I will start by confessing that I started out using Kubuntu and held on with a death grip until KDE3 was no longer a suitable/workable option. There wasn't much about KDE3 that I did not like, and not much about KDE4 that I did like. Since then I have bounced around a bit, LXDE, XFCE, Mint, etc, but eventually settled for Ubuntu simply to avoid glitches and odd behaviors. After some tweaks, I am largely a happy camper... with one exception.
Themes and overall appearance.
I am not talking about eye-candy. I never wanted awn curves, a spinning cube of desktops nor did I use compiz fusion or the like. It isn't flashy and slick that I am after, or fancy window animations, transparencies and such, since I have discovered I am allergic to bloat.
As far as how the windows are drawn I have no complaints with the default themes, they have nice shapes, gradients, buttons, bars, etc... it's the colors of those themes that bug me.
It seems like the tendency these days is to have pale gray on light gray with medium gray (for extra pizzazz?) For me that is boring as all get out, but for my aging father it is a serious problem. The lack of contrast gives him fits, and let's face it the "High Contrast" themes are garishly ugly and harsh on the eyes because they have too much contrast.
Yes, there are tons of themes out there, though seeing what they really look like is iffy, finding out how well they work is a crapshoot and fishing through them is time consuming.
Ideally, what I would like to find is a theme, or UI for a theme rather, that would allow me (and more over my die hard Linux using Dad - since Slackware 0.9, though he started with System V UNIX) to select colors for a theme. At the risk of being dogged on for using the W-word... Something like what Windows has, but of course since this would be Ubuntu, it would be better.
Perhaps such a thing exists already? Some theming wizard already create the perfect solution? If they have, it seems to be safely hidden in the bowels of ubuntuthemes.org.
My wish for the future of default Ubuntu themes would be the ability to select colors for any of the existing default themes. "Feeling your inner Irish today? Green it is! How about some reds and yellows for autumn? Presto!" <--- read as: click, click, click, done.
That's my two cents, for what it's worth. What do you think about the colors of the default themes?
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