Themes

[Loban Amaan Rahman <loban enigma caltech edu>]

> > Pixmap themes are slow because the computer has to coninually do real-time
> > transformations to the pixmaps. For example, as the progress bar goes
> > up, the "progress-bar" pixmap is stretched to reflect this. Hence, themes
> > that consist of A LOT of pixmaps get really slow down your machine.
> 
> Is there any way to load them in as pixmaps and then transform them to a
> differnt kind of data once loaded?  I would imagine that a lot of new
> users will choose one of the "pretty" themes and find GNOME horribly
> slow.  While we all know it's the theme's fault, they don't.  They just
> see GNOME as slow and bulky.  Maybe a small program that would change
> the format of the theme once it's on the system?  It seems this is a
> real problem, because all the solutions that I've seen boil down to: use
> a different theme, get over it.

It's not the format. It'll be slow whether jpegs, xpms, etc are used. What
slows it down is the "image transformations" that the computer must do.
Your mileage in different themes will very. Some have large pixmaps and so
are sloooow, others aren't. "gtkrc" themes, however, use only one "rc" file
that specifies colors, and doesn't use pixmaps. Hence, those themes are
ultra-fast. The themes that game included with XFCE were all gtkrc themes,
which was one of the reasons people found XFCE to be "really really fast"
(i'm sure there are other factors of course).

My point being, there isn't any other solution than to "use a different
theme". The problem is that pixmap themes look so much nicer, and so those
are the ones people tend to use. This is why I feel themes should be
labelled with their type. Also, gnome ought to come with a good number of
pretty gtkrc themes to accompany the pixmap themes. XFCE had some very
pretty gtkrc themes that could be included. 


|       LOBAN AMAAN RAHMAN  <-- anagram of -->  AHA! AN ABNORMAL MAN!      |
|   Snail: MSC #763, Caltech, Pasadena, CA 91126, USA. ** 1-626-395-1407   |
|     Wired: loban@earthling.net, loban@caltech.edu, http://i.am/loban     |
| (Do 'finger loban@ugcs.caltech.edu' for my PGP public key and more info) |