I'll be honest my experiences with themes for Linux have been quite poor. Even with good ones it works for some apps but not others and you end up spending all your time fixing edge cases or just dealing with some windows not looking right.
My solution has been to just use the default Ubuntu theme that ships with Gnome. I find that theme just seems to work the best across most of my apps with a few small exceptions, compare this to other themes I've tried where only like half of the windows look right.
I'm sure there are better themes out there and I could achieve perfect consistency if I dug deep enough and tweaked enough things. But at least in my case I already spend many hours on my computer coding and something like desktop theming is super low on my list, it's one of those things I just need to work because I don't have time to be focusing on that crap.
The same goes for my desktop environment. I am well aware that Gnome is not the best and if I put it enough effort I could have a dream setup with XFCE or one of the many tiling window managers. But for me it just goes back to not having time, the thing I love about Gnome is that even though it may be more of a resource hog, it just f*king works.
I’ve not actually built any themes so take these thoughts with a grain of salt, but my impression is that with GTK at least, most of the problems come down to CSS conflicts and libadwaita doing its own thing separate from GTK proper. It seems like a lot of GTK apps hardcode colors, fonts, etc instead of parameterizing too, which means they aren’t going to respond to theme changes correctly. All together these combine to produce a pretty spotty theming experience.
Things seem a bit better on the Qt side of things, but it suffers resolution scaling issues. Most KDE/Qt themes I’ve tried can’t draw correctly at non-integer scales.
Personally I think that CSS is actually pretty badly suited for the use case of desktop UI toolkit theming. It’s fine for one-off apps but quickly becomes a mess when it needs to be part of a larger more flexible system.
I'm working on some Gtk/desktop stuff and keep coming back to the Gtk/Gnome/Wayland bug trackers where the Gtk people are constantly stonewalling ecosystem improvements. Urgency notifications, disabling client-side decorations, themeing, etc. Stuff like "well some programs put stuff in the titlebar, therefore we can't allow a hint for the ones that don't". The Catpuccin theme is very popular and they recently threw in the towel, just for the Gtk port.
I don't know if Qt is better but I've heard about 0 drama from them... I made a poll on reddit though and for some reason people (users) still prefer Gtk to Qt.
> I don't know if Qt is better but I've heard about 0 drama from them... I made a poll on reddit though and for some reason people (users) still prefer Gtk to Qt.
I think this is probably because GTK programs tend to sport UI designs that are nicer/friendlier and less “designed by a programmer”, even if they skew overly simple. Qt leans the other direction, with apps that are generally complete from a technical standpoint but have a good deal of room for improvement in UI design.
Incidentally I think this is also why distros centered around GTK-based DEs still dominate.
I'm pretty sure the reason for Gtk being way more common than Qt has more to do with inertia (way in the past Gtk's license was more desirable and wasn't until Qt4 that changed, so any programs before or around that time that were made in Gtk remained in Gtk even after Qt4) and language availability. Specifically for the latter, C is much easier to make bindings for and GObject provides functionality for doing it automatically, thus Gtk is available in many more languages whereas Qt's use of C++ is much harder to both make bindings and do it automatically. The end result is that Gtk is simply more widely available and so much more likely to be used by someone who doesn't want to use C or C++ (the main exception seems to be Python which has official high quality bindings for C++).
The UI designs are just a byproduct, there is nothing about Qt that makes it hard/impossible to have Gtk-like designs, but since Gtk is used by a lot of programmers, when encountering a program like those you mention, the chances are higher that it is written in Gtk than in Qt because more programmers use Gtk than Qt.
(note that this is specifically about Linux desktop applications, i think overall Qt is used more than Gtk outside Linux)
I had a stint with KDE cca 6 months ago, Gnome couldn't do fractional scaling for X11 apps on Wayland, this meant my IntelliJ was unusable (this was fixed since). So I switched for a few months - Plasma was just super glitchy, panes randomly collapse into 1px width, flicker, etc. And the UI looks thrown together, apps have Windows 9x/thrown together in Visual Basic RAD vibe.
I think OP described it pretty well - stock Gnome is actually a nice desktop environment, I prefer it to Windows, does not even come close to MacOS.
TBH i haven't used KDE Plasma much. I used to like KDE 3.5, then KDE 4 was a disaster that it took several releases after KDE 5 to stabilize (i remember trying KDE Neon, supposedly KDE's very own distro that should be rock solid for KDE - and i had severe visual glitches). But the last versions of KDE 5 and KDE 6 nowadays seems fine. Again, i'm not using it much, i mainly use Window Maker (X11) and use KDE Plasma only on my laptop as well as on my desktop when i want to try something in a more "windows-like" environment or as a different user (for default configurations, etc).
I can believe that KDE Plasma still has issues though, it seems some sort of bomb was thrown during KDE 4 times in the codebase and it still has to recover. Though if nothing else, i do use KDE apps outside of Plasma (Kate, Krita, Dolphin, Okular, Spectacle) and they all seem very solid.
I think Gtk+Gnome and Qt+Kde are being mixed here and it's creating some confusion.
After a parent said that Gnome looked better than Kde I looked it up and found a number of posts criticizing Kde design decisions (padding, etc). I fully believe the Gnome people have a better design decision. But I don't think that criticism applies to Qt itself, necessarily.
