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The Joy of Linux Theming in the Age of Bootable Containers

blues.win

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Re: The Joy of Linux Theming in the Age of Bootable Containers

#61

Post by robinsonb5 »

keyringlight wrote: post #14
amarant wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to really enjoy theming and Riceing, but then I realised it was pointless: my monitor always looks the same, with a full screen IDE window covering up all my fancy themes

I think that speaks to another aspect, individual apps taking full control over how they're presented instead of inheriting whatever framework the DE is providing or the cohabitation of various KDE/QT/GTK/X/other, or electron framework defaults. Over on windows even when uxtheme skinning was in full swing it was the start of applications doing it themselves (winamp and quicktime come to mind), but I have the impressi…

I remember back in the day the apps most likely to have completely custom UIs tended to be scanner drivers. I'm not sure why!

Re: The Joy of Linux Theming in the Age of Bootable Containers

#62

Post by tuna74 »

cosmic_cheese wrote: post #39
aecsocket wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I should have clarified that by "your desktop" I mean "your GNOME desktop" - i.e. "if you run GNOME, it'll look good no matter your preferences". But wrt "your desktop" - even if I wanted to, I couldn't guarantee that my app looks good on your desktop specifically, because I have no clue what your desktop looks like! Which is why I want to target a large common denominator of desktops instead, where I know it c…

> My vision for my app might conflict with your vision for your desktop. Maybe I want this button to be a light blue because it meshes well with some other elements in the app, but you want it to be a darker blue because it fits with your desktop's color scheme. What happens then? Probably something similar to how Apple platforms handle colors. Instead of providing a single static light blue, you have a couple option…

Isn't this what the accent colours do in newer GTK/Libadwaita?

Re: The Joy of Linux Theming in the Age of Bootable Containers

#63

Post by concerndc1tizen »

gigel82 wrote: post #48

Off topic, but this website burned my eyes and I could almost hear my OLED crying. One of the rare examples where "Dark Reader" not only failed but actually made it more light; there must be some funky CSS shenanigans going on.

That's more a you-problem (Dark Reader) than a website-problem?

Re: The Joy of Linux Theming in the Age of Bootable Containers

#64

Post by nickjj »

bagatelle wrote: post #51
nickjj wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks a lot for the reminder. I just pushed an update to remove VcXsrv at: https://github.com/nickjj/dotfiles/commit/fdc1ddd95c2defb791... As for why I was using it: I've been using WSL since nearly the beginning (2017 / 2018) and used VcXsrv back then to get bi-directional clipboard sharing before WSLg was available. For a brief time I even ran Sublime Text in WSL 1 way back in the day. Then I used WSL 2. Then I tr…

Glad to hear this, I was worried I was missing something.

I did notice a very bad side effect. Yesterday I only pasted 1 line. When you paste in multiple lines using Neovim's normal paste key (p), it adds a Windows line ending to each line which you can see as ^M.

This unfortunately makes pasting text from Windows into WSL a problem. The ^M isn't present when pasting with CTRL+SHIFT+v because I guess the Microsoft Terminal converts it but that's a big pain to hit compared to "p".

I opened a bug report, let's see: https://github.com/microsoft/wslg/issues/1326

Re: The Joy of Linux Theming in the Age of Bootable Containers

#65

Post by Kudos »

kayson wrote: post #13

I really like the idea of immutable Linux and bootable containers. My next project will probably be switching to bazzite. But I took a look at the Containerfile[1], and I have some big concerns about the fragility of their supply chain. It uses 20 different copr repos (granted, half are their own), and I didn't count how many packages. Best I can tell, none of the versions are pinned. They do dump a diff of all packa…

I switched from official Fedora images when I got sick of dealing with nonfree stuff like codecs and nvidia drivers. They have much more lightly modified images that are better as a base to build on. I use https://github.com/ublue-os/main (and https://github.com/ublue-os/hwe for an nvidia system).

Re: The Joy of Linux Theming in the Age of Bootable Containers

#66

Post by Kudos »

XorNot wrote: post #40
kayson wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right but everytime a new immutable release is created, it automatically pulls the latest version of every package. It's not a manual change of package versions.

I mean that's the big lie isn't it? We all know no one is actually looking at these. Every system which tells me how immutable it is then shows me it's automatic version bump script or something.

The current term being used is "atomic" for this reason.

Re: The Joy of Linux Theming in the Age of Bootable Containers

#67

Post by WesolyKubeczek »

While this may be a nice exercise to learn bootc, shipping a whole OCI image, just because you wanted to put a couple files under /usr seems quite wasteful to me.

To put things into perspective, GTK themes, unless they bring lots and lots of bitmap images (which doesn't happen nowadays), rarely exceed a megabyte in size.

I guess one could spend less time learning how to package these as RPM packages and set up COPR to do just that, making OCI + bootc entirely optional (and yet you could build an OCI + bootc installing this package if you so wished!).

Re: The Joy of Linux Theming in the Age of Bootable Containers

#68

Post by mfro »

As the commentor that asked previously, "Is it really necessary to spin up an entirely new distro for an XFCE+GTK theme?", Blue95 makes much more sense in the context of bootc usage. I was completely unaware of bootable containers until reading this. Though I will admin I would still prefer something that can be installed easily over a base system. Perhaps see NsCDE[1] for an example. Great post!

[1]: https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE

Re: The Joy of Linux Theming in the Age of Bootable Containers

#69

Post by _fat_santa »

OsrsNeedsf2P wrote: post #2

Sometimes I wonder why there isn't more enthusiasm around theming. Chicago95[0] is popular, but I also love how Garuda[0] themes KDE. There's some small websites for downloading themes on various DEs, but most of them are a bit jank and it seems built-in support beyond basic things like accents aren't there. [0] https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 [1] https://garudalinux.org/editions (screenshots don't do it justi…

> Sometimes I wonder why there isn't more enthusiasm around theming

I can speak to this personally. I used to always tinker with various Linux desktops, themes, etc but nowadays I just use vanilla Ubuntu with zero theming modifications. There are two reasons for this:

1. Like others have said, theming is easy but consistency is hard. I've found that anything besides Gnome just turns into a shitshow where half your apps just don't theme properly.

2. It's a massive time sink. While I could create a very consistent theme, it would involve a massive time sink into dealing with all the edge cases. When I was in college and just used Linux "recreationally", I could justify spending a ton of time tinkering with my system and getting everything perfect. But these days I use Linux professionally so it's less about having a beautiful desktop and more about something that just works and gets out of my way so I can get my actual work done.

I should note that I still play around with other DE's and themes though I now do it all in VM's. I'm slowly building up my own theme stack on a Debian VM and once I get everything buckled up I might actually deploy and it use it on my primary machine.

Re: The Joy of Linux Theming in the Age of Bootable Containers

#70

Post by nickjj »

3abiton wrote: post #57
nickjj wrote: post #15

Regular containers also happen to work great for testing dotfiles. Many years ago I added an install script to https://github.com/nickjj/dotfiles to get set up in basically 1 command because I wanted a quick way to bootstrap my own system. I used the official Debian and Ubuntu images to test things. Over the last few days I refactored things further to support Arch Linux which has an official Docker image too. This e…

What is the benefit of this compared to something like incus?

I'm already using Docker for many other things. Launching an ephemeral versioned Debian, Ubuntu or Arch container that's officially supported is a 1 second operation.

I never used Incus before to know if it has other benefits but Docker solves my use case. Before Docker existed I used to do this with LXCs back when I ran my entire dev environment in a Linux VM.

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