need a new default Gtk2 theme. So between those two that
would be 4.

If you ask me, it should be either 2 (with maintainance) or 4 (start a
discussion on the future of the xfce engine).
As the xfce engine maintainer: I can maintain a theme as long as it are
just slight changes, I'm not a theme designer.


On Wed, Feb 4, 2015 at 8:43 AM, Olivier Fourdan <fourdan at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi
>
> There is a 4th possibility that has my vote.
>
> TBH, none of the xfce themes/engine work well with gtk3, let alone
> with GNOME CSD windows.
>
> So I'd rather stick to Adwaita (default gtk theme) or Greybird. Both
> look great with the new default xfwm4 theme.
>
> Cheers,
> Olivier
>
>
>
> On 3 February 2015 at 23:21, Simon Steinbeiß <simon at xfce.org> wrote:
> > Dear all,
> >
> > I'd quickly like to address the topic of our default Gtk+ theme for the
> 4.12 release. I have worked on a draft a year ago already [1], which relies
> on an enhanced Xfce engine for Gtk2 [2] and no engine (as in: relying only
> on Gtk3's CSS drawing capabilities) for Gtk3.8-3.12. However, even if we
> agree to ship this as the default theme, there are several open questions,
> mostly related to Gtk3, that I would like us to discuss.
> > Note: I'm not looking for user-feedback or opinions on the art and style
> of the theme! I need feedback from distributors and people with good
> knowledge of the goings-on in the Gtk3/Gnome world.
> >
> > So, the first issue is that – as most of you will know – Gtk3 has
> developed a nasty habit of breaking themes with each major release. So
> themes targeted at Gtk3.6 break with Gtk3.8 and vice versa. However, this
> is not entirely true, as one can write themes that support Gtk3.8, 3.10 and
> potentially 3.12 that might throw warnings in the console (no way around
> that) but that visually work fine. With Gtk3.14 things went awry again
> though and I presume for Gtk3.16 we'll need more modifications again.
> > So if we want to avoid lots of complaints, bugreports or users storming
> the mailinglist, forum or irc, we probably have to decide what we want to
> support and make that very explicit.
> >
> > I see the following scenarios:
> > 1) We decide to support *one* Gtk3 release with the theme. (E.g.
> Gtk3.6-only, Gtk3.8-3.12, Gtk3.14-only)
> > 2) We decide to support multiple Gtk3 releases and offer a compile-time
> switch to build the themes with the support needed.
> > 3) We decide to not support Gtk3 with our theme, because Xfce core
> relies Gtk2 in 4.12.
> >
> > Option 1) is already implemented for the proposed theme I linked to.
> > Obviously, option 2) is the most laborious and comprehensive. It
> provides distributors with a way to decide how to ship it.
> > Option 3) is also viable, given that many distributions ship with
> Gnome's Adwaita as default (e.g. Fedora afaik) and others have their own
> themes (e.g. Xubuntu).
> >
> > So basically I want to know whether it's really worth the effort to go
> through the pains of option 2), whether you're fine with 1) or whether we
> should be even more drastic to avoid misunderstandings and go for 3).
> >
> > Another important note: While all this applies to our new default theme,
> there are more themes around that some users appreciate (e.g. I've heard of
> some using Xfce-dusk) and I'm not entirely sure what to do about those. I
> can imagine adding engine-less Gtk3 support to maybe one more theme until
> release-time, but at least as long as I'm alone on this, that's about it.
> > (The issue of what to do about Gtk3 support in our engine should likely
> be discussed separately.)
> >
> > So, thanks for your attention! (..and sorry writing such a behemoth
> email)
> > Cheers
> > Simon
> >
> >
> > [1] https://github.com/shimmerproject/Xfce-refresh
> > [2] http://git.xfce.org/xfce/gtk-xfce-engine/log/?h=peter/refresh
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