It’s not a perfect rule but I find that Qt apps tend to resemble KDE apps and have questionable design choices more often than not, even those that aren’t related to the KDE project in any way.
It’s consistent enough that it makes me wonder if maybe something about the tooling is partially to blame.
To be fair, this one is specially to address the issue of a distro theming an app, breaking it, and that leading to a bug report at the upstream even though it's the distro at fault.
If a user is willing to take responsibility for breakage and such, then I'm not sure the devs are against theming as such.
> If you like to tinker with your own system, that’s fine with us. However, if you change things like stylesheets and icons, you should be aware that you’re in unsupported territory. Any issues you encounter should be reported to the theme developer, not the app developer.
The theming they dislike isn't the theming their users are doing. Their biggest issue is distros packaging their own theme, which can easily break an entire suit of applications without the user knowing it's because their distro decided to override the colours or mess with widths. As the page you linked says:
> If you like to tinker with your own system, that’s fine with us. However, if you change things like stylesheets and icons, you should be aware that you’re in unsupported territory. Any issues you encounter should be reported to the theme developer, not the app developer.
Theming Gnome by editing the default style sheet is akin to distro theming the web by modifying Firefoz's default style sheet. Tons of websites will break in weird and interesting ways but the user won't know to blame the distro, because they never touched user.css or even know it's possible to change the default.
The same breakage also happens on KDE and Qt applications (and more, I have seen Eclipse launch with black text on a black background when dark mode is enabled) but the developers don't seem to care as much, or are less bothered by the false bug reports. I've also experienced the "this doesn't look anything like the screenshots" feeling because of the theme I have applied, but at least I know it's my own fault.
More than apps liking to make custom interfaces, I think it’s more that companies like to try to make their UI into a brand, necessitating a high level of customization. If you look at the majority of FOSS software, even much of it that’s held in better regard by users (e.g. Krita), highly custom UI is considerably more unusual.
There’s not much that can be done about UI-as-branding unfortunately, but for everything else I believe that parameterization is the answer. Don’t hardcode colors, fonts, etc and instead favor framework-provided presets (like UIColor.systemBackground and UIFont.caption1 on iOS) wherever practical and that’ll for the most part make your app remain usable regardless of how the user’s themed their system, short of just using a badly made theme. This should be done anyway because it’s a huge boon to accessibility if the user can e.g. enable colorblind mode and have the reds and greens in apps adjust automatically because their devs were thoughtful enough to use Color.systemGreen and Color.systemRed instead of hardcoding #FF0000 and #008000.
Still looking back with nostalgia to the themes.org heyday of creativity...
There are a lot creative people, but making a theme work for all programs and people in all situations and edge cases likely requires a gigantic effort that seems best tackled by a corporate team with paid people giving one or two variants persistent attention and a pile of bug reports and fixing. You simply can't maintain a bunch of code or design that you are not using yourself daily, with problems you don't experience and can't reproduce.
I wasted an insane amount doing desktop customisation in the late 90's and early 2000's, time I haven't had for a long time. Luckily most default themes are pretty decent these days and sufficiently neutral to work for most situations.
They used to work better in the 00s/early 10s before API changes to Linux desktop environments. It's why most Linux theming sites seem to be stuck in that era.
Same goes for Breeze, default theme for KDE Plasma. I've tried a few themes and customisations for UI elements but always came back to the default because of some corner cases.
Desktop environments are inherently very personal things and so what one person might find great, someone else might consider unusable. Themes are a good way to add room for user preference without forcing the user to change desktop environments entirely.
For example, before libadwaita screwed it all up I used to like to apply a custom theme to GNOME to cut down on the egregious padding everywhere, making the UI a much better fit for non-touch desktop OS use on a small laptop screen. There were several themes that accomplished that very well.
I think it made substantially more sense in the 1990s.
For one, Gtk+ used to be advertised as a multi platform toolkit, with a port of GDK to Win32. Making Gtk+ widgets look like Win32 made sense for that.
Secondly, there were two groups of people using Linux and X11 in that era: one group who were exiles from commercial Unix, and another, faster growing group coming from Windows. For the former group, it was reasonable to want widgets to look more like Motif or Athena. The latter group wanted a more modern look, which could depart from old school Unix workstations.
In fact, the only change from your characterisation is that the toolkit has been renamed from Gtk+ to GTK. Here is an example of a current claim: "GTK is a library for creating graphical user interfaces. It works on many UNIX-like platforms, Windows, and macOS." https://docs.gtk.org/gtk4/overview.html
I think what has changed is user expecations; in the the 1990s, there was an expectation that programs should look like the native toolkit; whereas by now, it's even questionable whether there is a native toolkit on Windows (due to the range of choice, each of which a noticeably different in look and feel) and program-specific appearance is the norm on mobile and web applications. Nowadays, you could probably write a slightly customised Adwaita app for Windows and you'd get by more satisfactorily than if you wrote a plain GTK app and tried to theme it to modern Win32.
That's funny. Because I remember one of the changes from gtk-1.2 to gtk-2.0 (or maybe 2 to 3?) was to drop Win32 support. Which I at the time didn't like. We go full circle.
Gtk 1.2 did not really have great Win32 support, was basically a one man show primarily to get gimp to run on Windows. The Win32 backend took off after gtk2, there was more commercial push from Ximian to make it a cross platform toolkit via Gtk# as well. And it wasn’t dropped in 3 or 4, though it definitely has lost development steam as commercial interest in it and cross platform desktop GUI toolkits in general has flagged and consolidated.
