So we will have the ugly Ambiance theme in Ubuntu LTS for the next 2 years
Seems like thatâs going to happenâŚ
I just hope that it comes pre-installed in 18.04 or really easy to install and select
Many people who think about switching to a new OS are turned off by bad looks
they donât know that themes exist; not even the tweak tool is pre-installed
It wouldnât be bad if you could choose between the two themes like Wayland and Xorg
Default would be ambiance and xorg for stability; if you want something new, you can easily choose the communitheme or wayland
This is not news. Nothing has changed since comment #36 in this thread.
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 itâs considered âfinishedâ by 18.04 then we can also look to move it in to main. I donât 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.
Letâs not rush it, letâs get it perfect. And while that happens, letâs get Ambiance smartened up as well.
Itâs not so bad, installing either the ppa or a package or something will make all the âThings You Have To Do After Installing 18.04â lists. Gives people a sense of ownership, it will be A-OK.
This is very disappointing news indeed .
I donât want to sound like a standing-on-the-sidelines complainer, but I do want to express my disappointment.
In theory, what I think is even more important than pushing to launch the Communitheme as the default theme, is realizing that we canât afford to wait any longer to discharge Ambiance. It looks so old and out of place in the GNOME environment. The icons are long overdue. (Ever since, and even before, the first Unity 8 version came out.)
The question that also arises is: when is a theme - or any work of art, really - 100% ready? KDE, Linux Mint, Budgie, etc. There are many project that seem to be churning out new themes and tweaks every once in a while. While on the part of Canonical, maybe still because of the backlash from launching Unity âtoo quicklyâ as a replacement for GNOME 2, they keep on stalling until something reaches a level of utter perfection.
Iâm just saying: this is a choice, it is not a law of nature, and it doesnât have to be this way. A theme, even a default one, can be 75% âreadyâ and still be launched. If I had a say in it, and the choice were between Ambiance and the unfinished Communitheme, I would go for the theme that already looks a lot better and more polished. Which is the Communitheme.
We canât agree on everything, obviously (me for one, being an absolute fan of GNOME removing the active desktop), but I hope we can agree on some principles. One of those principles I hope most can agree on is: donât stall and stall, and wait until it is no longer ânewâ, to launch something. Just like Unity 8, Ubuntu desktop could be at risk of lagging behind constantly.
After launch, I hope the community can continue chipping away the rough edges, and at the same time can start working on a replacement for Radiance!
End of rant.
Great rant . Letâs replace radiance with Adwaita .
Iâm not surprised, itâs the Canonical/Ubuntuâs typical inability to deliver. MIR and Unity 8 should have been included in Ubuntu 16.04. After many years they donât even have a new theme.
Whining solves nothing, the time frame has been known. Ambiance serves its purpose well as a very well tested and functionally mature theme which also has carried the Ubuntu brand for years.
A theme is not just a coat of paint, there is a tremendous amount of subtlety involved in helping the user understand the state of their system as theyâre using it. Iterating on ideas from two design languages (Ambiance and Suru) to form a new system takes a long time, first to find all the corner cases where the themeing needs bug fixing, and second to arrive at the correct and consistent feel so the theme itself becomes transparent in its function. As is the case with every release, a lot of people will change from the default theme, but that is not a reason to change from whatâs worked in the past, and neither is impatience. I use the new theme on all my systems (which are all on 17.10 bar the servers), and canât imagine using Ambiance again, but itâs not really done yet and the feature freeze is on. Itâs life.
Since the beginning we know that to make it we needed a little miracle. We started the project in November, only 5 months before the UI freeze and 5 months of just free time of a small team. I think this is the right choice, Communitheme still has some important bugs, some undefined styling and tons of applications to be tested.
What I like the most is that this Community appreciated so much the work done so far, thanks to all!
Indeed, and you already made a miracle! Iâm sincerely really impressed with the current theme state, knowin that real work started mid-November with the first mockups and ideas. Great work to you and the other members of the team, working tirelessly on CommuniTheme! Thanks as well to @andy-k to have summed up well the subtilities of landing a new theme.
However, as I was afraid and stated previously already, we canât land safely the new CommuniTheme in 18.04. There are multiple reasons:
- As @c-lobrano stated, and you will as well if you follow the upstream repositories on GitHub, (I encourage everyone participating to this thread to to do that on the various communitheme-related projects), there are still a lot to be done and important bug reports, a lot of applications to be tested. We just went through and understood completely the GTK2 issues that some people had, but there is Qt and other GTK3 applications that we need to have some testing on and bugs fixed.
