Will the real Adwaita theme, please stand up

[Sam Varshavchik]

I have two laptops loaded with the XFCE spin. One laptop began it's life as  
Fedora 2x-something, and is now running 35, and I just reloaded the second  
laptop with a fresh F35 install, and fully updated it.

Both laptops show "Adwaita" as their default theme.

The panel on the first laptop is very light gray, with black text, and looks  
…normal.

The panel on the 2nd laptop, the one with a new F35 load, is very dark grey  
and lightly-colored text.

Both laptops claim to be using Adwaita.

Tiebreaker: I have a third laptop, also with XFCE, and also traces its  
lineage to Fedora 2x. Its appearance matches the first one.

Why is a new F35 install's Adwaita theme different? It looks downright ugly.  
On the other two laptops the Adwaita theme is light-colored, and is very  
similar in its brightness to the High Contrast theme. There's only minor  
differences, flipping between the two. But on the odd duck the Adwaita theme  
is basically the negative of the other two.

[Ed Greshko]

On 28/11/2021 07:29, Sam Varshavchik wrote:
>  I have two laptops loaded with the XFCE spin. One laptop began
> it's life as Fedora 2x-something, and is now running 35, and I just reloaded the
> second laptop with a fresh F35 install, and fully updated it.
>
>  Both laptops show "Adwaita" as their default theme.
>
>  The panel on the first laptop is very light gray, with black text, and looks …normal.
>
>  The panel on the 2nd laptop, the one with a new F35 load, is very dark grey and
> lightly-colored text.
>
>  Both laptops claim to be using Adwaita.
>
>  Tiebreaker: I have a third laptop, also with XFCE, and also traces its lineage to Fedora
> 2x. Its appearance matches the first one.
>
>  Why is a new F35 install's Adwaita theme different? It looks downright ugly. On the
> other two laptops the Adwaita theme is light-colored, and is very similar in its
> brightness to the High Contrast theme. There's only minor differences, flipping
> between the two. But on the odd duck the Adwaita theme is basically the negative of the
> other two.
>  
I suppose the obvious first question is does "rpm -qa | grep adwaita" produce
the same results on both systems?

--
Did 황준호 die?

[Sam Varshavchik]

Ed Greshko writes:

>  On 28/11/2021 07:29, Sam Varshavchik wrote:
> > I have two laptops loaded with the XFCE spin. One laptop began it's life as  
> > Fedora 2x-something, and is now running 35, and I just reloaded the second  
> > laptop with a fresh F35 install, and fully updated it.
> >
> > Both laptops show "Adwaita" as their default theme.
> >
> > The panel on the first laptop is very light gray, with black text, and looks  
> > …normal.
> >
> > The panel on the 2nd laptop, the one with a new F35 load, is very dark grey  
> > and lightly-colored text.
> >
> > Both laptops claim to be using Adwaita.
> >
> > Tiebreaker: I have a third laptop, also with XFCE, and also traces its  
> > lineage to Fedora 2x. Its appearance matches the first one.
> >
> > Why is a new F35 install's Adwaita theme different? It looks downright ugly.  
> > On the other two laptops the Adwaita theme is light-colored, and is very  
> > similar in its brightness to the High Contrast theme. There's only minor  
> > differences, flipping between the two. But on the odd duck the Adwaita theme  
> > is basically the negative of the other two.
> >
>
>  I suppose the obvious first question is does "rpm -qa | grep adwaita"  
>  produce the same results on both systems? 
Yup, both the F35 XFCE Live install, and the updated laptops, show the same:

$ rpm -qa | grep adwaita
adwaita-cursor-theme-41.0-1.fc35.noarch
adwaita-icon-theme-41.0-1.fc35.noarch
adwaita-gtk2-theme-3.28-13.fc35.x86_64

The themes do, overall, have other issues. All of my F35 seats have a bunch  
of themes labeled "Xfce-something". Actually about thirty or so "xfce"
 
themes. All of them seem to be a no-go. Switching to any of them makes parts  
of the xfce panel mostly disappear or have an indiscernible color scheme.  
And all the "xfce" themes makes scroll-bars disappear. I am not talking the  
annoying auto-minimization of scroll-bars that some UI "expert" invented, a  
few years ago. They're completely gone. There's no way to scroll the list  
widgets! If you manage to scroll the list of themes, in the "Appearance"  
dialog so that only the xfce ones are shown, click on one of them, the only  
way to restore sanity is to hit pg-up a few times until the first theme  
(Adwaita, incidentally) gets restored. Then you get the original "peek-a- 
boo!" GTK scrollbars restored.