I think I had it one major release off. It was probably the gtk3 era. I read comments on the mailing list that you basically shouldn't rely on Win32 support.
You're right that gdk2 ramped up Win32 support, I remember that now.
I wouldn't primarily base my OS choice based on the theme. There is so much more about an OS that is more important. But that doesn't mean that I can't like the look of the other OS.
there's cursor themes on linux and although you have to apply them in the usual wonky linux way, it's totally possible and it is independent of the window manager.
Of course some applications do their own cursor management so if you do it poorly your cursor hops around themes as you drag it over various windows based on the toolkit they use but then again, that's what we all signed up for.
Vertical integration is what is missing for a long time. I was trying to use Linux and FreeBSD previously and it is just a great time sink. Anyways, at least I learned a lot about Linux and it helped me got a job as a systems engineer years later.
Pop!_OS also has a built-in tiling window feature called "Automatic Window Tiling." It's integrated into the default desktop environment rather than being a separate tiling window manager like dwm. Nice to have something like dwm but without any fiddling.
And if you ever happen to feel adventurous, various Gnome extensions such as Burn My Windows can give you more than enough eye candy while still keeping the stock theme.
It's been a long time since I last installed a theme of any kind. In my past experiences, there was always aesthetic jank at the "boundaries" of themed vs unthemed elements. The "Fix for libadwaita (not perfect)" subheading doesn't inspire confidence - not a knock on this specific theme, just one of the hazards of theming in general.
My issue tends to be that themes that try to emulate a different OS can only do it in style, not in function. So while a screenshot might look similar, it won't function in the same way as the OS it's trying to be, which leads to compromises all over the place... and the aforementioned jank.
Gnome, for example, doesn't have a minimize concept. There is an extension to add it, but it's janky and feels weird. No amount of theming is going to change this, when the underlying system wasn't designed around it.
I could live with the jank and functionality if it would stay consistent over time - but you know it's going to be broken at the next GNOME update, and the next version won't just suck more, but the theme will also not quite work anymore and it's like multiple papercuts every time. Nowadays I have xmonad, xterm and emacs and a few gnome apps but I would replace them in a heartbeat if they annoyed me enough.
Breaking UI and functionality for no reason whatsoever, with no option to change it back, often with mandatory updates, is one of my #1 pet peeves with modern software.
in an alternate universe, most software would come with a core part that does all the specific work and the UI would connect to it with a fixed interface, and you'd be able to swap out whatever you want.
For GNOME, the bigger problem in my opinion is no option for a global menubar. Though there are similarities between macOS toolbars and GNOME headerbars, the former isn’t bearing nearly as much of a load as the latter is because Mac toolbars don't need to cover every function an app provides. Less-used/niche functions just don’t get a button and instead live tucked away neatly in one of any number of menus at the top of the screen.
On the other hand in GNOME apps, if a function isn’t used often enough to earn a spot in the app’s headerbar or hamburger menu it just gets tossed, because otherwise the hamburger menu becomes long and unusable. This results in less functional apps that are not as well equipped to keep up with growth in the user’s skill.
Ubuntu tried to use a macOS style menu bar back in the Mir days, but in my experience that didn't quite work. I ended up with some applications using the global menu bar and others using their own, adding two menu bars right next to each other when the window was maximized. For a macOS design feature like that to work, you need every application to use the specific APIs to integrate with it, or it'll just add to the GUI mess.
Ubuntu had the power to override APIs as they wished, a theme like this probably shouldn't do that, so I don't think there will ever be a stable theme that'll add a macOS menu bar.
Also, plugins (and themes) have a short expected lifetime on Gnome because it is tedious for a maintainer to adapt the plugin to the high rate of churn in Gnome.
IIRC GNOME also doesn’t have much of an official plugin API, which makes the situation that much worse. Plugins just have to tinker with GNOME internals and hope for the best.
The API isn't guaranteed to be backwards compatible, though, so you do need to occasionally update your extension code when a new version of Gnome comes out.
This is true for most Gnome themes, but I used Chicago95 (on XFCE) for 3 years and could count the "jank" on one hand: https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95
I remember the massive PITA that was running KDE with Gnome apps (or vice versa). The eyesore was unbelievable, and the official fixes required installing extra bridge themes, that tried to unify the look of everything, which of course wasn't perfect. This is better now, but even in 2025 GParted looks wrong under KDE, and this is sad.
> even in 2025 GParted looks wrong under KDE, and this is sad.
I did care a lot about this 10-15 years ago. Unfortunately, somehow I don’t even notice this anymore. In 2025, and thanks to web apps, everything looks wrong on my desktop.
It doesn’t help that I’m a developer and that basically not any single modern IDE / text editor cares about looking native.
Even Firefox and Thunderbird aren’t looking integrated anymore.
I cannot stress enough how much the nvidia situation pisses me off. I've had to convince colleagues that their bad experience is with nvidia drivers, not linux.
If your only solution is to buy a completely different version of a laptop to fix jankyness, most people would just say fuck it and opt for a macbook instead. It's a shame people dismiss linux because of that experience, but I cannot blame them.
Currently at least, it’s much easier to get a laptop without any Nvidia GPUs. I always tell people to get the boring machines because those will be the solid ones.
