tewha.net

Before my Beryl experiments, I briefly toyed with creating a new theme. I actually came up with something that I liked a lot. But upon returning to metacity I discovered that Edgy Eft has a theme that, while not perfect, is closer to what I want than what I came up with. A better starting place, if you will, though I’m still not very pleased with the title bars and will probably customize it at some point.

The theme name is Blubuntu. It is a pleasing theme with white and light grey backgrounds, accented with blue. In many ways, it’s exactly what I was looking for: A modernization of the old Apple System 7 theme.

You can install it with synaptic.

Here’s what I’m looking for in a theme:

• Largely off-white. I’ve seen some cool stuff done with dark backgrounds, but it just isn’t for me. The cream you see behind this post is about as off-white as I’d get, and I think it’s a bit strong. (In fact, now that I noticed this, I’ll probably fix it before anyone even reads this post.)
• Whiter controls. Most themes have buttons and controls the same color as the background. It all blends in together too much for my taste. The few themes that don’t have buttons that are darker than the background. I want lighter.
• Color as an accent. While I don’t require the background color to be perfectly grey, I definitely prefer an off-white (as I mentioned above). But small amounts of color as an accent are nice.
• Not distracting. Patterns, gradients and shadows are not for me.

Any ideas what qualifies? I realize I’m being picky here. I’d love to see a theme start from the Mac System 7 look, remove some of the patterned junk, and add a bit more color.

Been a while since I last updated, so here are a few random things I miss on the Ubuntu/GNOME desktop:

• Top menu bar. C’mon, the jury is not out on the best location for the menu bar anymore. It’s been settled for all but the most die-hard users of operating systems that get it wrong (which is, unfortunately, most operating systems). At least offer a top menu bar as an option. I don’t think this will ever happen.
• Custom date formats. I hate dd/mm/yyyy, mm/dd/yyyy, and so on. I want yyyy-mm-dd, which is actually the Canadian standard (even if it is infrequently used). I actually found several alleged solutions to this via google, but ultimately none of them actually worked.
• Alt-tabbing while dragging. I can alt-tab between applications, and I can drag between applications, but I can’t alt-tab while dragging. This is something both Mac OS X and Windows have solved.
• Stale forks. For idealistic/political reasons, up-to-date versions of some software are quite hard to install under Linux. Firefox and Thunderbird are great example of this.
• Expose. I know there’s a hack to add it, but I’m looking for something more seamless. I imagine it’ll be in a future version.