Where can I get this theme [Popiance]?
Also, Stefan Eduard Krenn’s design is the most difficult, but (in my opinion) the most thought-out design. It would be difficult to get ready for 18.04 (really difficult), but at the same time, it would not be a bad goal to have and work toward (maybe over a few releases). I would love to see that happen!
Sam’s suru reboot icons are superb: https://snwh.org/suru
I always liked the look and feel of unity 8, it had a true ‘next gen’ feel.
Great initiative. I love that the focus is put on building a collaboration team and not starting another pointless design competition. And it looks like we already have very talented and enthusiastic people here:
The guys from United Gnome GTK theme, Pop/Popiance, “Finding Ubuntu” concept… and of course, others that I don’t know of. I’d suggest (as others already did) contacting Sam Hewitt, the creator of the Suru icon theme and more awesome stuff.
Looks like a Dream Team could be in construction… although mixing good ingredients doesn’t always give a good recipe, so you never know 
It will depend on how much they are willing to collaborate and even “detach” from their own projects for working towards something new. Talent is there, it’s all about collaboration now.
I don’t have experience in these matters so I’ll just follow along and try to give feedback when possible. I hope you keep the process open and we regular users can find a way to do that. Really looking forward to this!
+1 on contacting Sam Hewitt, he’s making a really good work on icon themes.
I’m really interested too by this “popiance” idea, it could be either a great possibility, either a great source of inspiration.
About Stefan Eduard Krenn’s designs, they are interesting from a design point of view, but as of theming, I’m personally not too fond of them. I get a better feeling from the Hot Charmander concepts… I feel that the coloring of it have some more “modern” stuff.
Personally I think that the “Ambiance” scheme of a dark-brown headerbar on lighter applications would be really a great thing to keep. That with a transparent-that-become-dark titlebar, it create a nice, integrated feeling compared to many OS, and it make Ubuntu stand out compared to OS X and Windows.
Hi,
if you ask me, I think the best looking theme is actually the default GNOME theme: Adwaita. More over, you’d need no work at all
I just want to clarify a few points in didrock’s original post.
We expect that a new theme will take a lot of work to get finished, more work than can be reasonably accomplished in a single 6 month cycle. So the plan of record for 18.04 is a two pronged approach:
First we take the existing Ambiance theme in 17.10 and spend some time getting it in good shape for 18.04. This will need input from you, calling out the things which you think need fixing. We will also spend some time with our design team to get their help as well. As Didier says, this meeting is already scheduled, so please give your feedback on that soon. That’s probably best dealt with in a separate thread though. So, let’s use this one: https://community.ubuntu.com/t/ambiance-gnome-theme-bugbears-and-what-can-be-done-about-them/1637
Meanwhile, we as the community will be working on a new theme. This can be made available to 18.04 users via a package in Universe. If it’s considered “finished” by 18.04 then we can also look to move it in to main. I don’t want to discourage anyone from contributing to the community theme, but it will be a lot of work and is unlikely to get done in 6 months.
Let’s not rush it, let’s get it perfect. And while that happens, let’s get Ambiance smartened up as well.
The biggest problem with GNOME is that it was designed from the ground to be UX/UI disaster and *just change theme* will not help. You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig.
I would recommend to fix some problems with Ambiance(tweak gradients, make context menus smaller, etc).
Hi, I’m the author of Materia GTK/Shell theme and I’d like to share my little idea.
I know there’re already wonderful (third-party) themes related to Ubuntu, but I tried creating a theme with a slightly different approach.
Material Ubuntu (currently I called) is a theme forked from Materia. Most colors are based on the Ubuntu colour palette, and its color scheme is inspired by Ambiance and Radiance. (FYI, Materia is directly based on Adwaita, so the theme can easily follow the upstream changes.)
Like this theme, using a color scheme similar to Ambiance/Radiance would make it easier for users to migrate.
I hope this theme or the color scheme will help the new theme!
With all due respect of course, but this is a different approach than what has been done for the GNOME Shell Theme.
Just like with the Shell Theme, I think there should be a sense of urgency with the GTK Theme as well.
A modern looking GTK2 and GTK3 theme that has light and dark variants (dark for Totem for instance) is long overdue. Moreover, there already are good themes to start working from.
Why not just think about switching to Arc, United GNOME or Adwaita, after which we can start tweaking the colours, etc.?
