6 ms·

Disasterous :( For me, it has begun from evince and deadbeef, now firefox is on its way to follow. The problem is that I am unable to find any compact gtk-3 th

Disasterous :( For me, it has begun from evince and deadbeef, now firefox is on its way to follow. The problem is that I am unable to find any compact gtk-3 theme that looks like xfce-b5 theme for gtk-2. Xfce theming engine seems to be broken under gtk>=3.8. The only possibility is to recreate theme from scratch and pray that nothing would be broken when minor bumps again. Hell, I am unable to find any theme compact enough! Could somebody please help me to rule out: do most people really like that ugly-looking space-wasting bullshit like Adwaita (and other such nonsensical things mistakenly called "themes"), or is there some mysterious underground group guarding the treasure chest with human-friendly themes allowing only deserved ones in (how to become that one, btw?)? Its like being forced to leave my simple but consistent country house (gtk2) in favour of tall block building (gtk3), using the lift (smooth scrolling) as an argument. I don't need lift. tldr; Firefox won't be able to compactify its UI to the degree desired. Some users could clearly identify such situation as "regression". I am pretty much disappointed and annoyed of the trend.

anon4 11y ago
People seem to like it. Personally I don't, but... yeah. Gtk3 devs have outright said that gtk3 is not officially supported in any environment but GNOME3, which also worries me. On the other hand, this may be enough stimulus to make QtFirefox happen.
- voidz 11y ago
  Amen to that. I use xmonad, have no desire for gnome, so Qt would have my preference, too.
anon4 11y ago
P.S. and let's not forget that Gtk3 really really wants to draw its own titlebars and do its own window management.
- silon7 11y ago
  That must optional, surely. Otherwise it's a dead end.
  - nandhp 11y ago
    I believe it's optional on the part of the application developers, but it's not optional on the part of the users. (Although it only happens if you have a compositing window manager, so that's one way to disable it.)
- xpinguin 11y ago
  Do you mean client-side decorations? https://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2014/01/13/client-side-decorations-continued/ https://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2014/01/13/client-side-decor...
- bitwize 11y ago
  We're switching to Wayland, where client-side window decorations are required. So this is prepping you for the future.
felipeerias 11y ago
I would like to see a screenshot of that xfce-b5 theme and what you want to achieve. For reference, this is how Firefox/Iceweasel looks in my system, running GNOME Shell: https://i.imgur.com/VedZNiC.png https://i.imgur.com/VedZNiC.png I didn't crop it: that is all that is visible when maximised. I'm using tree-style-tabs for Firefox, and the Hide Top Bar and Maximus Two extensions for the Shell.
- igravious 11y ago
  What tab management thingy on the left are you using?
  - felipeerias 11y ago
    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
  - reitanqild 11y ago
    TreeStyleTabs, like felipeerias already mentioned seems to be THE reason why a whole lot of people use Firefox. (Others like me have a bunch of additional reasons.)
- xpinguin 11y ago
  https://i.imgur.com/wYVyJG5.png https://i.imgur.com/wYVyJG5.png Most gtk2-based (or dependent, in case of eclipse) apps I use at daily basis (incl. floating deadbeef settings window with older gtk2 plugin) side-by-side. I haven't included evince (gtk3) as I am using partially broken gtk3-Mist theme (not compact as xfce-b5, but still better than Adwaita). Nothing scaled, cropped or such. Btw, I use Classic Theme Restorer plugin, which also helps with firefox UI compactification.
  - lake99 11y ago
    https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/littlefox-for-firefox/developers https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/littlefox-for... This firefox theme makes the app's decorations really small. The icons look as if they were designed in 1995, but if there is a choice between slick and compact, I pick compact. On second thought, Classic Theme Restorer works just as well with the latest firefox dev build.
weland 11y ago
I was prepared to whine about exactly that. There is literally no gtk3 theme that, simultaneously: - Is not flat and generally grey or dark blue. It's as if everyone Apple fanboy who was rejected by Apple's UX department is now making GTK themes. - Is not frickin' ginormous. I know multitasking is frowned upon now that we have tablets, but I have a bloody 27" screen, I want more than one window on it at the same time! - Doesn't break in the next release. At first (as in, 2011 or so) I just blamed it on gtk3 being new and all that. But we're four years from that. This disaster seems to be intentional.
- xpinguin 11y ago
  That gtk3 maintainers position on backward-compatibility really puzzles me. May be I am wrong, but theming engine is a vital part of an UI toolkit - you need to represent all the fancy widgets somehow in a way appropriate to the user. Yet they keep on breaking things almost each minor, leading a lot of theme creators to quit. Might be the real underlying cause of our whines... Nevertheless, I don't see any other way than point out to the problem again and again, when each important piece of software is going to switch to gtk3. World does not stop on gtk3, there is Qt, which can handle gtk2 theme engines pretty much seamlessly (at least, from my experience), without breaking things at each release.
  - weland 11y ago
    Yeah. I still manage to live in a gtk2-only world for now, but mostly because I don't really need too many GUI programs (I can't remember the last time I opened something other than Thunderbird, Firefox, Emacs, and whatever pdf reader and image viewer I have lying around) but that's obviously not sustainable. Unfortunately, GTK3 (and, for that matter, much of the modern Linux user-side development ecosystem) is increasingly hostile. Frequent, often unwarranted changes (implemented through code of dubious quality), crap documentation (when it exists). It feels increasingly like developing for (and using) OS X or Windows, just without the good parts that we all secretly covet, like Visual Studio and Interface Builder and the MSDN.
  - EmanueleAina 11y ago
    > May be I am wrong, but theming engine is a vital part of an UI toolkit Arguably, for a big chunk of GTK+ users (me included) it's not. I care about the work on the default theme as I can't really be bothered to install custom themes. For me, the same is true for Qt or whatever other toolkit: either they give me appropriate defaults or I will probably tend to ignore them. That said, it seems that GTK+ developers agree with you more than you seem to expect: in the past few cycles they worked a lot on the theming engine, simplifying it to the point that the whole theme is defined only by CSS. Instead of writing clunky, complex loadable modules in C, they can just mash together some CSS and customize every part of the UI. This is a massive improvement over GTK+2. Of course, since the CSS can poke at the deep internals of the toolkit, complete stability cannot be provided: think of it as a user-level CSS that cannot cleanly cope when the target website changes.
wander_homer 11y ago
What's the problem with deadbeef? It supports both GTK+2 and GTK+3 interfaces - GTK+2 is even the default and considered more stable since most of deadbeefs developers prefer that one. Edit: Regarding Evince, there's Atril. It's the GTK+2 evince fork from the mate developers.
- xpinguin 11y ago
  You've made my day, thank you so much! Atril is really what I've been looking for. Regarding deadbeef, yeah, it was mentioned mostly on emotional basis. I had some troubles building gtk2 plugin on my home machine, good chances that it was problem with inconsistent building environment, yet no problems with building simple gtk2 apps or deadbeef gtk3 plugin. I haven't dug deeply though. At work, I just use slightly older deadbeef version with gtk2 plugin :)
  - wander_homer 11y ago
    I'm glad I could help :) If you need help with building deadbeef, just visit us in IRC (#deadbeefplayer in freenode) and we'll help you. There are also portable builds available, those should work on any distro.
reitanqild 11y ago
I for one like the current gnome themes but I can very much relate to (Gnome and Ubuntu) devs going off in other directions that I find weird and counterproductive ("breaking" (IMO) alt-tab, copying "shiny things" (dock) from Mac etc), copying other problematic (IMO) designs (single menu, hidden menus) from Mac.
flowless 11y ago
Try Clearlooks-Phénix https://github.com/jpfleury/clearlooks-phenix https://github.com/jpfleury/clearlooks-phenix It's quite mature and available in number of distros. I'm pretty happy with it since I've discovered it.
- xpinguin 11y ago
  I've encountered that while being on a quest to find perfect gtk3 theme :) Scrollbars are tremendous, which is crucial on tiling wm (see my screenshot above, for example).
- nycticorax 11y ago
  I second this. Clearlooks-Phenix is great.

