MX Linux Forum

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.

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

Arnox wrote: Sun Nov 24, 2024 2:38 pm 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..

AVLinux wrote: Sun Nov 24, 2024 4:38 pm

Arnox wrote: Sun Nov 24, 2024 2:38 pm 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.

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

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.

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.

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 -> ???

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.

dreamer wrote: Mon Nov 25, 2024 2:41 am .....
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.

Okay, I’ll be the unpopular one.

I seriously dislike window themes that try to look glassy, glossy, frosty, semi-opaque, shiny, metallic or any other “realistic” effect. The same goes for icons with 3d or realistic optics.

If a user wants those kind of things they can go to xfce-look.org and its ilk and try to find something that works for them. It only takes a few clicks in mx-tweak to change the theming.

As AVLinux, asqwerth and dreamer have pointed out, it is a lot of work to get a theme looking halfway consistent just across gtk2 and gtk3. Gtk4 keeps moving the goalposts and actively making it harder. Qt6 may or may not throw another spanner in the works. I don’t know if any of the devs have the time or interest to invest in getting a “skeuomorph” theme working consistently. Personally, I know I don’t.

I would have a problem if such a theme was to be the default in MX. Why would you purposely make the distro look like some kind of Windows 7 retro thing? To appeal to nostalgic users who grew up with computers in AK-47’s 90’s-00’s and 00-10’s eras? Is the current look of MX really the thing holding back hordes of new users from using it?

So, now a personal polemic: A window theme and an icon theme should be simple, consistent and yes flat(ish). The MX-comfort theme is an excellent example. Papirus icons are an excellent example. “Realistic” effects are an unnecessary distraction. Windows 8 only gets a bad rap as the precursor of all evil through of a combination of the stupid way they implemented the windows menu as a full screen and conservative backlash against the shock of the new. Theming-wise Windows 10-11 does a lot right.

As a final note: I’ve been spending my hobby time fiddling with a variation of the comfort theme. Sorry “skeuomorph” fans, if it ever sees the light of day you’re probably not going to be enamoured with it

Disclaimer: These are my personal thoughts and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of MX-Linux in general.

Why would you purposely make the distro look like some kind of Windows 7 retro thing?

+1,000

@Melber I was trying to be polite and careful with my words, heh heh. But I agree with most of what you say.

Except that for my own personal use, I am quite happy, while in Plasma desktop, to enjoy 3D-ish window decorations, and fancy translucent blur effects in Konsole and the desktop/kvantum themes.

@asqwerth I thought my response was reasonably polite. Apologies if anyone thought it wasn't.

Users are free to uglify MX however they want.
I just disagree with the idea of MX pre-uglifying it for them.

fluxbox has left the chat

Fluxbox turns up at the party and says “hey everyone, check out at all these cool styles I brought along with me...”

Everyone else: ***awkward silence***

Melber wrote: Mon Nov 25, 2024 5:32 am So, now a personal polemic: A window theme and an icon theme should be simple, consistent and yes flat(ish). The MX-comfort theme is an excellent example. Papirus icons are an excellent example. “Realistic” effects are an unnecessary distraction. Windows 8 only gets a bad rap as the precursor of all evil through of a combination of the stupid way they implemented the windows menu as a full screen and conservative backlash against the shock of the new. Theming-wise Windows 10-11 does a lot right.

As a final note: I’ve been spending my hobby time fiddling with a variation of the comfort theme. Sorry “skeuomorph” fans, if it ever sees the light of day you’re probably not going to be enamoured with it

Disclaimer: These are my personal thoughts and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of MX-Linux in general.

I'm so agree with Melber's this opinion...
People have any one own favorites, but MX should be for everyone. Desirable universal design for the MX design (flat simple Use Interface, in other words current MX design) I think.

Disclaimer: These are my personal thoughts and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of MX-Linux in general.

Melber wrote: Mon Nov 25, 2024 5:32 am
So, now a personal polemic: A window theme and an icon theme should be simple, consistent and yes flat(ish). The MX-comfort theme is an excellent example. Papirus icons are an excellent example. “Realistic” effects are an unnecessary distraction. Windows 8 only gets a bad rap as the precursor of all evil through of a combination of the stupid way they implemented the windows menu as a full screen and conservative backlash against the shock of the new. Theming-wise Windows 10-11 does a lot right.

