New theme suggestions for SpiralLinux 13 (Trixie)

[banzaigtv]

It's been a long time since I posted here. I like the Budgie version of this distro, though I feel that KDE Plasma may be the star of the next release. I think that the Numix theme used on this project is rather outdated and lacks the modern polish on the desktops here. I would like to suggest a more modern theme with GTK 4 compatibility for a whole new look. Other users can feel free to post other suggestions for nicer themes here.

My suggestions:

Colloid
Catppuccin
Fluent Round
Layan
Nordic

[geckolinux]

Hi there, I agree that the lack of GTK4 support is not ideal in the case of Numix. But I don't really like the idea of including themes from third-party sources that are not available in the Debian repos.

[geckolinux]

As for the Arc theme, unfortunately it has awful font color contrast:

[banzaigtv]

Arc seems good as a dark theme. It seems that Adwaita is the factory standard on most desktops and unfortunately, Debian does not offer much choice. Perhaps you could make your own theme?

[geckolinux]

unfortunately, Debian does not offer much choice

Yep.

Perhaps you could make your own theme?

That's what I do for my personal computers (I don't actually make my own, I tweak other publicly available themes and use the bits and pieces that I like). But that's not really an option for SpiralLinux, as I don't want the final installed system to have any dependency on me or the SpiralLinux project.

[marwenius]

But what is the difference between this and the integration of grub-btrfs or snapper-rollback? These are also two “non-Debian dependencies” that are nevertheless part of SpiralLinux.

I would understand if it were a matter of integrating an external third-party repository, but simply including a downloaded theme does not seem to me to undermine your philosophy in any significant way.

Or am I missing something here?

[geckolinux]

@marwenius That's true. I still try to keep external inclusions to a minimum, so if there are any acceptable options in the Debian repositories I would prefer those. Themes can eventually break as the Debian release continues to evolve, so it could potentially create at least some problems down the road if a downloaded theme were used by default.

At the moment Yaru looks like the least offensive packaged theme with GTK4 support, but I seem to remember from my prior testing that for one of the desktop environments Yaru gave it a light colored panel, which is usually poor for contrast and readability.

[janxkoci]

I always install Yaru within minutes after booting any new SpiralLinux installation. It may not be the best, but it's in the Debian repos and Adwaita-compatible, so it shouln't break apps (which is possible with Numix I think). And I know it exists - it's been a while I really cared about themes, back when Numix was still cool (2012?). Yaru has both light and dark variants (the dark variant is really the only reason why I care about it), and several accent colours, which is nice too. There is also package with icons I think.

PS: looking above, I can say I tried Yaru in MATE, XFCE, and Budgie editions without issues, including both GTK and icon themes.

[banzaigtv]

Yaru is a very nice theme and the legacy Yaru Colors GTK theme, while not in the Debian repos, offers a much better color selection. My only gripe is that it does not offer a Cinnamon, xfwm4, or metacity theme, so you're on your own on that. The theme was build specifically for GNOME. It works great on Budgie, too.

[janxkoci]

I know for sure Yaru has support for xfwm4, although it's not perfect - only the base Yaru and Yaru-dark have it (the orange variants) while the other colour variants don't. This means that switching theme was a two-step process, when I first had to switch between light or dark using the base orange variant, and then use the corresponding colour variant after that to get a fully working (non-orange) theme.

Both MATE and Budgie can do this in one step. Where is Metacity used these days?

For Cinnamon I actually use LMDE, which comes with nice themes by Linux Mint, so I don't care much about Yaru. Not to mention Cinnamon has it's own tool to install themes from some online source, so probably the fix is easy for most people (compared to other DEs).

[janxkoci]

Speaking of themes and visual style - can we also have some easy way to enable overlay scrollbars? Pretty please 😊

I've tried all kinds of hacks on MATE and XFCE, but none of them worked - the overlay scrollbars are apparently disabled in every config imaginable. I haven't even bothered to try on Budgie (yet), because I assume it will be hard too.

I guess I'm fine with the current scrollbars being default, if @geckolinux prefers, as long as there is an easy way to enable overlay scrollbars (some documentation would be a good start). I really don't like how the current scrollbars steal so much of my screen space even in apps like terminal 🙃

[geckolinux]

Hi there, I believe you would need to delete settings.ini from ~/.config/gtk-3.0/ and ~/.config/gtk-4.0/

[janxkoci]

Unfortunately, that is not enough. At minimum there is also a line in /etc/environment that needs to be removed/disabled, under that rude comment (you'll see when you get there).

After that the scrollbars will be disappearing and won't take part of the window for themselves, but they are still the same size. I guess fiddling with css somewhere could fix that..

PS: to test the effects of the changes I had to log out and log back in.

[geckolinux]

also a line in /etc/environment that needs to be removed

Ah yes, I forgot about that one.

they are still the same size. I guess fiddling with css somewhere could fix that

Correct, look at gtk.css in ~/.config/gtk-3.0/ and ~/.config/gtk-4.0/

[danzpaim]

Hello penguin friends. Your distro is very good. It's as easy as Linux Mint. I would like a tutorial from you so that after installing the distro, I can turn it into Debian, with Debian wallpapers, icon themes, and Debian's bootsplash.

I want to use Spiral Linux just to keep things in XFCE and Mate like in Linux Mint and keep the codecs among other things that Spiral Linux makes easy.

Thank you and happy new year.