Problems with GTK2 themes (such as human-theme) on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS MATE + poll

Development Discussion
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4

@wolfman

Thank you for idea! But of course I tried your suggestion before.
Now I tried it again and discovered, that not only Human and Human-Clearlooks are affected but also:

  • BlueMenta (gtk2+gtk3, from mate-themes package, installed by default);
  • ClearlooksRe (gtk2, from marco-common package, installed by default);
  • ContrastHighInverse (gtk2+gtk3, from mate-themes package, installed by default);
  • DarkRoom (gtk2, from human-theme package);
  • Dopple (gtk2, from marco-common package, installed by default);
  • Dopple-Left (gtk2, from marco-common package, installed by default);
  • Homosapien (gtk2, from community-themes package);
  • Impression (gtk2, from community-themes package);
  • Menta (gtk2+gtk3, from mate-themes package, installed by default);
  • Night-Impression (gtk2, from community-themes package);
  • Shiny (gtk2, from mate-themes package, installed by default);
  • Spidey (gtk2, from marco-common package, installed by default);
  • Spidey-Left (gtk2, from marco-common package, installed by default);
  • Splint (gtk2, from marco-common package);
  • Splint-Left (gtk2, from marco-common package);
  • Turrican (gtk2, from community-themes package).

See screenshot.

dopple.png450×582 34.4 KB

So aforementioned themes (and packages human-theme, marco-common, mate-themes, community-themes) are affected too.
Some have gray/silver background, some have low-contrast, some have wrong colors.

But problem is likely with GTK, it seems that some color defaults are hardcoded and changed since 16.04 LTS.

I tried other methods to set gtk-color-scheme for Human theme:

  • gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.interface gtk-color-scheme 'fg_color:#101010\nbg_color:#E6DDD5\nbase_color:#FFF\ntext_color:#1A1A1A\nselected_bg_color:#8F5F4A\nselected_fg_color:#FFF\ntooltip_bg_color:#F5F5B5\ntooltip_fg_color:#000'
  • gsettings set org.mate.interface gtk-color-scheme 'fg_color:#101010\nbg_color:#E6DDD5\nbase_color:#FFF\ntext_color:#1A1A1A\nselected_bg_color:#8F5F4A\nselected_fg_color:#FFF\ntooltip_bg_color:#F5F5B5\ntooltip_fg_color:#000'

- both do not work.

For some users "traditional desktop experience" should be supported by traditional theming (is it correct assumption, @Wimpy ? ).

How should I check that Marco honors my ~/.gtkrc, ~/.config/gtk-2.0/gtkrc and ~/.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini? It seems that it ignores them even in clean Ubuntu 16.04 LTS MATE and Ubuntu 18.04 LTS MATE.

If I specify theme by environment variable as

GTK2_RC_FILES=/usr/share/themes/Human/gtk-2.0/gtkrc gtk-demo

or

GTK_THEME=Human gtk-demo # just testing, I understand that this command is for GTK 3 only

it does not change window border too. What is wrong?

If I select GTK 3 based theme such as Menta the command GTK_THEME=Menta gtk3-demo works as expected. And other GTK 3 themes too (Ambiant-MATE-Dark, Ambiant-MATE, BlackMATE, BlueMenta, Blue-Submarine, ContrastHighInverse, GreenLaguna, Green-Submarine, Radiant-MATE, TraditionalGreen, TraditionalOk).

So the question remains - is it possible to use old GTK2 themes in 18.04 LTS?