I know Linux since 1995's Summer, starting with Slackware 2.0, and UNIX since Xenix in 1993, have subscripted to Linux Journal from 1995 until it stop publishing, got most Walnut Creek CD-ROMs, and plenty of other UNIX stuff.
Yet, I run Windows/macOS as desktop between private devices and work ones, eventually I decided to start spending my weekends doing other stuff other than making GNU/Linux run on laptops supporting 100% of the hardware, even when bought with Linux pre-installed like on my, now dead of old age, Asus netbook.
I "only" know Linux since 1999 when i found Caldera OpenLinux on a magazine cover disk, but my experience is the complete opposite: i use Windows as a desktop whenever some work require it (at work) but on my private devices i always use Linux because i find Windows increasingly and extremely user hostile with a ton of annoying issues.
When it comes to hardware i make sure the hardware i buy is supported before buying it (e.g. i'm using AMD GPUs since that has the best support under Linux[0] - though when it comes to desktop GPUs, i also used Nvidia GPUs around the GeForce 980 times and didn't had any issues myself), so hardware support isn't much of a concern. The only time i remember having issues was with an early Nvidia Optimus laptop which required a custom kernel patch that wasn't mainlined yet. That was annoying at the time but not too long ago i installed openSUSE Tumbleweed on the same laptop and everything worked out of the box (even got a GPU switcher). I even connected it to an old TV via HDMI to play some games using Wine and an older version of DXVK before Vulkan 1.0 support was dropped (sadly the laptop does not get driver updates anymore from Nvidia - the perils of relying on closed source drivers).
[0] bugs notwithstanding, but even then, i still had more AMD GPU-related bugs under Windows when i used it
That Asus 1215 B netbook that you will find in endless remarks from my comments, now finally joined other netbooks on laptop heaven, was also bought with Linux pre-installed from Asus directly, and yet it did not prevented it from suffering from wlan connection issues with FOSS driver, having the AMD driver only go up to GL 3.3, when Windows side could do 4.1, or after Flash was gone, never getting VA-API working properly with either FF or Chrome.
As i wrote the laptop now works out of the box - what i describe was 12 years ago, which is practically ancient history in terms of software. The only issue is that because Nvidia only provides closed source drivers and they decided they do not want to support the laptop's GPU anymore, there is no way to use any newer drivers from it.
But that is because of Nvidia, not because of Linux. I could even install a recent distro on my mid-2000s ATI X1950 Pro-based PC if i wanted as that has an open source driver.
I'm not sure what the link is meant to show - or really what exactly it refers to (EDIT: or if it is even relevant, the post is already 4 years old). The AMD driver is part of the Linux kernel this days, you don't need to install anything. AMD has its own alternative driver if you -e.g.- need their OpenGL implementation, but pretty much nobody uses that stuff nor is any software tested on it. Basically unless you have some very specific software needs, chances are trying to install AMD's drivers is going to have both worse performance and a ton of issues.
I did see this happening with AMD too. AMD drivers had a bug around 2020 that newer AMD Thinkpads couldn't drive 4K displays. It was one of the reasons I stopped using Linux after buying a new Thinkpad T14 Gen 1. Half of the hardware outright didn't work. It took a good 2 years for them to fix it.
This is not entirely on topic, but hopefully interesting enough: I used to rice my KDE setup very much. It was like a hobby. I often tried out other DEs, other window managers, messed around with colors, themes, extensions, and so on.
I was unable to replicate my setup on another machine, so I always had e.g. my laptop "ugly", and my main machine pretty.
About two years ago, or so, I switched to i3. I have a single config file where I changed the color and the primary keybinds, and I adjusted the bar and the runner to be easier to use. It's two config files. I copy them around and all my systems look and behave the same.
They're ugly, and they get out of my way. I don't get to adjust anything, because more than 98% of the pixels on my screen are apps I'm running.
I don't see my desktop environment, I don't have to deal with it, it just works and I got used to it. I am incredibly productive on it when I want to be, and I can focus entirely on entertainment or writing when I want that.
Not a single animation outside of one's inside apps ever plays. If I open an app, it's the right one because I typed the name, and it opens instantly.
On windows, I type the name of an app, and right before I hit enter, the search changes and launches something else.
I haven't worried about GTK vs Qt themes even once since switching. I don't have window decorations. I just have my workspaces, my code, by browser, and I forget that I have a window manager.
I'm not going back for a while, and using KDE, Gnome, or even the Windows GUI, feels slow and clunky.
I made my DEs somewhat pretty but never got too deep into ricing. Then I switched to i3-gaps. But I still spent a lot of time configuring and comparing terminal emulators, shell prompts, completion, vim plugins, iommu/vfio...
At one point I got sick of it all and decided to switch back to Windows/MacOS, not configure anything too heavily, install tools when I need them, and use all tools as vanilla as possible. Besides not having to maintain all this stuff I also realized I could then ssh into any machine and not miss my customized tools.
> I was unable to replicate my setup on another machine, so I always had e.g. my laptop "ugly", and my main machine pretty.
> It's two config files. I copy them around and all my systems look and behave the same.
I recommend managing your dotfiles with git. This guide[1] helped me getting started, but I suggest writing a small script that you can wget then run on a fresh machine and be up running within seconds. This way it won't matter if you have 2 or 200 config files, mine also installs the tools I use, some built from source.
