Do we really care about regressions in Ambience when Yaru is the new default theme now?
Especially when there is the choice between regressing GNOME/Yaru and Unity/Ambiance, I think the supported one should be glitch-free. Or will there really be a complete breakage of the Ambience theme?
Indeed Yaru has the precedence, just i’d prefer not to regress that too, since it still has users (ubuntu-unity don’t think moved to that yet).
Anyways, we might probably workaround this by just enabling the terminal patch when using Ambiance/Radiance themes. As eventually they’re the only ones which need this change.
Not just Ambiance, Numix, Greybird also adapted their code based on that patch. Except they doesn’t use transparent background. If Yaru doesn’t want that Yaru should simply set scrollbar-bg-color and remove the bottom border.
The patch breaks the scrollbar in GNOME. It’s not a theme issue or a question of preference: It looks completely broken on bright backgrounds and cannot be fixed by the Yaru team. It is NOT a theme issue at all, the scrollbar just moved out of bounds.
Now we have the Unity memorial glitch.
I had noticed that too. Was this intentional?
Theme evaluation
Hello! I have been asked to evaluate the Yaru theme and look for any glitches.
This is not an exhaustive review. It focuses on the shell, file manager, and other default apps. Some of these issues may be in the apps or toolkit, rather than in Yaru itself. I’m happy to report individual bugs if someone will let me know where is the best place to do that. Update: these are now all reported in GitHub.
Focus and selection
Some buttons, menus, and tabs have a dashed focus ring…
…while other buttons, and all text fields, have a solid focus ring.
It’s not clear whether this is deliberate, but it looks inconsistent. Update: reported as #844.
The text selection color scheme is very different on a light background (black text, #bfebfa highlight) than on a dark background (white text, #0f95c5 highlight), but the focus ring orange is identical (#e95420).
Either the text selection colors should be identical too, or the focus ring color should change in the same way and by the same amount. Update: reported as #845.
Menus
Menus have rounded corners in native GTK apps…
…and even in LibreOffice, but not in Firefox.
This is odd because Firefox does correctly include the tail at the top of dropdown menus. Update: reported as #846.
DarkShell menus are hard to see against dark backgrounds, unless your screen is at just the right angle. Perhaps they could have some kind of halo (visible only in the dark) as well as a shadow (visible only in the light). Update: reported as #847.
Other toolkit elements
An active tab label is 1px lower than inactive tab labels. Maybe this is intentional, but since inactive tabs have no visible outlines to indicate that, it looks accidental. Update: reported as #854.
The grabbing hand cursor is hardly recognizable as a hand. There are no fingertips, no visible knuckles, and the thumbtip is square. Update: reported as #855.
Files app
Icons
The default app icons are a mixture of Ubuntu-Touch-style rounded icons (such as Calculator, Calendar, and Shotwell) and icons with varied shapes (such as Firefox, LibreOffice, and Mahjongg). Update: already reported as #821.
I don’t think it would be a good idea for all icons to be the same shape, even if we could achieve it. But I’m sure that shaping them manually will never, ever achieve it. Many app vendors would either not know, not bother, or disagree. And for as long we tried, OS releases would continue to look sloppy.
The Rhythmbox icon is, I think, highly unlikely to be recognized except by people who remember what the icon used to look like (in which case they might recognize the color scheme). For everyone else, it’s just staring. 
Update: reported as #859.
The icons for Language Support and Software & Updates Settings are both globes, one containing a world map, the other against a background of a world map. There’s nothing language-y or software-ish in either icon, to hint at which is which. Update: reported as #861.
Ubuntu Software and Software Updater have icons that differ only in colour. This makes them harder to tell apart (especially, but not only, if you’re colour-blind). Update: reported as #862.
In addition, the As are back-to-front. When a font varies in stroke thickness, NE/SW strokes are thinner, NW/SE strokes are thicker.
Finally, it’s not a good idea for an app icon to include a pretend progress bar, which could be mistaken for a real one. Update: reported as #863.
The aspect ratio of folders in icons is noticeably inconsistent between the “Files” app icon (tangible area 32px/28px ≈ 1.14) and actual folder icons (84px/78px ≈ 1.08). The app icon looks more realistic, at least for a folder that would contain A4 or US Letter paper. Update: reported as #864.
The arrow and line in the sidebar Downloads icon has a very different aspect ratio (12px/15px = 0.8) than the arrow and line on the Downloads folder icon (22px/38px ≈ 0.58). Update: reported as #865.
The icon for a text file is a piece of paper, typeset, with rounded corners. Real folders may occasionally have rounded corners, but real sheets of paper hardly ever do, especially when they have lots of text on them. This also makes icons with thumbnails inconsistent in style with icons without thumbnails. Update: reported as #866.
The Ubuntu Desktop is only ever a rectangle on a computer screen. It’s not a physical object (though it uses one as a metaphor), or song that can be played, or a database that can be queried, or anything else with a variety of visual interpretations. It exists, at any moment, as a precise block of pixels, and Ubuntu knows exactly what those pixels are.
