I posted this to the subreddit but I figured the forum might be more active:
I can't seem to find any info that works here, I tried using GNOME's looking glass + editing the gnome-shell.css of my theme, but none of it seems to be applying even with restarts (and I'm definitely on the right theme). I basically just want to make it so focused apps have a semi transparent white background behind the taskbar icon, like Windows 10 would. How can I go about this? I'm on Zorin 17.3 Core.
The closest I've gotten is determining that the .app-well-app class targets these app icons, and if I set a background color it does show up correctly. I just can't figure out how to target only focused apps.
Instead of the Zorin Taskbar, You could use the Gnome Extension Dash to Panel - GNOME Shell Extensions which offers that in the Settings. So, You could set it up there manually.
That is what I've ended up doing so far, and I've been able to get pretty close to what I'm after with its built in settings and by editing the extension's stylesheet.css now. One thing I can't quite crack is setting a transition for the app background color - I've identified the right rule, because I can set it to something obvious like background-color: red and see the change, however adding transition: all 1s; (again, one second just to be able to obviously see the change) or transition: background-color 1s; doesn't seem to work, would you happen to know anything about this? I also understand if that's beyond the scope of this forum now, I can search elsewhere if so.
Replying again just because I guess I accidentally deleted my post somehow by clicking the "show more" dots...? And when I tried to hit "Undelete" it just gave me an error, I refreshed the page and it's just gone. Anyway... what I had said before Ponce-De-Leon just responded, for anyone looking here later, was that I'm now using Dash to Panel and I've gotten it customized pretty much exactly how I wanted, with the only exception being I couldn't get background color transitions working for the app icons, I knew I had the right selector since adding background-color: red as a test worked fine, but putting transition: all 1s or transition: background-color 1s had no effect. Sorry about the additional notification for this.
Sadly, I am unwilling to refer much to Gnome on .css due to the changes in Gnome that make comments outdated quickly or are blocked by Gnome Scripts and soft-blocking like gresource.
I can happily help style any Desktop Environment - but not Gnome.
Summary
The users can struggle and when they get tired of it - they might finally join the rest of us in standing up to and fighting back against Gnomes Microsoft Style of dominance, control and user thwarting.
Until such time, they have been happy to silently let us resist Gnome alone. And now we have LibAdwaita for it.
So, they can try to apply css styles to Gnome alone.