> On windows, I type the name of an app, and right before I hit enter, the search changes and launches something else.
This shouldn't happen. If KeePass, for example, is the best guess for an app beginning with k, ke, or kee, it must also be for keep, keepa, etc. I've never experienced what you report. Except if I misspell the app name; then it's plausible that the reaction to my last (wrong) keypress happens while my hand is in flight towards the Enter key.
I have the same problem on Windows 11. Every added keystroke seems to start a new search, and the order of the results is not stable.
It's not that terrible if there are only a few results, but if you leave the "search the web" feature enabled, Windows will complete your "keepa" to "keepass" and put a "search Bing for keepass" result right at the very top.
How often this happens seems to depend on system load and the quality of your internet connection. It's infuriating either way.
I'd happily never customize a theme again if there were any other easy way to actually pick the background and foreground colors on all of my apps. I like having white text on a black background, not a "dark" gray background and white text (and certainly not some off-white background with some dark but not fully black text, which I find even worse than just a typical black text on white background theme). I'm well aware of the fact that it probably does nothing in terms of actually affecting the battery life of my devices, and that dark gray is considered "better" from design perspective, but I don't care, because I happen to like the way the color scheme I describe looks, and I don't see why it should matter whether it does to anyone else if it's just going to be on a device that I'm the only one who ever uses. For whatever reason, this is next to impossible to do without rolling my own GTK theme (not even just using one that someone else had made, because I literally couldn't find one that just changed the background to black without having a bunch of other opinionated decisions on icons and padding and stuff), so that's what I do. I'm grateful that this is even possible though, because apps that aren't GTK (or Qt, which is also possible to theme) often don't provide any ability to theme whatsoever. With the exception of coding editors, I'm not sure I've ever found an Electron app that actually lets me pick a fully black background color, so despite not being particularly dogmatic in my opposition to them, I always try to run stuff like Slack and Discord in the browser so I can theme them with custom CSS. (I'm vaguely aware that this might be possible to do with the electron apps as well by running in some sort of developer mode, but I can't be bothered to spend a bunch of time trying to replicate what I already have working in the browser for their sites).
Expressing their argument as "don't use custom themes" just makes it less convincing when there aren't really any other easy ways to get the flexibility from them that doesn't cause any of the issues they cite. It would be like finding out that a friend or relative uses the same password for every site, and then trying to get to them to install a package manager by uninstalling Windows and switching to Linux at the same time. Mixing together subjective personal preferences with objective technical advice just dilutes the latter to the point where it's impossible to find it compelling.
I hadn't heard of this, but from googling, if you mean this (https://www.omglinux.com/gnome-accent-colors-are-coming/), that doesn't seem to do what I want. It doesn't affect the background color, and it hard-codes a list of colors that don't include what I want as my background color anyhow, so it wouldn't help me even if it did.
Open source is about taking back control over your software. The sentiment of that website is absurd to me. What I do on/to my own system is nobody else's business. (Though I don't really change much of the theming myself. Changed a few colors slightly and of course the desktop wallpaper.)
The sentiment still stands. I can't fault distros from wanting to theme their distro to match their branding. Like, Ubuntu wouldn't be Ubuntu without their signature orange and aubergine colors, Mint and openSUSE have their greens, and SteamOS' have their polished Vapor theme etc. And as an end user and a perpetual distro-hopper, I really appreciate that. I like the consistency that well-made distro themes provide, plus it makes you feel like you're actually using that distro, as opposed to some generic Linux with a vanilla GNOME/KDE shell on top.
Sounds fine to me, but these applications are already open source. If you're going to modify and repackage them, at least update the links to the bug tracker to your own.
The consistency is nice and all, but more than once have I seen distro replace a "stop" button with something they deemed similar enough that didn't make any sense in several applications that used them. I've also seen themes mess with spacing, hiding button rows or stretching them in weird ways. On a glance it all looks nice, but when you're using them applications look weird and broken.
Themes are nice, but unless there's an official theming feature (like with the new Gnome accent colours) it's the duty of a distro to inform their users that theme related UI glitches are the distro's fault, and I have seen none of them bother to communicate that.
In the mid 2000's, I loved trying different themes. These days I just take whatever is the default for Gnome, which is remarkably sane, usually more comfortable than a Mac, and consistent.
Some themes solve real problems, especially for the visually impaired, but that's not the norm. It's a fun work of art, but the utility is always limited. More often than I like to admit, I was left with a broken desktop after attempting to uninstall a theme that didn't work well enough (or at all), and that couldn't be fixed by installing another on top of it.
There are more pressing issues in Gnome than to provide a stable theme API.
Pretty easy to avoid copyright by making your own icons then you are left with trademark.
I'm honestly at that point not sure if there is an issue you aren't offering a confusingly similar product. Mac isn't offering an icon pack they merely have one. At least they don't appear to have ever gone after Macish icon themes legally.
Apple regularly cease and desists unauthorized parties using their icons and other likenesses over the years. I’m not aware of an instance where one of those recipients have refused and went to court with Apple.
* It is nice, calm and frugal.
* UI is presented exactly as developers want it.
* No work for me. Searching for a theme costs time.
* I don't need hide Linux. Why? GNOME looks better than macOS.
Where theming matters - for me - is the shell and source-code, because readability is crucial and I want it nice. I also care about it on the TTY with screen.