As a Linux User and Distributor who relies increasingly on Windows (10) for various dedicated Video apps I find it amusing that on Windows there are a multitude of programs I use (some 20+ years old) and they appear radically different in their UI presentations and when I used only Windows it didn't even cross my mind that this was a problem that needed solving.. This program looked like this and that program looked like that and as long as it was productive software who cared? Then on Linux where the whole UI toolkit thing is UTTER anarchic madness suddenly it is one of the highest priorities for every UI from every disparate toolkit to appear identical... I can see if it was easy then some people dabbling with it, but it is not easy at all and has become a cottage industry writing apps to make apps to look like other apps. I think this is why things like Gnome/libadwaita and even commercial platforms like Android are starting to see this is as too much of a diversion and esoteric concern and have stopped playing ball and now have an "our device is presented like this" type of attitude. I don't think Gnome or the new Cosmic DE are going to go backward to caring too much about uniformity across apps and 'big' Linux seems to be somewhat trending back to the Windows way of presenting the OS infrastructure and letting the apps look after themselves.

As @asqwerth mentioned if color palettes are adopted this will close some of the gap without having to go beyond skin deep. KDE does this well and I've found palettes useful on Enlightenment as well... While I'm mentioning it nobody does skeumorphic better (or worse depending on your viewpoint) than the classic E-16 and E-17 'Dark' theme combined with E-17 GTK revolved...lol

I personally like both flat and skeu-o if they are presented well.. To me it's an art to pull any look together and I appreciate the vision that goes into both just like I can enjoy good jazz and good hip hop..

Melber wrote: Mon Nov 25, 2024 11:11 am Fluxbox turns up at the party and says “hey everyone, check out at all these cool styles I brought along with me...”

Everyone else: ***awkward silence***

I downloaded all the styles (500+) that are available from tenr.de three years ago just in case the site ever goes down.

@Melber I think you are spot on, and I think a lot of people are better off with themes and eye candy that doesnt push their graphics too.

But, there are those of us that enjoy shadows and 'glass' and shiny. One of the ***best*** things I have found with MX is that it is NOT hard at all to add the eye candy.. and the base that is delivered currently is pretty dang good for building on it.

One of my long term goals is to build the theme, icons and windows that I love.. and I am half way there on xfce.. my next round is all about the window shading and bringing more custom into it.

In my opinion ... people differ with all aspects of what they like and having SUCH a good base to start off with is the bomb! We have a jewel here, and if the dev's keep on the path they are on.. we have the ability to tweak it all up and take it where we ( individuals ) want it to go.

AVLinux wrote: Mon Nov 25, 2024 11:41 am ...

As @asqwerth mentioned if color palettes are adopted this will close some of the gap without having to go beyond skin deep. KDE does this well and I've found palettes useful on Enlightenment as well... While I'm mentioning it nobody does skeumorphic better (or worse depending on your viewpoint) than the classic E-16 and E-17 'Dark' theme combined with E-17 GTK revolved...lol

....

Now if only XFCE could also add the ability to simply apply a colour scheme onto -- or at the very least, change the accent colour of -- a base light and dark theme!

Melber wrote: Mon Nov 25, 2024 5:32 am Okay, I’ll be the unpopular one.

I seriously dislike window themes that try to look glassy, glossy, frosty, semi-opaque, shiny, metallic or any other “realistic” effect. The same goes for icons with 3d or realistic optics.

If a user wants those kind of things they can go to xfce-look.org and its ilk and try to find something that works for them. It only takes a few clicks in mx-tweak to change the theming.

As AVLinux, asqwerth and dreamer have pointed out, it is a lot of work to get a theme looking halfway consistent just across gtk2 and gtk3. Gtk4 keeps moving the goalposts and actively making it harder. Qt6 may or may not throw another spanner in the works. I don’t know if any of the devs have the time or interest to invest in getting a “skeuomorph” theme working consistently. Personally, I know I don’t.

