Excellent work! Thank you for this superb distribution.
However I miss the Ambiant-Mate theme from 16.04, I am not keen in particular over the green scrollbars and the fact that dark windows like mate-terminal (which I use a lot) have a green scrollbar with a light background.
I'm not personally a huge fan of the green scrollbars either. Too much green!
← 16.04 | 18.04 →
- 16.04 - I prefer the grey
- 18.04 - I prefer the green
0 voters
A possible problem with patching the Ambiant-MATE (non dark) theme for the terminal is that someone using custom colours may prefer a light background - in which they see the new, unwanted dark scrollbar. Then again, do most users work in a terminal with the default/dark colours to justify that?
- My terminal has a light background
- My terminal has a dark background (or the default)
- What's a terminal?
0 voters
I remember in the past (maybe 15.04 or 15.10?), the terminal's scroll bar was actually too dark posing some contrast problems.
On a slightly related note, I was recently making some minor tweaks to the theme for 19.10 to try and visually adhere to what we had in 16.04. This was actually my first attempt at tweaking GTK themes, since I'm not actually familiar with them.
Since 16.10 with the move to GTK3, the underlying toolkit changed from GTK2 to GTK3. So some things may not look "exactly" the same any more, like alternating row colours. 
2 Likes
If a product is worse than the previous one (gtk3) then it should not be released. And if it is still released, then it should not be adopted by Ubuntu mate. I would have continued with gtk2, until gtk3 was up to the job. After all, if we as users were happy with broken new products, we would be using mainstream Ubuntu, not Ubuntu-mate.
The move from GTK2 to GTK3 is a significant change, but a necessary one. It's largely down to external factors out of an official flavour's control. MATE have completed the move to GTK3 on their roadmap, so versions after 1.16 are GTK3 only.
The development of GTK (by GNOME) affects the whole Linux ecosystem in general. You may hear of complaints like GNOME's massive simplification in their UI and themes breaking far too frequently with new GTK 3.xx versions.
Kudos to the MATE team for doing the monotonous job of updating the toolkit. 
Even if GTK3 isn't as "great" as GTK2, it's the latest spec developers use for writing Linux desktop apps (there's also Qt). I personally will stick with 16.04 for its life cycle. It's subtle things, but noticeable to GNOME 2 fans which is what that topic is dedicated for. 
There is some good to GTK3 - Ubuntu MATE 16.10 onwards supports HiDPI displays, and the codebase has common ground with upstream GNOME. Some say that by GTK4, GTK3 will have stabilised to that of GTK2 today, which is now in maintenance mode. 