On 2019-06-07 12:09 p.m., Adam Borowski wrote: > On Fri, Jun 07, 2019 at 11:24:03AM -0700, James Lu wrote: >> As far as I know, Debian mostly uses default upstream desktop defaults, >> so these concerns apply there too. Evidently some DEs (Plasma, Cinnamon) >> focus on looks out of the box more than others. > > Yeah, and when upstream defaults are not good enough, it's the > distribution's task to improve them, just like with any other package. It's > not a bugfix but integration issue, thus distribution is a _better_ place to > do so. >
Agreed here. >>> I also hate with a passion so-called "UX designers". Those are folks who >>> created Windows 8's Metro tiles, lightgray-on-white "Material Design" flat >>> unmarked controls, and so on. They work from a Mac while not having to >>> actually use what they produce. >> >> I respectfully disagree in the case of actual Android devices, but >> everyone has different preferences. > >>From your further comments, I see you prefer flat stuff, which I disdain. > And here's a case where both preferences can easily be made installable, > preferably even in default install. It's the maintainers' job to curate a > good set that satisfies every major side without being bloated. > > And which one should be the overall default, is a matter for a flamewar. > One that'd I greatly welcome over our usual incendiary fare. +1 GTK themes are very lightweight, much more so than icon themes. My personal collection[1] includes a bundle of both. [1]: https://deb.utopia-repository.org/sid_list.html#utopia-themes_all >> >> +1 for Materia (materia-gtk-theme), especially the dark variant. It's a >> simple, flat dark theme that preserves contrast without being having a >> pitch black background, more so than Arc-Dark and even Adwaita-Dark. The >> widget effects might be a bit much for some but I don't mind them. > > Flat! Die, heretic! :) I don't think I prefer *flat* as much as I prefer *simple*. Vertex[2][3] is my favourite non-flat dark theme, if you're looking for something like that. [2]: https://github.com/horst3180/vertex-theme [3]: https://www.gnome-look.org/p/1013757/ > >> Like most well-maintained themes it supports GTK2/3 and a plethora of >> desktops, as well as Qt5 natively via a 3rd party Kvantum theme >> (materia-kde). > > I have bad memories wrt trying to make QT use GTK3 themes -- unless that has > improved, GTK2 support is a nice thing so QT can use that. > >> My only gripe with this setup is that some apps like Firefox don't >> behave nicely using dark themed GTK themes only; things like buttons and >> input fields end up having black on black text, so I end up overriding >> it to start with GTK_THEME=Materia (the standard/mixed light and dark >> version) > > Yeah, but with the emergence of dark themes on Windows and Mac, such web > pages have mostly been fixed. This is actually a Firefox bug, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1283086 Most web page elements are fine - it's just forms and buttons that are broken since Firefox renders them using the system theme instead. > >>> * the default icon theme is fugly >>> >>> => Default to eg. faenza? >> >> I like Numix-Circle but I'm a bit biased there ☺. Faenza, Moka, and >> Papirus are all beautiful icon themes that the desktop's unify look and >> feel. But this unification makes some people upset[1], though I very >> much disagree with their opinion personally. >> >> [1]: >> https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2019/05/open-letter-stop-gtk-theming-distros > > I hate hate hate this approach. Especially, I hate "apps". I want > programs. The latter can integrate with the desktop, and don't have feeding > the developer's ego as the primary purpose. > I'm not much of a GNOME fan either! >> I use Noto Sans, which supports a lot of languages out of the box and is >> the default in at least Cinnamon AFAIK. > > Noto has one technical problem: it registers hundreds of font family ones, > making font selection dialogs useless if you have Noto installed. > > It'd be better if we had just "Noto Sans", "Noto Serif" and "Noto Mono" > instead of "Noto Southwestern Reformed Klingon" as a separate family. Fair enough; I'm not familiar with the technical decisions behind this. For example it seems my GTK apps can display Chinese text fine using "Noto Sans", while KDE/Qt needs "Noto Sans CJK" for it to not show as a square? > > Sub-pixel is awesome, but doesn't work right if your monitors have different > orientations (and with both code and almost all webpages being better in > portrait, you want one monitor in lanscape and 1 or 2 in portrait). > > Not an issue with laptops, of course. > Or you have a tiny desk like me and can only fit one monitor :( No one-size-fits-all solution here, I guess. >>> * CSD is still a thing. No, your special program shouldn't get to ignore >>> system theme, put controls in wrong order, miss some controls, not respond >>> to minimize/etc if it's currently busy, etc. Consistency not one-off >>> designs. >>> >>> => Install gtk3-nocsd by default in all desktop tasks but Gnome. It's not >>> perfect but it helps. >> >> Alternatively, many GNOME apps have CSD-free alternatives. MATE's apps >> for example are forks with relatively good feature parity: >> evince -> atril >> file-roller -> engrampa >> eog -> eom >> >> task-xfce-desktop has used MATE apps over GNOME ones for a while now. > > Yeah, I harassed the maintainers to make this switch myself. Would be > better for the originals to stop dropping support for non-GNOME, but if we > can't have that, forking is a solution. GTK apps with CSD look _passable_ with a decent theme, but I certainly don't prefer them. chromium is a strange personal exception though... > >>> => If default desktop at install time was not KDE, make QT obey GTK theme? >> >> Installing qt5ct lets you override the theme platform to use GTK+2 >> themes, or configure something else e.g. if your preferred theme also >> has a Qt version. >> >> One of the issues with hardcoding QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME=gtk across >> sessions is that it conflicts with user settings if they prefer >> something else.[2] > > Yeah, I have it set up on my old desktop, and just copied ~ over when > installing another, but that'd be inappropriate for this tiny Pinebook. So > I ended up with no integration between GTK and QT, and this is one of > complaints that pushed me to start this thread. > > This should be done by default. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I'm not super familiar with how sessions work, but qt5ct in Debian is packaged in a way that only enables it if no QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME was set previously. Perhaps a smart DE would use a similar strategy if it wants to set QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME=gtk2. I don't recall how newest Cinnamon does this. > > And I don't maintain (just use) GUIs so I don't know what's a good way to > obey user settings. Especially _my_ settings. > >> Another complaint I've heard is how many toolkits we should be >> installing in a base system, since adding qt5ct will obviously pull in >> Qt 5. We don't want it to be a hard dependency of any GTK-based desktop >> either, since that's not really the right place. > > Meh, I'd say it's not an issue on any screen-attached machine. This > Pinebook is at the very bottom, yet has gobs of space for any system files. > I'd need to start piling up _data_ to possibly exhaust it. I'm in agreement here because I use Qt apps frequently (VLC, KeePassXC) even on a GTK based desktop. > > Meow! >
signature.asc
Description: OpenPGP digital signature
