I was wondering if there is a configuration file somewhere that can be used to configure the color palette for the desktop.
Using colortest-16b I have found that there no black text colors on a light background and many of the other colors are also wrong. If I login with the gnome desktop the colors are correct.
Hi Walter,
I was wondering if there is a configuration file somewhere that can be used to configure the color palette for the desktop.
No, there is no such thing
because the 'desktop' is not a single unit, it consists of several distinct parts that, kind of, work together but every part has its own way of setting and displaying colors.
You can change appearance through theme-files. You select themefiles through the appearance setting app in control-center. Here you can select presets for groups of themefiles.
Every preset consists of themefiles for:
Let's look at 1 and 2:
The colorcodes for the controls are coded in the GTK+ themefiles themselves, so you have to adjust per theme.
The colorcodes for the windowborders are coded in the themefiles of the windowmanager. Also adjusted per theme.
(Don't get me started about GTK3 and GTK4, which made this situation all the more complicated)
Your best chance to find a fitting theme, not in the repositories, is on the MATE-look site. If you look in the left column there, you see 8 links to all the 8 different parts that make up the "desktop" that you look at.
Yes indeed, that are 8 themefiles for every "look" of the desktop.
Again, each themefile carries its own colorcodes and bitmaps.
Yes, you can write your own themefiles. Don't ask me how, there are others in this forum who are much more knowledgable about this than I am.
(like @Frieder_Saugschmerle who published some very beautiful themes lately)
What I do know is this:
Using colortest-16b I have found that there no black text colors on a light background
ANSI-escapecodes for colors on terminals have nothing to do and no connection at all with any of the forementioned windowmanager or GUI-toolkit colors.
regarding ANSI-colors: There is no problem whatsoever to have black text on a white background with ansi escape codes.
Try this in a terminal:
echo -e "\033[30m\033[47m black foreground white background \033[m"
Also, regarding terminal colors, see this:
And to make it even more complex: mate-terminal has besides the possibility to react to ANSI-escape sequences also its own color presets that you can adjust 
Hi,
You need to use a terminal application like Mate Terminal or rxvt, xterm and some others. Then you need to use a different custom color Sheme inside your terminal application.
Just set your favorite theme Like this once for ever new User :
Gtk CSS/SCSS themes and terminal colour sheme are not always related. Sometimes it works more or less other Times not. That isnt a Bug but a Feature of Freedom.
So here is my neofetch output showing the color palette and also attempting to display dark text on white background. Which appears all white.
I simply cannot get black text in MATE desktop. If I launch gnome and run mate terminal it works as expected. So by process of elimination i think mate terminal is ok but something underlying is not correct.
And it also occurs in Libra Office. I cannot have white background with dark text. So I'm forced to use dark mode in Libra Office or any other application like pluma.
So I think there is something fundamental incorrect apart from the application layer.
Ok. This looks even more strange. Please write a bug report in GitHub or Launchpad.
Maybe your need to enable a "DARK" theme. If the theme is DARK but not adressed as a DARK Variant this happens.
Also try to rename the theme to something different than yaru. ( Very strange request i do ask Here but i might be a difference). On gtk4 If i Name a theme yaru-xyz it loads very differently than without yaru in its name. While beeing the same theme.
OK, this is what I get:
Also tested with standard Yaru theme and Ambiant-MATE-dark, no problem here.
I have transparency activated (because sometimes black is interpreted as transparent).
I played around a bit with mate-terminal colorsettings in Edit->Profile preferences->Colors
and here I discovered something strange:
if i select a background color, the corresponding button is filled with that color.
if i close that menu and open it again , that button is still filled with that color except when the color was black, then the button is filled with nothing/transparency/white (can't see which)
(this happens only on 22.04 on both tested themes, in 20.04 there is no such problem)
On my system it doesn't have effect on the terminal's display of colors (probably because diff in hardware)
but it is fishy nonetheless.
could this help a bit ?
I suspect a GTK issue.
@gordon , do you have any suggestions ?
b.t.w. for all clarity, my tests were done on x86_64 only.
I do not have an odroid-ARM with mali-GPU so i can not test that.
Tried a light theme but that is worse since there is no dark text!
If I use a light theme I simply cannot see anything in any application. White text on white backgrounds doesn't work! So regardless of theme light or dark I cannot achieve dark text in MATE desktop.
I tried a number of mate distros (Fedora, Ubuntu & Manjaro) and the only one that worked as expected was Manjaro equivalent to 21.10 with kernel 5.17 (I didn't try later kernels or builds but earlier kernels had the same issue).
Yes. Arm with Mali GPU. Bleeding edge!!! I do have the system in a usable state with dark theme but the occasional app doesn't default to the system theme. So I can work but I would like to identify what the issue is as other desktop environments don;t exhibit this behavior.
I'm guessing it is a MATE desktop to hardware specific configuration issue even if that configuration is a compile time consideration.
PS. Manjaro is the only distro that provides a (semi) supported download for the Odroid N2(+). All other distros are community efforts. Maybe Armbian as well but I don't know if Armbian has MATE.
@tkn Your comment about transparency. Is there something I can do to check that and change that setting?
I don't think so. I suspect it is probably something hardcoded in one of the GTK3 libraries. That is something I know nothing about. You need a GTK guru for this.
It's hardware dependent. The full bug is on an ARM cpu + MALI GPU.
You can't reproduce it on a X86_64
The only thing you can test on X86_64 is mate-terminal -> Edit -> Profile preferences -> Colors:
if i select a background color, the corresponding button is filled with that color.
if i close that menu and open it again , that button is still filled with that color except when the color was black, then the button is filled with nothing/transparency/white
Only on Ubuntu-MATE 22.04
I agree it's a GTK problem because the problem does not occur with xterm but does in mate-terminal and gnome-terminal. And black appears to be used as a transparency. Anyway thanks for all the help!
I've brought it to the attention of the Ubuntu Odroid custodian.
