Current approach with the transparencies is very interesting - in a good way!
I quite like having the same transparency for the launcher and the top bar. But I wonder if you might as well get rid of the separating line in that case, so they form a single r-shaped panel. Personally, I think this looks a little bit better:
Also, if we’re going with dark menu titles, which visually “joins” them to the window’s title bar IMO - rather than making them feel like part of the app’s own interface - I think it looks better if you simply fuse them with the title bar without a separator, like so:
No I have updated from 16.04.
May be you are right, because it is working fine in my personal laptop (freshly installed 18.04).
By the way is there any fix for this?
“Agree, but this is a problem in Mutter that we cannot fix in communitheme”
Ah, of course. Then I probably cycle back to my preference for lighter menu titles, which I think I suggested up there somewhere. Otherwise, two dark stripes with a darker separator, as per current setup, just feels a bit dense and gloomy to me.
Dark is normally good but if it’s hard to do dark menus well at this time it might be flogging a dead horse.
Snap apps are not yet properly themed, which is a shame given that 18.04 is already out. Ironically, flatpak apps support communitheme pretty well since 3 days ago, faster than ubuntu’s own snap…
I’ve been mulling over menu titles. I spend a lot of time looking at these because my main apps have them.
So, to sum up: I know from @c-lobrano that it isn’t yet possible to fuse menu bar with window heading, because Mutter doesn’t support it. And I also know that the design team weren’t in favour of light menu titles.
In that case, for the menu titles, I think simply tweaking the shade of dark grey would be an improvement. Currently, I think there are two oddities:
The shade of grey used is very close to the in-focus window heading, but not identical. To my eye, it’s in the “uncanny valley”. It’s too close to make a pleasing contrast, but not close enough to make a pleasing match.
We have three different shades of grey involved (in-focus window heading, out-of-focus window heading, menu titles). I think this could be made slightly more elegant?
So, here’s my new suggestion: for the menu titles, use the same shade of grey as the out-of-focus window heading.
This is a very subtle change but I think it’s an improvement. It means the window heading and menu titles will either match completely (if the window is out of focus) or be a bit more different to each other, and make a more pleasing contrast (when the window is in focus). It also means we only have two shades of grey in play.
Illustration of the contrast (View, Layer and Object have the proposed background colour, whereas Path, Text and Filters have the current background colour):
Just a suggestion as always, feel free to discount. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder!
Great work Stuart
I think it’s a subtle but very nice tweak. Would you mind opening an issue yourself? (please add the screenshots or at least refer to this post).
Why do you think its not possible to blend the menubar with the window titlebar? Ambiance does. I guess all you need to do is remove the dark line at the bottom of the window titlebar - then there would be no separation.
The analysis took place here and we thought that the line was a server side decoration, that’s why mutter. However, you’re right, on Ambiance the separation does not look the same. I’ll have a further look
Sorry to all, but @CraigD was right. Not sure why at the beginning I was unable to make it work, probably because it’s kind of server side and require reboot or refresh
Probably to make it work best, we should add side borders to menubar too