(in any case, this particular theme uses exact copies of some Apple icons [albeit apparently redrawn], suggesting the author probably wasn’t worrying much about IP rights.)
7. The computer system of claim 6, wherein said others of said plurality of tiles each has a left edge and a right edge located at distances d1 and d2 from said cursor, and is moved to a position such that said left edge has a distance d1 from said cursor and said right edge has a distance d2′ from said cursor wherein:
d 1 ′=S×sine(π÷2×d 1 ÷W)
d 2 ′=S×sine(π÷2×d 2 ÷W).
8. The computer system of claim 7, wherein said at least one of said plurality of tiles is scaled by a factor of:
Surprising to see this up here. I used it for a few years and I do still believe Apple generally has better design than most gnome/kde themes. Gnome is unfortunately quite buggy and I've switched off since
The part of macOS I miss when using a Linux desktop isn't how macOS looks, it's how you interact with it.
• I miss the keyboard shortcuts. Not only what they are, but also the strict conformity macOS apps have to using the same set of keyboard shortcuts for everything. (Did you know that Cmd+[ and Cmd+] work as "Back" and "Forward" in the Finder; in both Safari and Chrome and Firefox; and even in the iTunes Music Store views in Music.app? Did you know that Cmd+Shift+[ and Cmd+Shift+] work to move between tabs in literally every app that has tabs — including things you wouldn't normally think of as "tabs", e.g. the sheets of a spreadsheet in Numbers?)
• I miss the Menu Bar. Specifically, I miss app menus in the Menu Bar. I know there are some themes with UI hacks that can trick Linux applications into disgorging their toplevel menu bars into some global faux Menu Bar — but that assumes that apps even have toplevel menu bars. Many Linux apps don't; they have top-level right-click menus, or top-level hierarchical modal navigation sidebars. And because of this, Linux apps also mostly just "have" keyboard shortcuts — toplevel window keyboard listeners. Whereas in macOS apps, all keyboard shortcuts are really keyboard accelerators for app-menu entries. Which means that everything you can do with the keyboard, you can also find in app's menu; the app's menu is an exhaustive access-point for all of the app's behaviors. And everything you can do in the menu, can be bound to a custom accelerator, or wired up with shell automation/scripting, or exposed to an accessibility device, or full-text-searched using the now-universal search box that appears under the Help app-menu. (Also, for those with not-so-tall screens, having the app's top-level menus pulled out into the Menu Bar means that if you 1. make an app full-screen and 2. set the shell to hide the Menu Bar when an app is full-screen, then you can reclaim the vertical screen real-estate of the app's top-level menu, with them just appearing — along with the rest of the Menu Bar — only when you hover the top of the screen. There'd be no sensible way to reclaim this same chunk of screen real-estate in fullscreened apps with internal top-level menu bars.)
• I miss the carefully-thought-out filesystem organized around bundle directories. Apps are bundles; plugins are bundles; libraries/frameworks are bundles. There are no installers, no package managers; bundles just sit where they sit, and then their Info.plist metadata can be auto-discovered by the OS (through Spotlight indexing, gated by Gatekeeper allow-listing), and registered with weak-reference semantics. (That is: drop an app that opens filetype X onto your computer — suddenly that filetype knows it can open in that app. First time you actually try it, Gatekeeper notices you haven't actually said you trust the app yet, and warns you. Remove the app, and the filetype associations automatically get purged — they were technically just a cache/index of the app-bundle's Info.plist, after all, so if the canonical association entries go away, the cache entries go away too.) This also means that macOS "libraries" and "plugins" don't have to spew themselves across half the filesystem; they both just bundle everything up and present themselves as a single file — one that has no default interaction verb, and so "tucks its protected members away", without actually being inconvenient to dig into, the way a shared object with embedded resources would be.
• A specific point of the above: I miss disk images. Not so much the ones apps come in — Apple themselves invented a better alternative to those with integrity-verified .xip files (with support, through Safari, for auto-self-extraction, and for auto-Gatekeeper-vouching when the archive is Apple-signed. Sadly these never spread to third-party support, and Apple themselves stopped using them in favor of just distributing things like Xcode through the Mac App Store.) Rather, I miss the deep UI integration with sparsebundle disk images. When I use macOS, I use sparsebundles for everything — they're technically disk images, but in practice, they just act like archive files, growing in size along with your usage rather than having a preallocated size. Unlike your average Linux loopback image, they're actually directories (bundles!) consisting of a bunch of 4MB "band" files. The "sparse" part is "sparse" like sparse-file support, but it works in a completely filesystem-oblivious way: the sparsebundle block-device layer notices whenever a given band would be updated to contain entirely zeroes — and just deletes the underlying band file instead. Mounting a sparsebundle that lives on a remote SMB share is the most low-latency, IO-efficient way I've ever seen of interacting with many small files (such as a remote git worktree.) It's no wonder macOS internally uses sparsebundle-mounts-over-SMB for Time Machine backups. (And they can be encrypted easily, too — not just with a custom passphrase, but also with a key held in a macOS Keychain — which doesn't have to be your default one!)
I'm not at all a Mac person, but this whole comment was a really interesting read.
Regarding the shortcut-listeners-not-accelerators things in Linux, is it really not equivalent when an app uses a fully featured toolkit like Qt that (presumably) has support for specifying the semantics of various controls?
