I don’t think tons of pictures will avoid different opinions and, as it is normal to see, we’ll have people that disagree with our choices. As example, we are now discussing about the window close button, which had pictures of the different versions we implemented (don’t get me wrong, discussion is well accepted and fine).
I agree with your general idea of a plan, even if the project workflow you’d like to have is not the only one out there.
We do have mockups of the widgets we need to style and we’re not actually building anything from scratch, since Adwaita is the base and we took a lot of design choices from Unity8 design plan and Ambiance.
The theme has about the look it will have in the future already, with some fixes and yes also potentially big changes (like, the path bar changed many times) if we think that our design does not fit when implemented, since a picture does not always relate 1:1 with actual implementation
The closest thing is the Ubuntu development branch (so you’d have the communitheme by default in perhaps May on Ubuntu 18.10) but there’s a reason it’s not stable and not recommended for production use I don’t think rolling releases are ever truly stable in a noob-friendly sense because of how dependencies are intertwined etc, that might change if everything got snapped/Flatpak’d up so we no longer needed Debs.
When will development start for the light version of the theme? Only minor details will be changed in the normal theme, so I think now is the right time.
I’m hoping to see transparency and translucency like the new Windows fluent design and inspirations by the KDE Breeze theme.
A qt version of this theme could then eventually be the default theme of Kubuntu.
Here is a theme I found: ArcMPD theme
But of course it has to be based on the standard version of the theme
Edit:
just for clarification: I had to use the tar file from the official Firefox download site since the firefox-next PPA isn’t updated yet and the snap from the edge channel didn’t work for me. Just if anyone is wondering where I got the beta (with the csd headerbars) from.
EDIT2: Firefox 60 is in the firefox-next PPA as well now (03/21).
The gap in the corner below Activities is rather ugly.
Upstream Gnome solved that by having that corner rounded and opaque. But they didn’t have the Ubuntu Dock there. Can that be fixed in the theme or in the Ubuntu Dock?
At least for me many apps come up in that corner by default and the brighter the background, the more obvious that “bright corner glitch”.
As you said, having the dock visible by default, does not let us use the same solution.
To me, the change (not a fix) would be to open the windows in the center of the screen (which is a configuration in Mutter), which is where I always move them soon after opening, by the way.
Some great work has been done on this theme - I switched to try it one night and didn’t bother switching back
The more I look at Notepad, Rhythm Box, and FIles, the more I love them in Communitheme. I’m really just waiting for a nicer treatment of menubars now.
I’m sure this has already been considered, but… after playing around in GIMP, I’d like to express some support for pale menubars. They make the “black stripe” at the top of the window thinner, which means menubar apps are more consistent with the other kind.
IMHO it’s also more consistent with the style of (e.g.) the Name / Size / Modified headings in Files, or Artists / Albums in Rhythm Box:
Yes, opening the apps in the middle of the screen would be much nicer. I move them there as well. I can suggest that mutter change/toggle in the ubuntu-desktop IRC channel.
We simply followed the Unity8 design (as you mentioned) and used dark menubars, because it looks great.
The difference here with Gnome Shell is that they (being Unity8) had global menus and a thin headerbar.
I absolutely agree that the current design feels like a wall of darkness at the top of the screen. I measured your screenshot to have 11,7% of the screen height in black. With a pale menubar that would be (only) 8,5%.
The problem is not only the missing global menu but that all apps without CSD look a little bit stupid in gnome. Unless you install https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1267/no-title-bar/
The pale menus could be a good solution for those apps.