4.12 Default Gtk+ theme

[Peter de Ridder]

Hi,

With gtk 3.14 adwaita has become the default gtk3 theme.
This gives us option 5.
5) Create a gtk2 theme based on the xfce engine that look good with the
default gtk3 theme.

Regards,
Peter

On Wed, Feb 4, 2015 at 9:27 AM, Peter de Ridder <peter at xfce.org> wrote:

> 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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