For instance, we understood recentely (https://github.com/Ubuntu/gnome-shell-communitheme/issues/61) why for some people, they got unstyled GTK2 applications. Indeed, the theme depends on 2 packages that are in universe and we need to promote to main them before depending on them.
This is to totally normal, and those bugs (with new ones discovered everyday) are part of creating a theme. Applications are using the toolkits and styles in very subtle ways, and you need to try to not make the whole theme unmaintainable on the long term with too many application-specific code.
- UI Freeze is next week. After that point, it mean that NO graphical/visible changes are allowed apart getting an excepetion. It means in general, no more refinement, no visible element or color changes for the next 5 years on 18.04 and to Canonical to support it. Are you sure the theme is ready for this? Seeing the amount of discussions triggered here, it seems that there isnât a clear answer, and maybe setting in stone the CommuniTheme choices at this point will definitely decrease the amount of experimentations and changes that would otherwise still happen here. It means basically Freezing CommuniTheme on the base principles choices.
This is to be expected, a theme is hard to make, regressions are easily triggered, issues are constantly coming until we have a good amount of testing. The goal is to push it very early on the 18.10 development cycle (like, within the first month once the archive opens) and iterate from there. We can have regular snapshots of the theme (uploaded manually) and get some feedback.
However, people following and running development release (even more non LTS) are few, and this is why I think we should make it easily available to everyone who wants to opt-in, even on 18.04 LTS, and I have 2 proposals here. The good thing is that people âwho canât standâ anymore Ambiance can continue following this as well
Here is what we can do:
- Commit to maintain in parallel than the version in the distribution the ppa with daily builds. It would mean however than every commit (potentially breaking ones) will land on people stable distributions, potentially breaking them even if they are just users who wanted to give a try to the new theme. Also, installing a ppa isnât for everyone.
- Ensure we land basic âdouble sessionâ support for shipping the theme via a snap that people would have to install. The instruction will basically be
snap install <theme>
or use GNOME Software to install it, then a new GDM session appears (similarly to today), and people can jump into this.
The benefits are:- The snap isnât installed by default, so we keep the opt-in as for the PPA
- We can use multiple maturity channels, meaning that people who want to follow every new changes upstream can subscribe to the âedgeâ channel, knowing that they suscribe to the âedgeâ risks with what it means Then, regularly after community +1 and some testing we can promote a particular revision to the âcandidateâ or âstableâ channel, delivering it to a wider community.
- We can even imagine having some snaps built per pull-request, so that people can have a try before things land!
This is a substantial amount of work to be done, but Iâm happy handling this if people like that idea. I will need to know this week to land the âin distroâ defaults for the new session, appearing only when the snap is installed, and to teach the system to look in that case for the snap theme folder (Note that I donât know if that will work with GTK2 theming yet).
Finally, I think we should include the great sound work and cursor icons made by @madsrh officially as part of the CommuniTheme project. I would love as well someone stepping up for the plymouth theme work (which is mostly code-work, no css, svgâŚ). Anyone interested?
Tell me what you all think about this!
Great idea. Especially if shipping the theme as a snap means that every snap that at the moment only includes ambiance could somehow use the new theme from that snap. I guess snapping a theme is also a good testing playground, since as far as I can understand this from my user perspective, at the moment only ambiance is packed into the installed snaps.
If that snap would be somehow promoted in the LTS (in the store maybe?) most disappointments could also vanish Oh snap⌠I wrote âsnapâ many times in this post.
thanks a lot @didrocks
I love the idea of the snap, mostly because of the different channels
Having more experience with snap than with ppa, I could help more as well
Totally agree, great work @madsrh
I would like it to be implemented from Adwaita-ubuntu with the orange color, which would be closer to the gnome-vanilla and the deploy icons of the suru-places folder and the retouching of the Humanity icons.
How to image:
Nice! will you release that theme on GitHUb?
I am not designer, I did it for the Oomox program, Thanks for liking!
If this rounded buttons was possible for 18.10 would be nice
New theme looks super great, thank you all for your hard work and good taste
Rounded bottom corners would look super fresh!
âŚBut they probably wonât really fit in GNOME, since they would not âconnectâ with anything like windowâs headers connect with topbar then maximized.
Or maybe thatâs not really an issue.
https://askubuntu.com/questions/984918/how-to-add-blur-effect-to-dock-in-ubuntu-17-10-gnome
We could blur ubuntu dock, and top bar to have premium look?
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