While we’ve been using “Greybird” as our default theme for a few releases now, I’ve continuously worked on it. The goal was not only to ensure the quality of the theme in terms of a flawless Xfce4 and Gtk3 performance and extras like supporting Unity or Compiz, but also to visually keep it up-to-date.

More contrast

After having had a tendency to soften colors and contrasts, I’ve decided to take a (bold?) step and counter this tendency. This is why the changes for the upcoming Quantal release might seem more drastic then between the releases before. After playing with it for a while, I realized that going this direction half-way wouldn’t work well, so while I’m aware that there might be quite a bit of whining (partly because people may miss the “old Greybird”, partly because change always provokes whining) I really hope that many and most of you will fall in love with the changes the way I did while working on it.

Built around Gtk2

Since the Xfce developer community decided a while ago not to port their (and consequently: our) desktop to Gtk3 in the next release (4.12) and instead to postpone that until performance and memory issues with Gtk3 would be fixed (keeping my fingers crossed), I built the refresh of Greybird around Gtk2. As this will be the main platform for our users’ desktop experience, I’ll try my best to port all the changes to Gtk3 as perfectly as possible, so that hopefully no-one will notice whether an app is Gtk2 or Gtk3 (because I firmly believe that users shouldn’t have to care about things like that).

So, without much further ado and blathering, here goes a representational compilation for our Greybird refresh.

Testing

If any of you feel like testing this, feel free to download the tarball @github or git-clone the repository to easily stay up to date.

Feedback

Constructive feedback – either via the Mailing list or on IRC – is always appreciated!

The author of this post is Simon Steinbeiß, who is the Xubuntu Artwork Lead. In addition to Xubuntu, he works extensively on the Shimmer Project and the Xfce Design SIG.

It is the time to submit your ideas on how to make Xubuntu better: the brainstorming phase for the 12.10 roadmap is on now! It is also a good time to start contributing, since every item needs an assignee – without assignees, even good ideas will not be approved – thus not implemented.

Everybody is welcome to submit ideas to the roadmap brainstorm until the end of week 19 (13th of May). To do this, edit the table in the section New features, major bugs, improvements to community on the roadmap page for Quantal. Please add new ideas to the end of the table so it is easier to follow submissions.

If you are willing to implement a feature too (or work on an item when “implementing” is not applicable), you can add yourself to the assignee field on any item with no assignee, including your own submission. Please note that the default application specifications will need assignees as well. Feel free to add yourself as an assignee to any of these too, even if they had an assignee already – multiple assignees will most probably lead to better objectivity.

If you set yourself as assignee to any item and are not an active member in the Xubuntu community, please send an email to the Xubuntu development mailing list to introduce yourself quickly. Unless we hear from assignees before the end of week 20 (20th of May), ideas will not be approved anyway. Approving will happen during week 20 by the Xubuntu team.

To read more about approving and the roadmap phases generally, refer to the Roadmap phases or refer to the partly simplified infographic above.

While there are many people who project a competition between Ubuntu and its flavors, I’d like to set a (small) sign that this is definitely not the case.

With respect to our default theme, “Greybird”, I have been striving to expand the supported window-managers in the last release “Oneiric Ocelot, 11.10” (metacity, emerald), to give people who want to use Compiz in Xubuntu an easy way to use our default look.

So for this cycle (“Precise Pangolin”) I started working on adding support for Unity in Greybird. Unfortunately there were so many things to do in the artwork-department during this cycle that I could only start a very short while ago, so we’re far past the freezes. So far our testers report that things are working well and if there are no blockers coming up, this will hopefully land in Precise via the -proposed repository.

Try for yourself!

You can try this version of Greybird even before it lands in any repository very easily by downloading the 0.8.1 release and unpacking the theme into ~/.themes (if that directory doesn’t exist, simply create it).

Unfortunately there is currently no built-in way of switching to any other than the short list of themes that Ubuntu ships by default in Unity, so those of you who want to give this a try will have to use something like “GNOME Tweak Tool”, “Ubuntu Tweak” or “My Unity”.

If you find any bugs please file them on launchpad! Thanks in advance and happy testing!

A few screenshots

And finally, since everyone loves screenshots, here go a few of Unity with Greybird in action, taken by our tester Carlos.

The author of this post is Simon Steinbeiß, who is the Xubuntu Artwork Lead. In addition to Xubuntu, he works extensively on the Shimmer Project and the Xfce Design SIG.