Aside: I still miss the Unity desktop environment that Ubuntu used to have. It had its flaws for sure (e.g. poor performance and relying on a patched version of Mutter), but its implementation of a global menu was just superb. The ergonomics of having it at the top of the screen were great, and having each entry be searchable was a breath of fresh air. I've been happy enough with KDE Plasma for a while now, but would jump at the chance to have that global menu with search again.
All of that is technically possible under Linux. I think the biggest issue with Linux for macOS enthusiasts is that there are very few macOS enthusiasts who are willing to write their own window manager/composer/GUI toolkit/distro.
The keyboard shortcuts can largely be fixed, but many of the advanced ones are modeled after Windows rather than macOS when it comes to behaviour. The window bars will require a new (or old, as in Mir era Ubuntu) paradigm, which will require convincing application developers to use it, or for a distro to make their own alternatives. The disk images thing sounds quite feasible using standard qcow2 images, though you'd need a file manager with support for them.
I think macOS enthusiasts are generally quite happy with macOS, so I don't really expect a real macOS based Linux environment any time soon. This stuff requires more than just theming, the entire standard application stack would need to be rewritten, as well as parts of the input stack.
As much as I appreciate desktop Linux (particularly with Windows getting worse by the minute) it really kills me that these points can’t be fully replicated under it. All the DEs are geared for Windows-like or tablet-OS-like experience first and foremost, with a few niche oddballs mimicking unices of old. WMs are predominantly hyperminimalist tiling things. There’s nothing that reproduces a Mac desktop experience beyond the most superficial level.
Gtk menus used to have a feature where you could hover over a menu item, press a key combination, and a shortcut for that menu item was updated to it (and shown in the menu too).
It did lead to some confusion (if you accidentally do that while the menu is open), but this is only to show that technically, this was all possible.
However, "Linux apps" have really always been either Gtk apps, or Qt apps, or KDE or GNOME apps (yes, different from bare Gtk/Qt), or Fltk, or... Thus providing consistency has been an uphill battle, and distributors mostly tries for a couple core pieces: Gtk + Qt + LibreOffice + Firefox.
As someone who use sparse bundles a lot, I would say APFS volumes are better for most local use cases, especially if you want to have a different backup strategy.
looking like OSX isn't "enough" or "sufficient" or even really the point. Being self consistent about the meta-key mapping and operational interactions is. Being able to write something equivalent to applescript to emulate any mouse/pointer action. being able to RELY on keyboard mappings. tools which expose how the underlying system works, window/desktop switching, panning, relocating.
I do want to say that some things, TM for instance, are work mostly. There are quirks in TM such as eating all your SSD's free space to store TM history and the pruning approach which means things like df report what they want you to know about disk occupancy, and things like wear levelling/trim are necessarily hidden a bit, because what you see is not actually the total of what is being done.
Considering it used to look like this¹ it's no wonder why people (including me) were desperate to theme it. It took until the last two or so years for me to not care to do that because the default look and feel of gnome is now pretty good.
Still, I wished they offered some more adjustments rather than just a paltry selection of accent colors (you can't even select a specific color...)
I use it, and it's really very good and beautiful. However, I set everything to dark colors.
But there's something that really bothers me, and none of the fixes work: I can't get the cursor to work in GTK applications! It always switches to the default. It's not the theme's fault, as this happens with all the others...
To reduce an interface like macOS to its superficial appearance is to misunderstand what an interface is. The problem with "mimic" themes is that aesthetic similarity implies functional similarity, which no theme gets anywhere close to replicating.
Not really, you can tweak a lot with the right CLI commands, and the desktop experience is not constantly being messed with or your settings reverted, as is the case with Windows and its forced updates.
I used to want Linux to look like Mac OS X but the current Mac OS interface is just plain awful IMNHO. Fo me, I just stick to Linux Mint as it is (mostly) consistent from release to release.
Since this seems on point, I've been using mint the last few years, thanks to cognitive fatigue fighting gnome3 and KDE. What's the state of KDE w/Plasma nowadays?
Plasma has become very good especially after version 6 release with Wayland. I apply a light configuration to my setup once and then it gets out of the way. When I need to adjust something - I know I can find a corresponding setting, but I rarely touch configuration these days.
It shows the stoplight-style close widgets on the right in the first screenshot and the left on the later ones. Is that configurable?
It looks like the apps in the example are designed to use the space all the way up to y=0, so I didn't expect to be able to move them to the left, but it looks uncanny on the right.
There's a difference between convention and brand infringement. I'd be down to try a theme that moved the widgets to a familiar place, but showing the Apple menu on a non-Apple system is a bridge too far.
There are certain terms that indicate membership in a particular set like management, sales, HR that include for a greater understanding of the particular field and a kind of othering of the rest of the human species because one's field is at odds with the rest of the population. EG only sales entertains the fantasy that it is serving the population by connecting needs and products. The rest of us recognize the cat stalking in the tall grass.
"Brand Infringement" is one of those terms. Apple ought to be worried that Samsung is copying look and feel of their iphone because they are directly attempting to entice their customers away from their most profitable market.
A theme for 0.5% of 1% of existing users of another OS to make their environment look like Mac carries none of the risk. Finding out if our judicial system actually considers it so it would probably require 2 parties and hundreds of thousands to a few mil to decide.
A threatening letter might well shut something down to no benefit to anyone and at a cost of good will.
