Should MX Linux 25 shift to a skeuomorphic default theme?

[Arnox]

I don't know about you all, but I dearly miss the glassy clean skeuomorphic look of old KDE's Oxygen theme and Window 7/Vista's Aero theme. I think it would also be a great way to visually differentiate MX Linux from many other distros as well. Everyone and their grandma is using a flat theme and I personally find such to be utterly boring and unimaginative. Now, I can look around for us and try to find a theme and icon pack that would both work well and be attractive, but I'd rather not do all that work unless the MX team agrees to this as well beforehand, hence, why I'm asking here first.

[Stevo]

For Qt, there are quite a few skeuomorphic Kvantum themes, but not so many for GTK. They just looooove Adapta, don't they?

[AVLinux]

I don't know about you all, but I dearly miss the glassy clean skeuomorphic look of old KDE's Oxygen theme and Window 7/Vista's Aero theme. I think it would also be a great way to visually differentiate MX Linux from many other distros as well. Everyone and their grandma is using a flat theme and I personally find such to be utterly boring and unimaginative. Now, I can look around for us and try to find a theme and icon pack that would both work well and be attractive, but I'd rather not do all that work unless the MX team agrees to this as well beforehand, hence, why I'm asking here first.

I agree with your sentiments but skeumorphic themes that are actively being maintained and are GTK4 ready are VERY rare... I use 'Skeuos' in AV Linux because they are a little skeumorphic but still look OK with flat Icon themes but even that project hasn't been updated for quite some time...
https://github.com/daniruiz/skeuos-gtk

In my opinion a project like MX needs to work with status-quo things with the widest appeal possible, themes that are actively maintained and are as suited as possible for all toolkits, anything else is a potential waste of their development time and will just tick off potential Users and feed the trolls. If you were to survey Linux Users at large my educated guess would be that a large percentage don't care at all and just use MX as presented, and smaller percentage enjoy the contemporary Flat look and look at more options to go even farther down that road and a very small percentage are tweakers want a Retro skeumorphic type of look from the past.. This is what Package Managers and the various Gnome, XFCE4 and KDE theme sites are for; customization by the End User.. This is up to us to self-serve, not the MX team.. I would guess they have much bigger fish to fry..

[Arnox]

I don't know about you all, but I dearly miss the glassy clean skeuomorphic look of old KDE's Oxygen theme and Window 7/Vista's Aero theme. I think it would also be a great way to visually differentiate MX Linux from many other distros as well. Everyone and their grandma is using a flat theme and I personally find such to be utterly boring and unimaginative. Now, I can look around for us and try to find a theme and icon pack that would both work well and be attractive, but I'd rather not do all that work unless the MX team agrees to this as well beforehand, hence, why I'm asking here first.

I agree with your sentiments but skeumorphic themes that are actively being maintained and are GTK4 ready are VERY rare... I use 'Skeuos' in AV Linux because they are a little skeumorphic but still look OK with flat Icon themes but even that project hasn't been updated for quite some time...
https://github.com/daniruiz/skeuos-gtk

In my opinion a project like MX needs to work with status-quo things with the widest appeal possible, themes that are actively maintained and are as suited as possible for all toolkits, anything else is a potential waste of their development time and will just tick off potential Users and feed the trolls. If you were to survey Linux Users at large my educated guess would be that a large percentage don't care at all and just use MX as presented, and smaller percentage enjoy the contemporary Flat look and look at more options to go even farther down that road and a very small percentage are tweakers want a Retro skeumorphic type of look from the past.. This is what Package Managers and the various Gnome, XFCE4 and KDE theme sites are for; customization by the End User.. This is up to us to self-serve, not the MX team.. I would guess they have much bigger fish to fry..

I think the hate against flat designs is actually more universal than you'd think. I know I've seen a fair amount of anger about it in the Windows and tech community at large and a strong desire in the Windows community to return to Aero. Another thing too is that every time I see someone use Vista/7 for a video, they (and other commenters) always remark on how beautiful it looks. I also saw a thread on Reddit where someone wanted to "redo Oxygen" for KDE and then a bunch of commenters got rightly mad because the person was using flat design and wasn't sticking to the original skeuomorphic design. lol

Now, as far as the MX project is concerned, it's of course very true that the default themes of MX are hardly a high priority concern, but on the other hand, if we can find a good well-maintained skeuomorphic theme... Why not go for it? Not saying I can find one for sure for both KDE and XFCE, but damn it, if I can find them, I definitely think we should implement them. Just my opinion.

