Re: Default theme for GNOME

[Luis Villa <louie ximian com>]

On Thu, 2002-11-21 at 17:13, Jonathan Blandford wrote:
> I just added support to gnome-themes/gnome-control-center to view the
> accessibility 'metathemes'.  I'd like to ship GNOME with a nice set of
> metathemes too, including a good default. 

I'd /love/ to do this. :) 

>  Does anyone have any suggestions for what the default should be? 
>  Unless we change things, we will ship with Atlanta as the default
>  windowmanager (assuming metacity) and the standard GTK+ theme with the
>  awful light blue.

I have no quarrel with the 'awful light blue' but Atlanta... I have
issues with ;)

> WINDOW MANAGER THEMES:
> ======================
> Metacity ships with:
> 
>  * AgingGorilla
>  * Atlanta
>  * Bright
>  * Crux
>  * Esco
>  * Gorilla
>  * Metabox
> 
> Sawfish has analogs of most of these, though not Atlanta (which is the
> default for Metacity)

I'd love to see metabox as the default, personally, but I understand it
isn't to everyone's taste.

> ICON THEMES:
> ============
> 
> We really only have one icon theme currently, so that seems to be a
> no-brainer here.  Still, it would be nice to try to turn some of the
> older nautilus themes into icon themes and have them be available in the
> future.

Dave Camp has a script for this purpose, I believe. It's almost
mandatory (IMHO) that we convert the old nautilus themes over; otherwise
we've got a big visual regression for most users.

> There are, of course, any number of themes in art.gnome.org that we can
> add to gnome-themes (crux, thinice and mist come to mind).  Doing this
> incurs a support cost of course (though the engines in gtk-engines are
> not very maintained.)  It would be nice to also try to guarantee some
> level of compatibility from release to release.  That is, make sure that
> people don't lose a theme when they upgrade to a newer GNOME.

Crux has (in the past) had a number of crashes caused by the theme. I
have no idea if there are similar problems for mist or thinice, though
there have not been reports to b.g.o and I have used mist personally for
several weeks now without problems. I'd certainly like to ship mist, at
least, if we can get the maintainer to promise to fix crasher bugs
reported against it :)

> Thoughts,

In a nutshell: YES. :)

Luis