[ubuntu-art] freshened metacity theme

[Young Hahn]

Out of curiosity, at what color depth are you running X?

I have so far been optimizing for rendering speed, but definitely was not
expecting to accomodate 8bit or lower color depths. I would be surprised to
find individuals running such machines to find the icons/gtk flare to be
bearable at 8bit.

don't get me wrong--i think it's a good idea to aim for accessibility to
those on more dated hardware. but having run X in 8 bit color before I
wonder whether it would be a better idea to fork some UI themes (metacity,
gtk, icons) specifically for those on older hardware.

on the other hand, if you're encountering problems on 13 or 15 bit color
depths, please let me know and maybe we can fix what's wrong.


yh

ps. another option would be to offer several default themes--i was already
thinking about a pixmap free non-striped version (with gradients however),
and now it seems a flat color version might also be worthwhile...

On 2/3/06, Martin-Éric Racine <q-funk at iki.fi> wrote:
>
> On 03/02/06, Henrik Nilsen Omma <henrik at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> > Martin-Éric Racine wrote:
> >
> > >Unfortunately, all that eyecandy renders very poorly on low-spec
> > >graphic cards. There is a good reason why the current Metacity theme
> > >we have is very spartan: it renders well in a variety of situations,
> > >including on laptops with a small color palette.
> > >
> > That's an interesting point. Could you please elaborate? Which themes
> > are fine and which are too heavy? Human is OK while clearlooks 2 is too
> > slow? Are themes with bitmaps in them faster or slower than those with
> > xml-based blending?
>
> Things like graphic-based window widgets with lots of highlights and
> shadows render horribly on laptops or other similar low-spec graphic
> hardware. What works best is having as few colors as possible and
> keeping those within the so-called Web-friendly palette, as much as
> possible.
>
> A flat theme like Clearlooks work well, because the window frames are
> one big flat color zone, so a Human variant based on that would be
> best. Any time that stripes or similar decorations are added (or at
> least, stripes based on just a slightly different shade of the same
> color), it hampers rendering on low-spec graphics hardware. Ditto
> whenever using images for the widgets.
>
> If any stripes or decorations are used, then solid colors that fit the
> Web-friendly paletter or, even better, the old vga16 palette would be
> the best option, both from a perspective of rendering resource usage
> and from a perspective of offering a crisp theme that looks great even
> on low-spec graphics hardware.
>
> Here, I currently use Human from ubuntu-artwork 0.2.27-1.1, but this
> is installed on a pure Debian setup, which I need to build packages
> that go straight into Debian (and then propagade into Ubuntu via the
> automated Universe buildd).
>
> --
> Martin-Éric Racine
> http://q-funk.iki.fi
>
> --
> ubuntu-art mailing list
> ubuntu-art at lists.ubuntu.com
> https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-art
>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-art/attachments/20060203/c95a25ee/attachment.htm