Wednesday 21 June 2017

Eight years since first release and still no usable theme?

Well, let me be frank. Ever since gtk-3.0 I've been skeptical of it, especially of the theming aspect. In gtk-2 we had (and still have) many themes ranging from trash to excellent, almost every kind of taste could have been satisfied. Not so in gtk-3. First issue is constant changes to theming API, meaning that despite there being hundreds of themes, only handful of them actually work right :( And among them, I still have yet to find one that would work on my fairly usual 15,6″ laptop screen with 1366×768 px resolution. Basicaly I have two issues.


  1. Almost every possible gtk-3 theme has huge (no, not just big, I really mean the word huge) paddings and there are no working compact variants. Yes there are minwaita and adwaita-slim, but they kinda break Thunar's and Whisker menu's entry boxes, and they also aren't very slick (yes, I don't like proper adwaita either, it does not look very proffessional to me).

    So far it meant I had to expand side pane in libreoffice and had less usable screen estate left for editing (the first two pics, notice how in the gtk-3 version the sidepane is not only wider, but also needs a scrollbar!), but now inkscape is getting ported as well, I'd need twice the screen resolution I have now for it to be usable (the second two pics, notice how in the gtk-3 version much more buttons and entries are not directly accessible, and the sidebar is sooo huge and cannot be made smaller) :(
  2. Scrollbars. They're small, they're ugly, they're hiding and hiding badly, meaning sometimes it's almost impossible to select either last column or last row in a list or both.
*Sigh* You at gnome/gtk – why do you try to fix something that ain't broken? Why there isn't a single proffessional looking compact theme that I could use with inkscape on my laptop much like I could with its gtk-2 releases? Are low-end machine users nothing to you? Why gtk-2 themes worked actually better at gtk-2.8+ (and probably in any version sans the very first or second) than gtk-3 themes in any version you choose?

Do you still wonder why people are complaining?

Oh, and to end on a positive note: if someone points me to really working really compact theme that does not break xfce-gtk3/libreoffice-gtk3/inkscape-gtk3 a is good looking (no, not adwaita, but something along the lines of numix, greybird, menta, zuki*, etc.) I'd be very happy to change my mind about gtk3 ;-)