For me a worse problem is Adwaita not having a “darker” variant in the sense of Yaru light. White titlebars are awful with dark themed apps, having dark titlebars with everything light is a much better trade off (sometimes statusbars look bad on dark apps though). Short of having all three light, darker and dark, I think Yaru makes a better trade off here.
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What dark apps, though? Even Slack uses a light theme. And Sublime and friends probably have light themes as well.
I think he is talking about server side titlebars. And he has a point.
So when apps do not have client side decorations (close button etc) they receive a tiltebar on top of their actual window. If it is a light app and a dark titlebar, it blends quiet well with the dark panel. But when its a dark app, a light titlebar and then a dark panel it could look kind of weird.
Since most people seem to prefer the current mixed style, and we now have an upstream + dark headerbar build, I could imagine it’s possible to extract a “bright”-theme without our headerbar modification theme some day in the future (but surely not for this cycle)
One thing is having an app light theme and another thing is wanting to use a light theme for that app. Many people prefer a dark background in their editor because they’re looking at it all day long. Or prefer to switch from light to dark background or viceversa according to their ambient lighting conditions. In these cases the darker variant in the desktop and window manager is a better, more versatile, fit. It adapts to both kind of app themes, along the day and across apps. Except that you prefer a legacy white titlebar on a black app background to a legacy black titlebar on a white app background, which I doubt.
Some people do prefer a dark background in their editor, and the same people try to use the dark theme in all other apps. Good for them (even though I’d say it will ultimately be bad for their eyes). I’ve never said Ubuntu shouldn’t have a dark theme.
I’m saying it should have a light theme as well.
And I just remarked that short of having three variants, Yaru has made a better choice than Adwaita. Of course, without looking at the cost term of the equation, three is better than two.
Wasn’t that one inspired by Ambiance?
I think so, but what’s the point?
I can understand your needs of course, but I also recognize that the main part of the window is almost white, so deciding for a variation of the theme, it was more logic for me to provide a darker one (with main parts dark) than a lighter one with only the headerbars bright.
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OK, to sum up: I’d really like to see a light GNOME Shell theme supplied by Ubuntu (there are some third-party ones, but Yaru has set a fairly high standard of quality).
Any further improvements can stem from there.
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This is how a light theme looks like, if the headerbar is not inverted:
Apart being hard to read in a bright room inverted headerbars are also a problem for custom widgets that make use of exported colours, described here:
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That looks really good in my opinion. But just looking at it and not really testing out with the applications I use of course. Love the gray header-bar.
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Here’s a different take on the light theme:
EDIT: I tried to remove the red X (close button), but I actually prefer to keep it - like we have in Yaru
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It looks like Adwaita, not very Ubuntu.
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In light of what @jyaku is saying, would be better to have it more like beige color similar to Unity’s Radiance theme. That way it would differentiate from Adwaita.
Well, it kind of is 
With this new rebased Yaru we change as little code as possible from Adwaita. The goal is compatibility, stability and low maintenance.
Who is to say that this isn’t the new Ubuntu? 
I know what you mean.
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I actually like it being very close to Adwaita, for all intents and purposes.
The accentuating colours and the default font make things Ubuntu-ish enough.
Looking forward to the new Yaru as well, with this in mind.
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@TonyS great you like it!
The theme is very close to adwaita anyways. But we were/are inverting the headerbar color in the light theme. We upstreamed many yaru design ideas to the upstream theme, to reduce the diff.
After merging @madsrh design additions, the light theme in the light theme branch currently looks like this:
While the dark theme looks like this:
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I had opened an Issue on Github, but unfortunately it was closed. https://github.com/ubuntu/yaru/issues/919
…but unfortunately it was closed.
It wasn’t closed because we didn’t like the fully light theme. It was closed because we didn’t want to spread our efforts thin.
Reading the issue again, there seems to be a lot of love for the light theme in the comments, so hopefully those people will be happy with the new light theme.
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@madsrh, I understand, thanks for your response and effort to make Ubuntu better. I think the new approach is excellent. 