MX Linux Forum

I am currently using MX 16 as my main OS and testing out MX 17 on a USB stick.

In Settings > Appearance > Style of MX 16 there is the shearwater style. It provides a semi-dark appearance and it is nearly unique in that it shows dark menus which look great. The benefit it has over fully dark themes is it causes no issues with software like Firefox.

Would it be possible to include this style in MX 17 as it seems to have been dropped?

shearwater is in the murrine-themes package, available in synaptic.

Thanks for the pointer Dolphin.

Whilst I was digging around with Synaptic I came across Shiki-Colors which also has black menus. Here's the description:

Shiki-Colors is a set of Metacity/GTK-2+ themes which mix the elegance of a dark theme with the usability of a light theme, resulting in a hybrid theme.

This package provides seven variations of the Shiki-Colors (Murrine) theme:

Shiki-Brave (Blue), Shiki-Dust (Chocolate), Shiki-Human (Orange), Shiki-Illustrious (Pink), Shiki-Noble (Purple), Shiki-Wine (Red), and Shiki-Wise (Green)

I have given these themes a whirl and they are very good. I have found them in the MX stable repo. Would it be possible to add them to the Themes section of most popular packages?

Do they work with gtk3 programs like Archive Manager? If that appears with only the fallback adwaita white bar on top even with shiki themes applied, it means shiki is a gtk2 only theme. With more gtk3 programs around, it's not the most appropriate theme for inclusion in the curated list of Popular Applications in the MXPI

I have just tried the Archive Manager and everything looks OK - there are no problems with what is displayed.

colin_b wrote:I have just tried the Archive Manager and everything looks OK - there are no problems with what is displayed.

Could you screenshot Archive Manager with shiki?

Here it is:
The Shiki Wine style was being used when the screenshot was taken.

Exactly, shiki doesn't theme gtk3 apps at all so what you get as can be seen in your screenshot is the fallback adwaita theme.

Not saying it doesn't work for you if you're OK with gtk3 apps always showing the all white adwaita theme with blue cursor highlights regardless of the look of the themed gtk2 apps , but gtk2-only themes should not be highlighted in the MXPI, IMO. They are of course still available for installation from the main repo using synaptic.

I see what you mean now.

Just out of curiosity, would it be possible for the theme at viewtopic.php?f=95&t=43797 to be placed in a repo?

It would allow people who aren't Linux savvy (like myself) to easily install it,

That's something we can consider in the future, after checking with PaulXfce on its readiness for MX and Xfce, and we have to check his licence as well.

Meanwhile he has his own theme page at Gnome-look.org. You can see it's still in the midst of active development and tweaking. Latest version is 1.4 or 1.5 when the version he previewed here was 1.0 and 1.1. Whisker menu is now themed separately.

You can install it easily from there, and he has provided instructions on his page . He has supplied it as a simple compressed archive that you can just unzip/uncompress and save into a .themes folder in your home folder (note the dot in front of the 'themes'; that denotes a hidden folder. Set file manager thunar to view hidden files. You can create the folder if it doesn't exist yet in your home folder ).

Why don't you test his latest versions out and let us (and him) have your feedback and views in the thread you linked to? You could let him know if it's working well on mx even though his focus right now is testing it on xubuntu.