So perhaps disengage boring business mode and enjoy nice things. After all do you really feel morally bad about theming your own desktop as if you should be respecting someone's "brand identity"
I tried many theming configuration but I always end with small but nasty little bugs like white on light gray icons in some app or wrong padding in others. It is very hard to have a consistent theme across all Linux apps.
I realize that the gazillion of UI api on Linux makes it hard/impossible but I think it should be more of a priority.
I like it too, but I'm in the minority. Everyone always whines about it, but honestly I don't interact with the DE much. I run like 5 programs and switch between them. I just need a good launcher, task switcher and for it to look pretty doing it. That's it.
Sometimes I also open the file manager. Most of the file heavy lifting is done in the terminal, but, sometimes, the GUI is the way to go when you are not sure what you want to do.
It's not a matter of personal preference, Windows UI is objectively atrocious. Like what is this even? Why does Windows need 20 different ways to handle context menus? https://i.imgur.com/uLLiMxS.png
The "context" in "context menu" means displaying different options depending on the context of the UI/where you clicked, not having 20+ different ways to render the menus depending on the flavor of the Windows UI API you chose.
The middle "stoplight" button is 1-2 pixels higher than the others for me. Is this one purpose? It looks this way in the screenshot, as well, unless my eyes are playing tricks on me.
I used to be KDE nut until version 4 came around. I stuck for a while but once gnome 3 got a few years of development on it's back I started liking it more over the direction KDE took. Nowadays I just use GNOME and think their design and HIG works really well across multiple different devices. Be it a desktop with a big screen and tons of real estate for lots of windows showing up concurrently, running on a cramped notebook screen with mostly just a single FS widnow or two side by side or as a "couch" experience on my HTPC, with a great interface for a "ten foot UI" usage.
I've also heard some good feedback on how well it works on a phone/tablet context but haven't had the chance of trying that my-self. Perhaps the GNOME project is on the right track for converging all those computing experiences in one in a way that makes sense, specially compared to the train wreck that microsoft's attempt unifying stuff in windows 8/mobile was.
Disclaimer: I use GNOME on my main computer and on my small-factor, touch screen enabled, couch laptop.
In terms of usability and UX, there loads of things that frustrate me. They seem to be due to design choices that the dev team made and that they don't intend to change anytime soon, so I know I'm stuck with them as long as I stick with GNOME. For that reason, I also know that someday I'll probably just snap (no, Canonical, not you) and switch DE. But for now I don't have the mental room, energy nor time to do so, so I just deal with my frustrations and stick with what Just Works™. I have to use Windows and MacOS at $dailyJob anyway so I'm used to having a subpar experience with my OS.
On the touch screen side, they indeed nailed it, as far as I can tell. I do have the occasional driver issue, due to my laptop being an obscure and not really well supported model, but the UX is far more enjoyable on my laptop than on my main computer. There's still much work to do to have a unified experience à la Apple, or as Microsoft envisioned it at the time, but they did make Linux usable on small touch screens.
It feels like GNOME has a touch-screen first approach, which is good on one hand, and bad on the other.
If only gnome shell could be used on Mac OS, I would jump at heartbeat. I really can’t understand what apple developers had in mind when bringing window in focus which is present in the current screen it switches to a different workplace. Is it a bug or is it intentional is hard to tell with macOS.
I have been using this for years, and love it. The only real niggle I have is that some of the document icons are actually old Windows icons and not Mac ones.
Sometimes I wonder what the desktop linux experience would be like if all the total effort put in was focused on the unification of userspace instead of endless fragmentation.
I've never understood the appeal of such themes. If you really love to have an Apple logo in the top left corner, why not buy the original? What's the point?
When I moved to OSX from Linux for work, there was the choice of homebrew, which blasted crap all over /usr and screwed around with SIP, vs MacPorts that worked within the constraints of the way OSX works, including frameworks and versioning for things like Java and Python.
MacPorts just works, installs everything under /opt and integrates the ports into the OSX world, including things like launchctl services etc.
It seems better built and based on the solid BSD ports architecture.
Also, brew broke my machine a vouple times too many. It’s there, installed, but nothing it does is in the PATH. I keep it because I need to help other engineers who bet their machines on it behaving well.
I've tried using a mac for work a year or so ago and the keyboard alone drove me crazy, constantly making mistakes and activating the wrong shortcuts. I wished they had IBM-ified their keyboard back when they went with Intel...
There are many better keyboards around, Apple only recently introduced a non-glossy screen option, and by going with a competitor, you can avoid sharp edges on a palmrest.
Yes, you can experience actual pain by using Apple hardware.
My solution has been to just use the default Ubuntu theme that ships with Gnome. I find that theme just seems to work the best across most of my apps with a few small exceptions, compare this to other themes I've tried where only like half of the windows look right.
I'm sure there are better themes out there and I could achieve perfect consistency if I dug deep enough and tweaked enough things. But at least in my case I already spend many hours on my computer coding and something like desktop theming is super low on my list, it's one of those things I just need to work because I don't have time to be focusing on that crap.
The same goes for my desktop environment. I am well aware that Gnome is not the best and if I put it enough effort I could have a dream setup with XFCE or one of the many tiling window managers. But for me it just goes back to not having time, the thing I love about Gnome is that even though it may be more of a resource hog, it just f*king works.