I would have a problem if such a theme was to be the default in MX. Why would you purposely make the distro look like some kind of Windows 7 retro thing? To appeal to nostalgic users who grew up with computers in AK-47’s 90’s-00’s and 00-10’s eras? Is the current look of MX really the thing holding back hordes of new users from using it?

So, now a personal polemic: A window theme and an icon theme should be simple, consistent and yes flat(ish). The MX-comfort theme is an excellent example. Papirus icons are an excellent example. “Realistic” effects are an unnecessary distraction. Windows 8 only gets a bad rap as the precursor of all evil through of a combination of the stupid way they implemented the windows menu as a full screen and conservative backlash against the shock of the new. Theming-wise Windows 10-11 does a lot right.

As a final note: I’ve been spending my hobby time fiddling with a variation of the comfort theme. Sorry “skeuomorph” fans, if it ever sees the light of day you’re probably not going to be enamoured with it

Disclaimer: These are my personal thoughts and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of MX-Linux in general.

Hm... It looks like the devs aren't as united on this as I would have hoped...

Melber wrote: Mon Nov 25, 2024 5:32 am If a user wants those kind of things they can go to xfce-look.org and its ilk and try to find something that works for them. It only takes a few clicks in mx-tweak to change the theming.

Yes, but the issue isn't that these themes aren't available for other users. The issue is how we present the distro to new users. And yes, I have heard a few complaints about MX looking boring and samey in the past. I remember just a bit in the past as well where people got really excited about both Garuda and especially Deepin partly because of their bold, colorful, and sometimes, yes, glassy choices for theming. There's also Q4OS with their XP-esque Trinity desktop which turned a few heads. For us to have the option of all of that but choose instead to just go back to a full flat theme with absolutely nothing setting it apart is just... I'm sorry, man, but looking at grey flat color squares with maybe rounded corners doesn't exactly excite me visually, you know? Presentation is important when you want to sell something. (Yes, I know we're not actually "selling" something, but you know what I mean.)

Melber wrote: Mon Nov 25, 2024 5:32 am As AVLinux, asqwerth and dreamer have pointed out, it is a lot of work to get a theme looking halfway consistent just across gtk2 and gtk3. Gtk4 keeps moving the goalposts and actively making it harder. Qt6 may or may not throw another spanner in the works.

It is work that I would be willing to do. Admittedly, I don't have any knowledge of how to make a custom theme for XFCE or KDE from scratch, but I will search and I will find out as much as I can in order to get the best look possible. And hey, if I fail, we can all go back to the usual flat design and not talk about it anymore for the next two years. Again though, I don't want to do all that work just to get shot down in the end. The dev team must all agree to this beforehand or we might as well just stick to what we've done before. I hope though that you guys will give this a chance.

Melber wrote: Mon Nov 25, 2024 5:32 am Why would you purposely make the distro look like some kind of Windows 7 retro thing?

Who said Windows 7 had a monopoly on skeuomorphic glass? MacOS also did it and also old-school KDE. Hell, you could even argue that Windows XP did it as well, but it was more metal and ceramic looking as AK-47 pointed out. (I actually wouldn't mind that look at all either and have no problems going for that look too.) Windows Vista/7 very often gets pointed out in particular though because people agree that they seemed to have pulled a skeuomorphic design off the best. I mean, if we're really going to go down this route about what looks "old", I could easily argue that the entire Metro/flat design is incredibly old-school design, going back to Windows 3.11. Ultimately, I don't think whether a style is "old" or not should be a factor in deciding the theme for MX. A style is a style. What we should be asking is, what feeling and style do we want to convey? Do we want to go with the super boring and super common flat design? Or do we want to at least try to stand out a bit?

Melber wrote: Mon Nov 25, 2024 5:32 am Is the current look of MX really the thing holding back hordes of new users from using it?

Everything contributes to how a new user will perceive the distro. Stability, ease of access, tools, performance, and yes, even UI and presentation. If we can make the distro look more visually appealing to new users, then why not?

Melber wrote: Mon Nov 25, 2024 5:32 am Windows 8 only gets a bad rap as the precursor of all evil through of a combination of the stupid way they implemented the windows menu as a full screen and conservative backlash against the shock of the new.