But I'm mostly wondering how Adwaita gives a negative color scheme on a new  
F35 install. Maybe there's a "dark theme" global setting somewhere that  
Adwaita is using. I dimly recall that dark themes were all the rage  
recently. But there's also an Adwaita-dark theme too, which allowed me to  
create this handy-dandy matrix:

Laptop A:

Adwaita: dark panel, light window frame color.

Adwaita-dark: dark panel, dark window frame color.

Laptop B:

Adwaita: light panel, light window frame color.

Adwaita-dark: dark panel, dark window frame color.

[Sam Varshavchik]

Sam Varshavchik writes:

>  Ed Greshko writes:
>
> >
> > I suppose the obvious first question is does "rpm -qa | grep adwaita"  
> > produce the same results on both systems?
>
>  Yup, both the F35 XFCE Live install, and the updated laptops, show the same:
>
>  $ rpm -qa | grep adwaita
>  adwaita-cursor-theme-41.0-1.fc35.noarch
>  adwaita-icon-theme-41.0-1.fc35.noarch
>  adwaita-gtk2-theme-3.28-13.fc35.x86_64
>
>  The themes do, overall, have other issues. All of my F35 seats have a bunch  
>  of themes labeled "Xfce-something". Actually about thirty or so
> "xfce"  
>  themes. All of them seem to be a no-go. Switching to any of them makes parts  
>  of the xfce panel mostly disappear or have an indiscernible color scheme.  
>  And all the "xfce" themes makes scroll-bars disappear. I am not talking the  
>  annoying auto-minimization of scroll-bars that some UI "expert" invented, a  
>  few years ago. They're completely gone. There's no way to scroll the list  
>  widgets! If you manage to scroll the list of themes, in the "Appearance"  
>  dialog so that only the xfce ones are shown, click on one of them, the only  
>  way to restore sanity is to hit pg-up a few times until the first theme  
>  (Adwaita, incidentally) gets restored. Then you get the original "peek-a- 
>  boo!" GTK scrollbars restored.
>
>  But I'm mostly wondering how Adwaita gives a negative color scheme on a new  
>  F35 install. Maybe there's a "dark theme" global setting somewhere that  
>  Adwaita is using. 
It was indeed something like that. This Scooby-Doo mystery was a separate  
knob in the "Panel" section of Settings. There, under the "Appearance"
tab  
there was a "Dark mode" knob. It was enabled by default, in a new F35  
install. There was absolutely no way to know it's there unless you go and  
look for it.

And it was, apparently, effective for some, but not all themes. For Adwaita  
it fiddled its appearance. For other themes it did not. And there was a  
separate, discrete, "Adwaita-dark" theme that did its own thing.

Clear as mud.

[Tom Horsley]

On Sat, 27 Nov 2021 18:29:30 -0500
Sam Varshavchik wrote:

>  Both laptops claim to be using Adwaita. 
Not exactly sure how this might be relevant, but in my from
scratch f35 install I had this experience:

I was desperately trying to get claws-mail to stop putting
black text on a dark blue background I discovered that adwaita
is apparently now hard wired in the gtk libraries, the installed
theme files I was going to try modifying have nothing but a comment
saying they are no longer used.

I was still able to change settings in ~/.config/gtk-3.0/gtk.css
and have them take effect, so this line fixed the dark blue default
selection color:

.gtkstyle-fallback:selected { color: #ffffff; background-color: #bddafc; }