Kid me absolutely ran The Bug on an old PowerMac G3: https://macthemes.garden/themes/8191e1471dc9-the-bug/
I was all about Tephra! https://macthemes.garden/themes/75d29921d7bc-tephratrianon/
Mac Themes Garden
51–60 of 82 posts
Re: Mac Themes Garden
#52Can these be installed on modern macs?
Nope. I liked Kaleidoscope, but it got old, really quick. Some of the themes were outstanding, but some were damn near unusable. Themes relied on system hooks that would make modern security professionals defecate masonry. OS X got rid of all that stuff.
I applaud your great prose. This metaphor is so powerful and yet viscerally painful!
Re: Mac Themes Garden
#53I miss the times, across all platforms, when you could just pick an accent color or two for things like window borders, filled radio buttons and so on. On GTK you could take someone's window theme, someone else's widget theme, and go "that, but in orange".
You could even, if it didn't come by default already, have the active title bar in a different color.
Maybe 99% of people didn't use this. Maybe they hired an authoritarian at GNOME to make the adwaita "one theme to rule them all". But it used to feel like I the style choices for my own computer's gui belonged more to me as a user.
Often, that meant picking a theme that I liked, from the very active theme-design community (the garden lists more than 3000 themes, although I'm not a mac person) and then just tweaking a color here or there.
Re: Mac Themes Garden
#54I remember theming my mac and windows machines as a kid! Somehow all we're left with is corporate sponsored blandness and a user base who does not care about having fun with what they own, they just want a basic tool to browse the web. (and I guess ownership is much more muddied now anyway)
I think what you say is partly true—systems are definitely more locked down nowadays and we mostly just accept what corporations give us. But I think this is also, at least in part, consumer-driven. Computers are less of a novelty nowadays, so fewer people are interested in tweaking and configuring for the sake of it, while more are just looking to get work done.
> But I think this is also, at least in part, consumer-driven.
I can't disagree more.
Consumers haven't requested this, and up until this ability was taken away people did theme their XP, etc.
There weren't many options without hacking but changing the XP blue bar to silver or green regularly happened. People are just taught to accept that this is how it is now though.
Re: Mac Themes Garden
#55I remember theming my mac and windows machines as a kid! Somehow all we're left with is corporate sponsored blandness and a user base who does not care about having fun with what they own, they just want a basic tool to browse the web. (and I guess ownership is much more muddied now anyway)
I think what you say is partly true—systems are definitely more locked down nowadays and we mostly just accept what corporations give us. But I think this is also, at least in part, consumer-driven. Computers are less of a novelty nowadays, so fewer people are interested in tweaking and configuring for the sake of it, while more are just looking to get work done.
Actually, I would take this a step further.
I took my old white polycarbonate MacBook to the Apple store a few years back to get a new battery. I had a few people ask me about it, and even one lady asked at the genius bar whether she could get a MacBook in a colour. People pick aluminium chassis because the alternative is cheap gray, fake metal chassis. I miss the era of colourful iMacs and I think other people do too, and not just geeks.
Re: Mac Themes Garden
#56Ideal for https://beyondloom.com/decker/
Re: Mac Themes Garden
#57It blows my mind how diverse these are, and how diverse their creators were. One single artist, Martha Royer, made over two hundred themes: https://macthemes.garden/authors/martha-royer/ (They're not all amazing in quality, but the sheer industriousness is staggering.) I was lurking around the equivalent Windows community in roughly the same era (well, a couple of years later) and it was nothing like this. Far fewer…
Fluxbox and blackbox among GTK had over 2000 themes.
Re: Mac Themes Garden
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nope. I liked Kaleidoscope, but it got old, really quick. Some of the themes were outstanding, but some were damn near unusable. Themes relied on system hooks that would make modern security professionals defecate masonry. OS X got rid of all that stuff.
I applaud your great prose. This metaphor is so powerful and yet viscerally painful!
Can't claim credit. Got it from some other geek. Can't remember where.
Re: Mac Themes Garden
#59Back in the day, Kaleidoscope schemes and later appearance manager themes were one of my favorite things about owning a computer. Combined with Classic Mac OS extensions it seemed like there was nothing you couldn’t do when it came to customization. Even modern desktop Linux, as vaunted as it is for its customizability, struggles to compare. Now of course Classic Mac OS was a security nightmare but I wish that a mode…
CWM + window search + keybindings was and it's still superior to whatever theme you are trying to apply. I have a patched Zukitre GTK2-3-4 theme with custom ~/.Xdefaults. I nearly don't need neither decorations nor a taskbar. Just hit win+w, begin typing, your window it's there. Magic. I don't even need to use a mouse.
OTOH, yes, Gnome's blandnes sucks a lot. With Plasma and a bit less, XFCE, you can do far more with a desktop, even Budgie it's far better than Gnome3.
And I miss tons of GTK2 themes from its era. Bluecurve looked better than everything from today. OSX, Windows, Haiku, whatever. That theme looked colourful, positive and extremely usable, with proper and visible menues, buttons, scrollbars and so. Nowaday both OSX, GTK4 with Adwaita (far less with Zukitre) and Windows are a nightmare on usability.
Once you disable the overlay scrollbars under GTK4 and force the GTK theme to Zukitre (once installed) at /etc/profile.d/gtk.sh (a line with 'export GTK_THEME=Zukitre'), most of the dumb choices from Red Hat/FreeDesktop go away for the average Joe user.
Zukitre has gray widgets (not full white, damn UI pseudo-designers), usable buttons and proper scrollbars (again, disable the overlay settings for GTK). And, for sure, COLOR CONTRAST, damn it.
Mac System 7 did it fine; so did Platinum under Mac OS 8-9. Neutral gray colors, usable widgets. Ditto with OSX, but the stripped bars sucked at first, yet Tiger and Snow Leopard look perfectly usable. The same with Windows 95, even Windows XP and partially 7. Windows 10 is unusable with flat widgets with no contrasts and hints for Windows. Windows 11 it's even worse. Current MacOS, with the same overlay scrollbars and lack of contrast it's a huge downgrade from Snow Leopard.
Even the old Motif/FVWM under Unix had a nightmarish usability for the non-CS student, but it had 3D widgets on Motif/Athena (Xaw3D) and grabable window borders. Go try resizing a window under Gnome3 or Windows 10. Or moving a window at a quick glance.
UI designers should stop following trends and just give up on merging tablets and desktops. It doesn't work.
Re: Mac Themes Garden
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
The pipeline from Windows to Linux is fairly clear. The pipeline from Mac to Linux is less evident; the dyed in the wool Mac users tend to stay that way, using Linux for work rather than a daily driver. Queue a Mac-to-Linux user to contradict this, and there's plenty of them, but we Mac users are truly the dictionary definition of the sunk cost fallacy in more ways than one.
It doesn’t help matters that desktop environments that try to do things “the mac way” and don’t just mimic macOS superficially (like Pantheon/elementary) don’t exist. Everything is either Win9X-like (KDE, Cinnamon, XFCE, LxQt, etc) or tablet-like (GNOME). For the most part, to a longtime Mac user switching to Linux feels like switching to a bizarre alternate universe Windows that’s built around the Linux kernel inste…
GTK 2/3 has a setting to use the Emacs keybindings. Pair it with Budgie with a menubar and a dock and you are set.