Was there a change in GTK 3 that makes the themes not effect the panels? I’ve tried a few and they don’t seem to skin the panels the way they should. Even GTK 3 ones like these don’t work right. Am I missing something?
GTK+ 3 themes definitely can affect the panel, but I’ve seen some that don’t seem right in MATE. I think these themes were just written for GNOME 3 and are missing the code for the MATE panel, since GNOME no longer uses this code. (The GNOME shell doesn’t use GTK+ itself and is themed separately.) Maybe a theme expert will know more. I’d suggest you nicely ask the theme developer to add support for the MATE panel.
Okay, thanks. Then why don’t GTK 2 themes seem to skin the panel either? All themes seem to skin it like a menu instead of treating it separately like a panel. There’s also no option in MATE Tweak to skin the panels–just to skin the window controls and titlebar. In the screenshot of the theme, it shows the panel skinned differently. How can I get it to be skinned like that?
The panel doesn't use GTK+ 2 any more. It's using GTK+ 3.
But don’t the window controls and everything use GTK 3 as well? I thought GTK 3 was compatible(ish) with GTK 2 themes.
GTK+ 3 and 2 themes are essentially completely different, just most themes include one of each that try to look as close to each other as possible. MATE and the built-in apps are now all GTK+ 3, but older apps like, say, GIMP that still use GTK+ 2 need the GTK+ 2 theme.
The MATE panel is just different from other desktops’ panels, so it seems a GTK+ 3 theme will need to specifically support it, and not all of theme do if they weren’t tested with MATE.
I suspect this is by design. It had been decided by Canonical that indicator applet WILL be monochromatic - all black. So your panel must be black to accommodate it. This is fine if you use one of the black and orange themes. They look ugly to me, I will never use one of those.
Linux is beginning to resemble a Microsoft product that tells
YOU how it is going to look and function.
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Is it possible to switch back to GTK 2? I don’t care about HiDPI support and most other GTK 3 improvements. I’d much rather have full support for GTK 2 themes.
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Not with the current versions of MATE Desktop or Ubuntu MATE. You can keep using Ubuntu MATE 16.04 for another year, which is the last version using GTK+ 2 and is supported until April 2019.