Same goes for the Icon Theme. Adwaita is modern, ready, complete, upstream GNOME. Why not take the leap?
This is my opinion of course, but I would strongly suggest to reconsider.
I completely agree with the points on using Arc or United Gnome as base though not with Adwaita icons, they look old same as Ubuntu Mono Dark icons, I find Numix icons (especially in their circle version) to be both modern, well designed and easily readable. Suru icon theme by Sam Hewitt looks awesome as well, I think his work or blend with Numix would look fantastic, Numix Square/Circle icons are already complete, Suru is on the way of getting there, I think that in 6 months the authors of Numix and Suru icons would easily be able to make the most out of both icon themes and make a new icon theme for Ubuntu. There are also visual similarities between Suru and Numix icon themes which would make blending far easier. As for GTK theme I believe Arc Darker or United Gnome Darker with modified colors to fit more with Ambiance/Unity 8/Suru style would look great and could be done relatively fast.
Also I hope someone will want to copy Charmander concept, it looks beautiful 
Numix icons could be made to look like suru, to have a suru shape. I think there might even be a way to automate the process of reshaping the Numix circle icon to square and then those icons could be used in a UI that applies Suru shape so crop the icon into it like it’s done in Unity8.
I have made a blog post in a way to offer people a direct way to compare some aspects of the most commonly mentioned themes (Adapta, Ambiance, Arc, Pop, United, also Unity7 and Adwaita). I have also put down some observations on what I think are important in a well designed theme, more than evaluating flashiness or how much like another popular design language it looks.
From making this comparison, Ambiance is still the best theme for Ubuntu and more complete and featured than some of the other competitors. The Sam Hewitt’s Suru icons are absolutely amazing as a visual upgrade all on their own, the impact is massive. Adwaita is really not that good, and some of its icons are brutally bad. All the themes have good and bad parts, and a few good ideas to borrow into the next default for Ubuntu.
In addition, I would like to mention that 3/5 themes (Adapta, Pop, and United) are Materia-based themes.
Can I also suggest, that whatever theme is chosen, that a Qt counterpart also be created? To create a Qt theme I strongly suggest using the Kvantum Qt engine. A Kvantum theme consists of an SVG file and a simple text config file. Kvantum already ships with Ambiance, Arc, and Adapta like themes, it is also (AFAIK) the only Qt theme that support real overlay scrollbars. Kvantum’s author is also very helpful. To ship a Kvantum based variant of the chosen theme would simply mean installing the theme engine, and having the SVG and config files in the correct place. e.g. if the theme was named ‘UbuntuNext’ the the folder contents would be something like:
/usr/share/themes/UbuntuNext/
gnome-shell/
...
gtk-3.0/
gtk.css
...
Kvantum/
UbuntuNext.svg
UbuntuNext.kvconfig
To automatically style Qt apps based upon the Gtk theme, as well as using Gtk3 dialogs in Qt apps, I also suggest using the QGnomePlatform Qt platform plugin. If this platform plugin is used, then it will attempt to set the Qt theme based upon the configured Gtk theme. For instance, it matched Gtk Adwaita with Adwaita-Qt. It will also check to see in a Kvantum theme is installed that matches the selected Gtk theme.
Nice new theme, sure will be top notch.
I think also is time to unify the themes so they can fully work in the others desktop too to unify the mark and feel across the envirmoents and ubuntu families.
That´s great news. I hope that the new design/theme is not limited to colors, fonts and icons. IMHO, the biggest flaw with the current theme is white-space, margins/paddings and alignments.
I’m not a big fan of OSX, but the attention to detail is stunning. I’ve tried lots of different Ubuntu themes, but after 3 clicks I´m already disappointed because of obvious inconsistencies.
Therefore, I’m looking forward and cross my fingers.
It seems pointless to make GNOME Shell themes while GNOME still has bugs like https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=694235 and https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=755446
Edit: unless you are also going to make a suite of extensions…
Apple does their design right, everything looks beautiful, clean, readable and unified, that is a big part of the overall Apple ecosystem appeal, not only it works well, but it looks fantastic. New Ubuntu theme needs to strive for such consistency.
Good call! We should find a way to rewite apps which don’t accept Gtk Themes like Synaptic or Bleachbit. Is that possible for the devs to unify all the thirds apps?
Do you have clearance from canonical to use the name ubuntu in your site? They may sue you for copyright infringement…