Today I have installed Bunsenlabs on my laptop. I like the homogenous look of the apps with the round corners of picom.
But there are only a few light themes which don't look very good and don't fit to the icon themes and I have trouble reading the text in dark themes.
Where can I find other themes that work? For xfce or gnome themes you take a look at gnome-look or xfce-look, but what's about distributions with window managers? Do themes for all desktops work there? I know that I need an openbox theme for the window border/titlebar but it is separate.
I'm not sure yet if I'll get used to the somewhat clunky interface. I was only able to add app launchers to the panel by installing the Whisker menu. There was no "add to dash" option at all.
In Bunsenlabs which has no DE there are three themes: one for the widgets, icons and openbox. The openbox theme can be selected in the GUI of openbox.
But the main part of a window is a gtk theme, or not? There is an option in the menu "reload gtk". Probably that is the important one.
Would the Archcraft themes work on Bunsenlabs? Then I could take a look there if they have good looking light themes.
On the github site of Bunsenlabs I found some more bunsen-themes (themes-extra). I installed them and chose a light theme, but it isn't very elegant.
I tried today to download the gtk orchis theme from vinceliuice and added an openbox theme for orchis from the archcraft site on github. It seem to have worked.
It's a strange mix of German and English in many menus and apps, e.g. thunar... A lot hasn't been translated.
Unfortunately I often get errors when I want to unzip zip files in the downloads folder with file-roller ("An error occurred while extracting the files"). For some .zip file it works. When I run "unzip filename.zip" in terminal, it always works and shows no errors.
Does someone know how to solve this? I already reinstalled file-roller and checked if unzip is installed.
I noticed also a problem with a custom cursor theme. I installed the bibata modern ice cursor theme and on the desktop and in many apps or in the topbar of the firefox browser the cursor has always the same small size regardless of the selected size, and in some apps like firefox or geary it is the real set size (a bit much here in the screenshot to show the difference)
I don´t know which themes I need for Bunsenlabs.
It takes a long time to get used to Bunsenlabs. Maximized windows can´t be moved or resized with the mouse before right-clicking on the topbar and selecting "resize" and then drag it smaller. Only then it can be moved. Strange.
Today I took a look on Lilidog in a live session to see if it has better light themes there. That is also an interesting distribution if you are looking for openbox/picom without an desktop environment. I haven't heard of that distribution before. It is a bit bloated with apps but you can choose other isos with less apps. It even has a toggle to turn on/off os-prober!
I don´t know where the green color in the dialog popups comes from. It is set Orchis grey light theme for the widgets, and in gnome or xfce Orchis grey light gtk theme usually has NO green accents but grey ones (the green colored border for active windows is set by me, but the others in the window not). I'm not sure if it is a mistake in the Orchis theme or a problem because of Bunsenlabs.
How can I get rid of that green color which doesn´t fit to the default Bunsenlabs labbe icons sage or bark? I´d like to have it grey as usual in Orchis grey theme or change the color to a custom color I like.
It is much work to setup things... very complicated. No autostart app, so you have e.g. to move the .deskop files of the apps to ~/.config/autostart.
And I wanted to have launchers for suspend and logout, not just the "exit" app (and the buttons in the whisker menu didn´t work because the commands were for xfce4 session, now I have adapted the commands), so I changed the desktop jg menu:
I'm a bit disappointed. I had hoped that a distribution that doesn't use any of the classic desktops like GNOME or Gnome based desktops like Xfce - and instead uses only a window manager - would be spared the issues with libadwaita/GTK4...
Now, unfortunately, I’ve noticed that this is an issue here as well, because the apps are made this way, and for example, GTK4 GNOME apps like the GNOME Calculator stand out visually and use CSD instead of the Openbox theme. Bunsenlabs is not noticeably faster than Xfce on my system either … Is all the effort involved in setting it up really worth it??
It will become increasingly difficult to find apps that aren't built this way and adapt to the user's theme.
Now I found many green images (checkbox and others) at assets. They seem to be part of the theme. I think I would have to change the color in all those images (png, svg).
The Desktop or Window Manager is the one Thing. How the App is made another. But this is not only a Problem with a Windows Manager. You can have that on normal Desktop Environments, too when You combine for Example GTK and QT. Or when using .deb Packages and Flatpaks.
When You want the best unified Look, You should check what Program You use and what Frankework they use and what Desktop fits to them.