As someone who to this day still uses 8.1 somewhat alongside MX, I can definitely tell you that it was more than just "Ew, bad theming!" (Although it certainly wasn't good at all.) You mentioned the Start menu, but it was definitely more than that.

There is something though that I can't argue against for sure, and that is your own opinion. If you don't personally like skeuomorphic design, that's totally fair and I have no counter to that except to say that, hey, as you already mentioned, you can always change it in about 5 seconds.

CharlesV wrote: Mon Nov 25, 2024 11:52 am @Melber I think you are spot on, and I think a lot of people are better off with themes and eye candy that doesnt push their graphics too.

But, there are those of us that enjoy shadows and 'glass' and shiny. One of the ***best*** things I have found with MX is that it is NOT hard at all to add the eye candy.. and the base that is delivered currently is pretty dang good for building on it.

One of my long term goals is to build the theme, icons and windows that I love.. and I am half way there on xfce.. my next round is all about the window shading and bringing more custom into it.

In my opinion ... people differ with all aspects of what they like and having SUCH a good base to start off with is the bomb! We have a jewel here, and if the dev's keep on the path they are on.. we have the ability to tweak it all up and take it where we ( individuals ) want it to go.

Perhaps I should add some clarification to my categories. A lot of themes during certain eras were built around the graphics that were available at those times.
The 80's-90's themes looked the way they were because monochrome and few-colored monitors were the only things you could get.
The 90's-00's saw some more colours but because of how comparatively large individual pixels were, the 3D effects worked OK as they required only 2-3 additional pixels of border to be implemented. They would still work on modern hardware but wouldn't look the way the developers originally intended.
The skeumorphic glass/plastic themes became all the rage because somebody wanted to show off the effects possible with the graphics cards of the 00's-10's.
Then in the 10's-20's some old chap invented the smartphone, and others followed. Perhaps they realised they need to take a step back and not have the theme consume loads of graphics, RAM and CPU resources, because the flat themes should (in theory) be better than your application looking like a Fisher Price toy. That said, the Tango icon set is a decent skeumorphic icon set. The flat themes in particular can scale to HiDPI monitors very well and with little effort. Windows and MacOS have high contrast versions of their flat themes which actually look good.

I think flat themes are not bad per se, but we lost the definition for elements, the contrast of icons and text, and some brainiacs decided it was a good idea to make the situation even worse by implementing disappearing scroll bars, super thin (1px) window borders and other elements. This is especially the case for Linux, for example KDE thinks progress bars for Breeze should not contain any text, so it looks like a slider with text next to it. Although this breaks many applications, they don't care about fixing the issue. Flat themes were actually the first themes (80's-90's) because they even scale well on monitors with limited resolution, 3D and skeumorphic themes require extra pixels for the borders that flat themes do not need. But back in the day the flat themes were excellent in contrast and didn't do stupid tricks like disappearing scrollbars and buttons, low contrast "soft" colours, etc.

AK-47 wrote: Mon Nov 25, 2024 2:50 pm Perhaps they realised they need to take a step back and not have the theme consume loads of graphics, RAM and CPU resources, because the flat themes should (in theory) be better than your application looking like a Fisher Price toy.

They aren't. Windows 8.1 Metro I think actually consumed a little MORE resources than Aero. And Windows 10/11 are just... Yeah. And to really put this theory into the ground, Windows XP could run on a damn toaster.

I'm not sure why some people are now so scared of adding gradients to their icons, taskbar, and window elements. Also, I agree. Screw disappearing scrollbars and other modern design nonsense. A particular pet peeve of mine is massively rounding the corners of images. Just looks dumb though admittedly, I couldn't tell you exactly why.

@Arnox
The question posed in the thread title is "Should MX Linux 25 shift to a skeuomorphic default theme?"
My personal answer remains no.

Do I have anything against you and/or other users creating such a theme?
Equally no. In fact, go for it. If it works across xfwm/gtk2/gtk3/gtk4/plasma/fluxbox and you can find a complementary, maintained and comprehensive icon theme (don't forget you are going to need icons for all the mx tools) I would have no issue with including them in a default installation.