anon4 11y ago

People seem to like it. Personally I don't, but... yeah. Gtk3 devs have outright said that gtk3 is not officially supported in any environment but GNOME3, which also worries me. On the other hand, this may be enough stimulus to make QtFirefox happen.

voidz 11y ago
Amen to that. I use xmonad, have no desire for gnome, so Qt would have my preference, too.

anon4 11y ago

P.S. and let's not forget that Gtk3 really really wants to draw its own titlebars and do its own window management.

silon7 11y ago
That must optional, surely. Otherwise it's a dead end.
- nandhp 11y ago
  I believe it's optional on the part of the application developers, but it's not optional on the part of the users. (Although it only happens if you have a compositing window manager, so that's one way to disable it.)
xpinguin 11y ago
Do you mean client-side decorations? https://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2014/01/13/client-side-decorations-continued/ https://blogs.gnome.org/mclasen/2014/01/13/client-side-decor...
bitwize 11y ago
We're switching to Wayland, where client-side window decorations are required. So this is prepping you for the future.

felipeerias 11y ago

I would like to see a screenshot of that xfce-b5 theme and what you want to achieve. For reference, this is how Firefox/Iceweasel looks in my system, running GNOME Shell: https://i.imgur.com/VedZNiC.png https://i.imgur.com/VedZNiC.png I didn't crop it: that is all that is visible when maximised. I'm using tree-style-tabs for Firefox, and the Hide Top Bar and Maximus Two extensions for the Shell.

