Re: Default WM theme settings

[Michael Toomim <toomim cs berkeley edu>]

Jens Knutson wrote:
>
> Thoughts?

Personally, I don't find Klarth to be aesthetically pleasing.  I think 
this is a very important issue, too.  I first got interested in linux 
after I saw a bunch of cool screenshots of pre-1.0 gnome (running 
enlightenment) on www.gnome.org, and wanted my computer to look all 
beautiful too.  Lately, I tried to get my girlfriend into KDE when she 
started using Linux (thinking that it would be the easiest desktop for 
her to transition to from windows) -- but she refused, saying that it 
was ugly compared to gnome and that she wanted "the pretty one".  Also, 
in the ongoing KDE vs. Gnome debates on public message boards, I've 
noticed that many discussions seem to conclude that gnome is "immature 
compared to KDE, but much better looking."  Aesthetics seem to be one of 
the few things that gnome has really had going for it, and it would be a 
pitty if this were no longer true.

Crux is decent.  It isn't my favorite look, but it's nice.  I don't like 
Klarth.  Klarth is boring, blocky, and has those annoying vertical 
gradients all across everything that make me feel like my computer is 
composed of Lincoln Logs.  The buttons don't look like buttons, either, 
but rather like nondescript decorations for the ends of the title-bar. 
(Especially when the title-bar takes on a dark, bold color such as you 
get with the default gtk theme.)  The button-icons don't mean anything 
to me: they look like "little v" and "big ^" rather than minimize and 
maximize -- and when you look at it all for a while, you realize that 
everything on the title bar (save the colorful application-icon) is 
uniform same-color ASCII text!  Are we aiming for a window manager that 
can be displayed in a videocard's text-mode on purpose?

I find it somewhat cool that it copies colors from my current GTK theme, 
but I find that for many of my themes the result is just ugly.  My 
current gtk theme (flat) makes the Klarth window-decorations pitch black 
(very hard to see).  The proper way to copy the colors, IMHO, is to only 
set the theme's *highlight* to the GTK color (like crux does), not every 
pixel that you can find on the darned thing.

Anyway, style is important.  People don't pay a premium for Apple's 
overpriced iMacs, iPods, G4 Cube's, etc. because they want their 
title-bar to resize when they change their fonts, but because Apple's 
products are all so freaking cool.  Klarth looks like my grandmother's 
old garden clogs.  I think it'd be seriously detrimental to brand gnome 
with it.

Mike