[CharlesV]

Agreed... I love tweaking a theme to give it "a little more" ... maybe we can push something more into them.

[trawglodyte]

https://www.pling.com/p/1080259 <-- this one is working okay on MX 23.4 xfce. I'm not sure how much I like the blue font yet, but it seems to work okay.

[asqwerth]

This really is both a practical and a subjective issue.

Practical:
1. a gtk theme needs to be fully maintained because a lot of gtk apps are moving to gtk4 and older themes don't have gtk4 theming [check whether they even have a gtk4 subfolder]. Plus Gnome itself keeps tweaking its theming conventions/syntax [whatever you call it] so older themes may look wonky on your gtk applications.
2. is there an equivalent [or similar enough] theme that can be used for Plasma, so that MX can have a unified look across the different isos? The current theme creators often have matching kvantum themes that can be applied. But their popular themes [go check what is popular on KDE store] follow the modern look - sleek, flat but with lots of fancy translucent frosted glass [blur] backgrounds that work really great in Plasma [their gtk versions won't have blur, of course].
3. I believe the icon naming conventions in freedesktop.org have also changed a bit so it is good to stick with an up to date icon set. I think newer Plasma especially requires [or works better with] some things to be specified in the index.theme file of an icon set. Older icon sets won't have that.
3a. An icon set should be comprehensive. A lot aren't and for many apps they fall back on the default icon that an app developer came up with, some of which are either not great looking or don't match with the style of the icon set.
4. there are a few skeuomorphic icon sets I like, like Buuf or the 2 Sphere icon sets by ZMA, but they are too quirky to be a default set. Buuf is also unmaintained IIRC, and is very incomplete as a set. ZMA's icon sets are very complete, but they are also huge so may take a long time to unpack from the archive. How in line with modern icon naming conventions are ZMA's icons? Not sure.
5. Debian will likely be moving to Plasma 6 in Trixie. Again, how much will old, unmaintained Qt themes be compatible with that?

Subjective:
1. I find lots of the skeuomorphic themes very outdated looking, I thought Win 7 was ok but not exciting. The glossy window decorations were nice, though. Hated the icon set. So it really depends who you ask. I'm sure many may not have liked the Win 8-11 look, but a lot more [silent majority?] were ok with it.
2. I have also used skeuos-gtk once in a while. I even tried to use its script to generate a theme with MX's shade of blue for the accent/highlight colour. It's very nice and pretty modern looking, but has not been maintained for some time as @AVLinux stated. However it does have a gtk4 subfolder, so might still be compatible with gtk4 if the latter hasn't changed too much since the theme was last updated. Don't think there are matching kvantum or qt themes, though.

Of course, there is nothing stopping anyone from testing some themes/icons with latest Gnome/XFCE and Plasma to see how they work with gtk4 and Qt6 applications.

[AK-47]

80's-90's -> The icons and elements were made out of icons and elements (available graphics). Contrast galore.
90's-00's -> The icons and elements were made out of metal and ceramic (3D). Excellent conrast.
00's-10's -> The icons and elements were made out of plastic and glass (skeumorphic). Fair contrast.
10's-20's -> The icons and elements were made out of paper and depression (flat). Rubbish contrast.
20's-30's -> ???

[dreamer]

My random thoughts... Isn't themeing at the distro level mostly about app compatibility? In MX reviews I haven't really seen that many complaints about theming. From that perspective MX Comfort themes must be considered a success.

Personally I don't mind neither Adwaita nor Breeze which I think are the base themes for MX Comfort. I don't remember if MX KDE is a recolored Breeze, but I would think so because creating a Qt/KDE widget style from scratch would probably be too much work, with little or no benefit.

I liked the skeumorphic Windows XP and Windows 7 look, but today they are kind of outdated. Windows 8/10 were too flat for me. Windows 11 is perfectly fine because of shades of grey and translucency.

Today we have gtk3, gtk4, Qt5 and Qt6. Another factor is screen scaling. For proper fractional scaling you need DPI aware apps that scale themselves (often with included assets). I believe this is how it works on Android, Windows and also in video games. When apps ship their own theme/icon assets, theming is ”dead”. This is already a thing with many Flatpak applications.

