“I’m going to propose something a bit outrageous, but, the idea behind Adwaita’s black top-panel and curved edges is to have the top-bar blend into the monitor. Maybe we can follow that idea and have everything become plain black or near plain black when a window is maximized?”
Not outrageous IMO - it a) matches upstream vanilla Gnome for the top bar and b) matches plans for Unity 8, which had very dark elements at the screen border.
I’ve tried mocking this up before… IMO it is a bold look, but I always pulled back from it because the dark launcher doesn’t work as well for icons with no background. Irregular shaped icons often have a drop shadow, for emphasis, and this is lost on black - causing some icons (e.g. Inkscape) to “melt into the shadows” a bit. As we saw on Unity Phone however, Suru icons look great on a very dark launcher.
Apologies for rubbish mockup - this is literally “black #1”, which would probably need replacing with a v. dark grey:
I vote to try this approach on the edge channel - we can all play with it for a while and report back. I think trying a solution that’s consistent with upstream and Unity 8 is a very worthy experiment, and would love to try it on my desktop!
Looks better than the current solution indeed - with one exception your wonderful (or was it carlos? well who cares ;D) idea to add a border to windows which are attached to an edge gets somehow lost - at least I can not see them in that mockup
Had another little go at mocking up @godlyranchdressing’s idea. Changes: dark charcoal instead of black; bright border on window title (I think this gets a bit lost tbh); and the alternative approach to Ubuntu branding.
I think the very dark panels look a bit stark as embedded screenshots, but the approach looks a lot nicer when I try it full screen, because (as suggested) the edge elements blend nicely with the monitor itself.
If there is not other choice other then have a dark Panel I would be against too many colors on top.
IMO, the blending smooth color as it is now is the best. I personally not happy with the charcoal.
It appears brownish (at least on my monitor).
I like the Ubuntu logo on the Dock. It helps in a glance to know on which session are you, on the top panel
it is just another -icon next to text- that you want to remove. in my case you can not even see the activities btn.
The date moves to the right so it will be as clean as possible. …and please! - keep the dock transparent…
This looks real nice, reminds me of Unity 8. (well, it is just like it was in Unity 8)
I’m now torn between liking transparency and just plain blackness
At the moment the popover color looks like the popovers “grow” out of top panel - like an arm ;O And the colors fit very nice in that way.
Now, when I changed the color to black for the dash/dock and the panel the old/current popup color looks out of place. But if you change the popup color to black too → the whole color palette which has been worked on several months gets screwed
This is no solution Or is it? I fear that this would cause a color chain reaction.
Black dock/panel → black popups → black dialogues/notifications → gtk “dark” too light → black … etc. etc.
We would need to adapt to that and thus the whole palette would shift to black and darker and even now it get’s kind of hard on the eyes when you are outside. I don’t know… everything looked so good one week ago
I don’t know - maybe it is but we would need to rethink many colors. Maybe it works maybe not. There are some advantages of that ultra dark … black shell.
But I think it can work if we change the popovers to a plain black, the Shell’s dark colors doesn’t need to match the dark colors used in the GTK themes. We can apply the same idea (that the panel and dock should fade into the background) to the Shell itself. We’ll treat the app window like its own thing. The way the dock and top panel fades to black when a window is maximized will get that idea across very well, in that instance the window becomes the main focal point and everything else fades to black. The only time when the Shell will use light colors is in dialog windows, which is when the Shell is interacting with the user. So the Shell is “hidden in the dark” until you’re directly interacting with it (the case for light popovers ).
Actually @frederik-f , is there a definite need to be so radical?
Vanilla Gnome has grey popovers coming from a black header bar. Also, in vanilla Gnome and Ubuntu shell, the popovers won’t match the top bar when the windows aren’t maximised anyway (because the panels will be see-through and the popovers won’t be). Maybe black panel + grey popover only looks odd because you’re not used to it? I don’t think it necessarily follows that the popovers and panels have to match (and actually, the use of transparencies means they often won’t match, whatever you do when a window is maximised).
IMVHO, I still think it would be worth trying black top bar + black launcher when windows are maximised, with everything else staying the same, on edge channel for a bit.
Agree btw, everything was looking great recently, shame about the overlay problem.
EDIT 1 - vanilla Gnome:
If upstream doesn’t have black popovers to match black header bar, does Ubuntu need to?
Although it’s not exactly directed to me, I tried both. I prefer the jet shell but against the solid dock on both.
Thanks for the test! @c-lobrano@frederik-f@godlyranchdressing
- it a) matches upstream vanilla Gnome for the top bar and b) matches plans for Unity 8, which had very dark elements at the screen border.
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Or is it? I fear that this would cause a color chain reaction.
to solve this problem: