Re: [opensuse-artwork] Improve LXDE's artwork.

El Lunes, 31 de marzo de 2014 13:05:11 Richard Brown escribió:

On 28 March 2014 21:24, jcsl wrote:

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Hi.

I'd like to see LXDE's default artwork improved. I know that you can change it at any moment, but having a default nice and homogeneous theme is nice. The changes I propose are:

- Change the default GTK+ theme: currently it is Clearlooks that is GTK2 only. GTK3 apps have a bare metal look. We could use Adwaita, that is GTK2 and GTK3, and it looks nice.

Sounds good to me - I like the idea of "LXDE in openSUSE" sharing a little more commonality with "GNOME in openSUSE" - would probably result in both getting more of a polished feel, and I think it goes a long way to encourage LXDE as a lightweight alternative to the 'less lightweight' GNOME

Yes, I agree.

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- However, if we choose to do so, there is a problem with some applications that use Adwaita's dark theme as default, causing visual inconsistency (Totem, Cheese). We could create a forked Adwaita package (Adwaita-LXDE?) with /usr/share/themes/Adwaita/gtk-3.0/gtk-dark.css removed to fix this. I'm a little less supportive of this idea - I don't think it's terrible, but I'd prefer to see less forking if possible. I think the logic behind the dark theme is a good one - Totem and Cheese are about 'content', and Dark themes work best with content-focused applications. Using a different theme from the expected in applications like Totem is likely to cause visual inconsistencies which you'll need to find a way to fix. So I'd really recommend LXDE use Adwaita the same way as 'upstream' GNOME.

There is a little difference between the two desktops. With GNOME you can have the whole window in dark colors, but LXDE uses Openbox as window manager and you cannot change the title bar color. So in this case you have a dark window with a light colored title bar and it doesn't look as nice as in GNOME. Anyway, I'm not sure about if Totem should be the default video player in LXDE. I've seen the features of Totem for GNOME 3.12 and it looks like a more heavyweight application than it is now. Not sure about this, but VLC-GTK could be a lighter alternative. But this thread is about artwork...

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Maybe we could even modify some of the theme colors. For example, we could replace the default selection color from blue to green.

In principle, sounds great! We'd probably want to use it in openSUSE-GNOME too. In practice, every time people have tried this before, it's proven to be a lot of work maintaining it in the face of other versions. I'd be willing to help out, but if we go down this road, you need to expect a lot of work, not just a single 'patch and release'.

Well, my idea of "fork" was to package Adwaita with a different name (Adwaita- LXDE-light and Adwaita-LXDE-dark) and patch them with the desired changes to not break anything in the original theme. Modifications would be the minimum to get what I suggested before, colors basically. I don't know how GNOME themes work, but I think that they use a base palette and the rest of the colors are derived from them someway. If it is more complicated than this, then my idea is not a good one, XD. And it may be a bit exagerated to create the packages just to change two or three colors. So better leave this for a better time.

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- I think that we should not use textures for the panel. If you make the panel taller than the texture height it is repeated and looks ugly. What I do is to choose "Solid color (with opacity)", selecting as background color the background color of windows in Adwaita, and then I add a bit of transparency to distinguish it from the windows background color.

- We can change the default Openbox theme. I did one that mimics Adwaita and gives visual consistency. You can see it here http://box-look.org/content/show.php/Adwaita-ob?content=162589. I like it

Thanks.

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- The default icon theme looks nice, but we could choose another one, maybe Faenza.

Maybe the GNOME icon set? Given most of your other changes are towards the GNOME default of Awaitia, that icon set should be rather complimentary.

Yes, GNOME is one of the possible elections. It is a complete theme, it matches with YaST icon theme, so all the look is homogeneous.

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I've been working on the packages too. They are all built against GTK2 to avoid GTK3 related issues. There was a mix of packages, some of them built with GTK2 and some of them built GTK3, and I think that it is better to build them all using GTK2 or GTK3. Talking with one of the developers we concluded that it is better to stick to GTK2 at the moment.

I put here some links for you to see the changes:

1. Default LXDE's look on openSUSE 13.1

http://susepaste.org/view/raw/82551363

2. LXDE's look (Clearlooks) after applying the updated packages from X11:lxde> http://susepaste.org/view/raw/34231871

3. LXDE's look with default Adwaita's theme

http://susepaste.org/view/raw/4316730

4. LXDE's look after the removal of gtk-dark.css in Adwaita's theme

http://susepaste.org/view/raw/53109704

5. LXDE's final look without textures for the panel

http://susepaste.org/view/raw/49952626

I'd like to hear comments from you.

While my comments above are a mixed bag, I just want to say I really really appreciate your effort looking into this - Please dont let anything negative discourage you from taking this forward, I think it's a great idea :)

- Richard Brown openSUSE Board & GNOME Team

No problem. The more ideas are proposed, the better the result. Greetings. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-artwork+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-artwork+owner@opensuse.org