igravious 11y ago
What tab management thingy on the left are you using?
- felipeerias 11y ago
  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-tab/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/tree-style-ta...
- reitanqild 11y ago
  TreeStyleTabs, like felipeerias already mentioned seems to be THE reason why a whole lot of people use Firefox. (Others like me have a bunch of additional reasons.)
xpinguin 11y ago
https://i.imgur.com/wYVyJG5.png https://i.imgur.com/wYVyJG5.png Most gtk2-based (or dependent, in case of eclipse) apps I use at daily basis (incl. floating deadbeef settings window with older gtk2 plugin) side-by-side. I haven't included evince (gtk3) as I am using partially broken gtk3-Mist theme (not compact as xfce-b5, but still better than Adwaita). Nothing scaled, cropped or such. Btw, I use Classic Theme Restorer plugin, which also helps with firefox UI compactification.
- lake99 11y ago
  https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/littlefox-for-firefox/developers https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/littlefox-for... This firefox theme makes the app's decorations really small. The icons look as if they were designed in 1995, but if there is a choice between slick and compact, I pick compact. On second thought, Classic Theme Restorer works just as well with the latest firefox dev build.

weland 11y ago

I was prepared to whine about exactly that. There is literally no gtk3 theme that, simultaneously: - Is not flat and generally grey or dark blue. It's as if everyone Apple fanboy who was rejected by Apple's UX department is now making GTK themes. - Is not frickin' ginormous. I know multitasking is frowned upon now that we have tablets, but I have a bloody 27" screen, I want more than one window on it at the same time! - Doesn't break in the next release. At first (as in, 2011 or so) I just blamed it on gtk3 being new and all that. But we're four years from that. This disaster seems to be intentional.

xpinguin 11y ago
That gtk3 maintainers position on backward-compatibility really puzzles me. May be I am wrong, but theming engine is a vital part of an UI toolkit - you need to represent all the fancy widgets somehow in a way appropriate to the user. Yet they keep on breaking things almost each minor, leading a lot of theme creators to quit. Might be the real underlying cause of our whines... Nevertheless, I don't see any other way than point out to the problem again and again, when each important piece of software is going to switch to gtk3. World does not stop on gtk3, there is Qt, which can handle gtk2 theme engines pretty much seamlessly (at least, from my experience), without breaking things at each release.
- weland 11y ago
  Yeah. I still manage to live in a gtk2-only world for now, but mostly because I don't really need too many GUI programs (I can't remember the last time I opened something other than Thunderbird, Firefox, Emacs, and whatever pdf reader and image viewer I have lying around) but that's obviously not sustainable. Unfortunately, GTK3 (and, for that matter, much of the modern Linux user-side development ecosystem) is increasingly hostile. Frequent, often unwarranted changes (implemented through code of dubious quality), crap documentation (when it exists). It feels increasingly like developing for (and using) OS X or Windows, just without the good parts that we all secretly covet, like Visual Studio and Interface Builder and the MSDN.
- EmanueleAina 11y ago
  > May be I am wrong, but theming engine is a vital part of an UI toolkit Arguably, for a big chunk of GTK+ users (me included) it's not. I care about the work on the default theme as I can't really be bothered to install custom themes. For me, the same is true for Qt or whatever other toolkit: either they give me appropriate defaults or I will probably tend to ignore them. That said, it seems that GTK+ developers agree with you more than you seem to expect: in the past few cycles they worked a lot on the theming engine, simplifying it to the point that the whole theme is defined only by CSS. Instead of writing clunky, complex loadable modules in C, they can just mash together some CSS and customize every part of the UI. This is a massive improvement over GTK+2. Of course, since the CSS can poke at the deep internals of the toolkit, complete stability cannot be provided: think of it as a user-level CSS that cannot cleanly cope when the target website changes.

wander_homer 11y ago

What's the problem with deadbeef? It supports both GTK+2 and GTK+3 interfaces - GTK+2 is even the default and considered more stable since most of deadbeefs developers prefer that one. Edit: Regarding Evince, there's Atril. It's the GTK+2 evince fork from the mate developers.

xpinguin 11y ago
You've made my day, thank you so much! Atril is really what I've been looking for. Regarding deadbeef, yeah, it was mentioned mostly on emotional basis. I had some troubles building gtk2 plugin on my home machine, good chances that it was problem with inconsistent building environment, yet no problems with building simple gtk2 apps or deadbeef gtk3 plugin. I haven't dug deeply though. At work, I just use slightly older deadbeef version with gtk2 plugin :)
- wander_homer 11y ago
  I'm glad I could help :) If you need help with building deadbeef, just visit us in IRC (#deadbeefplayer in freenode) and we'll help you. There are also portable builds available, those should work on any distro.

reitanqild 11y ago

I for one like the current gnome themes but I can very much relate to (Gnome and Ubuntu) devs going off in other directions that I find weird and counterproductive ("breaking" (IMO) alt-tab, copying "shiny things" (dock) from Mac etc), copying other problematic (IMO) designs (single menu, hidden menus) from Mac.

flowless 11y ago

Try Clearlooks-Phénix https://github.com/jpfleury/clearlooks-phenix https://github.com/jpfleury/clearlooks-phenix It's quite mature and available in number of distros. I'm pretty happy with it since I've discovered it.

xpinguin 11y ago
I've encountered that while being on a quest to find perfect gtk3 theme :) Scrollbars are tremendous, which is crucial on tiling wm (see my screenshot above, for example).
nycticorax 11y ago
I second this. Clearlooks-Phenix is great.