Despite this, neither of the icons for the Desktop look anything like the Desktop. One is light grey, with a launcher but no top bar, and the other is blue with a top bar but no launcher. And both have rounded corners, when the actual desktop doesn’t (and neither do the other sidebar icons).
Ideally, I think, both icons would be a miniature of your current actual desktop (with the sidebar version desaturated), which is something an icon theme can’t do by itself. But next best would be a miniature of the default desktop background. Perhaps this could be auto-generated whenever a new default background is committed. Update: reported as #867.
The icons for the Trash / Rubbish Bin are also inconsistent between the desktop and the Files sidebar. Not just in style (which is excusable, to reduce garishness of the Files window), but in what they represent: a recycle bin with no lid, vs. a grooved metal garbage can with a handled lid and something sitting in front of it. Update: reported as #868.
Finally, icons for volumes are a mix of sidebar-style outlines and app-style rounded rectangles. Update: reported as #869.
Firefox is not correctly sucking up the gtk3 code. : /
Firefox has brought me sleepless nights already. It’s not a native gtk3 app (as you may know) but is has some “gtk3 code sucking capabilities”
Chrome on the other hand, sucks up everything correctly.
Edit: the best place to report bugs is github
Most other issues seem to be icon related. I’m a bit torn here since 95% of the icon work is done by @snwh
You could either report those on our GitHub repo or on @snwh 's github repo
This one comes from a limitation in gnome-shell. A dashed focus ring is not possible there. So either we change the gtk focus ring to be solid, or we leave it as it is. There are several differences between gnome shell and the gtk theme which we accepted as a design limitation and/or a possibility to divide the the shell from the apps. 
Thanks @mpt, this is a very interesting analysis 
Yes please, discuss so much content here would be a mess 
here is the github repo link https://github.com/ubuntu/yaru
There is also a wiki page with the reasons behind some decisions
That would be great if the patch could be made theme aware then.
One issue with the broken terminal scrollbar (which is seldom mentioned) is that they are always shown regardless of the content of the window. If the terminal is nearly empty no scrollbars should be shown at all. I hope that diabling the patch for Ubuntu/Yaru will fix that as well.
There is no way to stick an icons into shapes automatically in GNOME Shell. But we can reach an agreement with software developers (Mozilla, The Document Foundation and Remmina) about the creating of Suru icons already from their side.
I think it could be faster if we provide the Suru icons for this pre installed third party apps after having a legal agreement with them.
@mpt For the other pre installed apps missing the Suru icon we have a pull request already: https://github.com/ubuntu/yaru/pull/839
These are GNOME shell popups and have no access to the gtk theme in terms of checking for which gtk theme is active, dark or light.
We would have loved to add the same dropshadow as we’ve added to the OSD popups
Sadly this is not possible (here comes the strange part ->) unless we remove the little arrow
We often talked about removing the arrow for having the box-shadow, but we were not sure if removing the arrow would not take off more usability than the box shadow brings.
We could really consider this change - @madsrh @c-lobrano what do you say?
This would be a huge deviation from upstream, which we usually tend to minimize. I would avoid it
It’s also a very big usability loss. The menus look detached from the element you clicked
Hi @c-lobrano, Community theme (installed using this ppa) with Ubuntu 18.04 .
Now I see there’s also a package named yaru-theme
Thanks~
Apps already vary in whether they use the dark theme or not, right? For example, Gimp and Shotwell use the dark theme, while Files and Calculator don’t.
If apps can already do that, it wouldn’t be scandalous for the shell to do it too. That is, use the same color values as the default dark theme, regardless of whether you’re using a dark-themed app.
We addressed the contrast problem by increasing changing the OSD/popup border base tone.
Some more info:
Having the same color as gtk uses produces a strange “wall of greyness” because unlike Unity7, GNOME shell can not merge the menus into the top panel nor it can merge the non-CSD apps into the top panel unless you use extensions
Thus you can end up with THREE stripes on the top: shell panel, menus, titlebars. But his can also be found in this very thread
It’s not like these color are randomly chosen. It would be great if you could read up some of the discussions in this thread or github. It’s kind of exhausting to elude the whole history of all decisions
But it is our fault to not have a more up to date wiki - sorry. I planed to update it AFTER 18.10. and didnt see this coming before 18.10
We also discussed an even lighter shell by having light popup menus like the dialogues
But this broke again the feeling of the popups “growing” out of the dark top panel
Thus to be a bit more friendly and overcome the contrast problem of dark headerbars, we use light notifications and dialogues in the shell. The rest is dark.
Edit: for the topic “wall of darkness” or “wall of grey” just search in this topic for “wall of”
The Yaru team is happy to announce a new stable release!
The changes are mainly bug fixes:
enjoy 
Hi, I wrote a separate topic to discuss the space usage on the screen top, which is something that, using a laptop, affects me everyday. Programs like PyCharm or Slack which I use in my study and work, waste space using thick windows decorations. My proposal is to use thinner decorations for windows that don’t use the GTK Headerbar (i.e. don’t have buttons on the decoration), similarly to what is done on Mac OS systems.
<rant>I think this is too much of getting in the way of the user for a desktop which aims to the opposite</rant>