Just not as the default theme.

Since Windows 7 theme resources are available for every toolkit and window manager I wanted to post a screenshot showing kvantum and gtk3 widgets. I like the style despite being a little plastic. No dark theme of course.

The history of dark theming is pretty short. Dark themes were pretty much unknown to the common user when Windows 7 was released in 2009. The first dark theme I saw was a gtk2 theme called Dust. Demand for dark themes slowly increased. There was no dark theme in Windows 10 at launch in 2015 (only a dark panel). It was during the Windows 10 cycle (2015 to 2020) that a dark theme appeared in Windows. So pretty recent. When I started my Android Pixel phone for the first time it had a dark theme out of the box. Not a great choice during the day.

To be honest I don’t think theming is that important. The MX forum and the presence of the devs are important. Most important is the product itself. For me it’s the MX tools. I recently discovered that there is a GUI for efibootmgr in MX Boot Options. I was kind of blown away. I thought to myself: MX devs have created a GUI for every application I can think of. I have all the tools I want. That’s a strange feeling of completion. “Luckily” I switched away from official desktops to keep me busy.

What exactly is "flat"?

BV206 wrote: Tue Nov 26, 2024 3:54 pm What exactly is "flat"?

In the context of themes it basically means widgets, buttons etc. without artificially rendered depth, shadows, gradients, or gloss. Windows 8+, Android, Chrome OS, Ubuntu Gnome's defaults and things like Papirus Icon theme would basically fall under the general definition as examples.. Borders around widgets and windows are generally also very thin or absent completely.

BV206 wrote: Tue Nov 26, 2024 3:54 pm What exactly is "flat"?

The opposite of ugly.
scnr

btw. papirus icons do actually use very small and subtle shadows

I like to keep my desktop simple and uncluttered although I do have plenty of icons. Spacing and alignment is key and flat icons without fiddly 3D effects are better for my needs especially arranged on a flat background of suitable colour and tonal level. I have been using an icon set of my own design for some time now - I can easily add additional icons when necessary. I also tend to set a single flat colour for the desktop to maintain the overall clean cut appearance. It is a mistake to dismiss simple themes as boring; a flat theme can be efficient in use, giving clarity of purpose, remember the first rule of good design relates to function - the key role of a computer for me is the jobs it can do and I want clear, non-fussy icons to help navigate to applications and files which can be displayed on a non-fussy desktop. Everyone has their own taste certainly, choose what satisfies your own needs of course but hopefully the developers of MX25 will continue to make it easy to choose what suits us as individuals - one of many reasons I like MX-Linux so much is that it can so readily be personalised.

@Arnox
hope you've got an iphone...

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/06/ ... th-ios-26/

trawglodyte wrote: Sun Nov 24, 2024 7:01 pm 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.

Looks like Winamp

Well if some folks went to all that trouble to shade and render and glassify and illumination effect things why should they not be used?

Aronticuz wrote: Tue Jun 10, 2025 3:51 pm Well if some folks went to all that trouble to shade and render and glassify and illumination effect things why should they not be used?

They should! And they can be used by whoever wants them, the discussion is about what the MX Default theme should be not what themes people can use once they've installed MX. Once installed you can go wild!

AVLinux wrote: Tue Jun 10, 2025 4:03 pm ...
They should! And they can be used by whoever wants them, the discussion is about what the MX Default theme should be not what themes people can use once they've installed MX. Once installed you can go wild!

It seems a good option. Let the consumer decide ?

OP doesn't go far enough. EVERY operating system should have a skeuomorphic default theme. Flat design was one of the worst mistakes in IT history.

Thank goodness all those are just opinions. :) Please don't dig up old topics next time.

Eadwine Rose wrote: Mon Jun 16, 2025 4:57 pmPlease don't dig up old topics next time.

If it's old, why was it near the top of the topics list?

Because someone dug it up.

Guilty as charged. Sorry, I know better, just wanted to let OP know if they wait long enough the wheels of fashion will turn...but not in time for MX25
No further discussion required folks.
@Eadwine Rose @richb Lock away, if you see fit.

*puts on mini skirt*

Thanks, I will close.