You can understand how importent theming is to key devs, when Flatpak apps are forbidden to even read the contents of /usr/share/themes and /usr/share/icons. Not even read permission... and as far as I know no way to override it.

Gtk5 is said to support fractional scaling internally so this libadwaita thing and/or packaged assets are kind of understandable from that perspective.

Qt6 can already take advantage of the new fractional scaling protocol in Wayland. And I believe packaged theming assets might not be strictly necessary when everything is moved to vector graphics.

Unfortunately, vector graphics and skeumorphic design are not a perfect match. There is always a tradeoff between compatibility and theming.

Linux is Linux so you can always use your own theming, but for a distro app compatibility might be worth more. I think Ubuntu ships recolored Adwaita and basically every KDE distro ship (recolored) Breeze. Xubuntu probably maintains Greybird and Linux Mint maintains Mint Y. My general feeling is that if a theme isn't shipped by a desktop or distro, then maintainers will sooner or later lose interest.

Since I'm using Cinnamon daily at 125 % scaling I have found out that only stock Qt Fusion style can scale Qt widgets reliably in Cinnamon. Next best is actually gtk2 style. I don't know why I had problems with Featherpad (Qt5) toolbar with Breeze or Kvantum (vector based). Maybe it's a Cinnamon thing, but I think it uses the same Qt5 scale settings as Qt based destops. All the MX apps scale well (maybe because of lack of toolbars). As a user I'm done tinkering with gtk.css or the Qt equivalent.

I don't use KDE apps because of dependencies, but Qt Quick and/or the Kirigami style apps are probably only compatible with Breeze. Theming quickly becomes a rabbit hole when you stray from upstream. On the other hand, KDE is probably the only desktop that has a really active theming community. But when I tried the Breeze gtk theme on my Xfce desktop gtk buttons became enlarged. So if Breeze gtk theme is working well for gtk apps in KDE, this wasn't my experience in Xfce. Nothing is easy if you want to cover everything.

[asqwerth]

.....
Personally I don't mind neither Adwaita nor Breeze which I think are the base themes for MX Comfort. I don't remember if MX KDE is a recolored Breeze, but I would think so because creating a Qt/KDE widget style from scratch would probably be too much work, with little or no benefit....

Thank you for your thoughtful post.

MX comfort gtk theme is based on Numix. However, it doesn't have gtk4 theming, so there are a few irons in the fire for the next MX.

MX KDE comfort theming is just a colour scheme applied onto Breeze and Breeze dark themes. Plasma is great for making it so easy to create colour schemes from within the Plasma settings manager itself.

I've also adapted the Kvantum Arc theme [light and dark] to have the comfort blue accents if people want to use kvantum manager for system wide Qt6 theming on a gtk-based desktop in MX-next (Manjaro does this for their xfce release). While it appears to work in Plasma 6 with qt6 apps [I'm testing it in my Artix+Plasma6 install], I've not tested it with any qt6 versions of MX tools yet .

Melber is also testing qss files that hopefully can be used with qt6ct.

.....
Today we have gtk3, gtk4, Qt5 and Qt6. Another factor is screen scaling. For proper fractional scaling you need DPI aware apps that scale themselves (often with included assets)........

Unfortunately, vector graphics and skeumorphic design are not a perfect match....

yes, most modern themes, including icon themes, use mostly svg assets, which are scalable.

......
Since I'm using Cinnamon daily at 125 % scaling......

I don't use KDE apps because of dependencies, but Qt Quick and/or the Kirigami style apps are probably only compatible with Breeze. Theming quickly becomes a rabbit hole when you stray from upstream. On the other hand, KDE is probably the only desktop that has a really active theming community. But when I tried the Breeze gtk theme on my Xfce desktop gtk buttons became enlarged. So if Breeze gtk theme is working well for gtk apps in KDE, this wasn't my experience in Xfce. Nothing is easy if you want to cover everything.

I don't think Breeze gtk is even maintained anymore. KDE only cares about how gtk apps look when run from a Plasma desktop, and if you are choose "Breeze" as your gtk theme in Plasma, Plasma is able to extract the relevant colours from Breeze/colour scheme to apply to your gtk apps. So to them, Breeze gtk is not necessary.