Help, I Broke my Theming

infinitymdm

After seeing the issues with Plata-Noir theme on Budgie 10.6, I switched over to Materia-dark. However, I'm finding I really miss those deep darks and rounded corners. So today I found Skeuos on gnome-look, and being new to packaging, I thought I would build myself a package for it.

Initially I had some success. I built a package with just Skeuos-Blue-Dark, installed, and set the theme in Budgie Desktop Settings. When I did so I got a bright theme instead of a dark theme though, so I swapped back to Materia-dark and went back to tinkering.

After that I uninstalled plata-theme, thinking I probably don't need it anymore, and then tried to build a Skeuos package with all the Skeuos theme variants included instead of just Skeuos-Blue-Dark.

Since doing that, all of my themes appear to be broken. Any theme I select doesn't seem to make any changes to my desktop's appearance. They're all a bright white that looks like Plata, I think. Since no themes have any affect I'm really not sure.

How can I fix my theming and get Skeuos working properly? Please advise me on where to start!

infinitymdm

For context, here's the "working" (as in shows up in Budgie Desktop Settings) package.yml:

name       : skeuos-gtk-theme
version    : '20220315'
release    : 1
source     :
    - https://github.com/daniruiz/skeuos-gtk/archive/refs/tags/20220315.tar.gz : 078f51f46ee2fb3ea806f5fa49ba323dab96315968c6297e8e2e1a3e43e8a727
homepage   : https://github.com/daniruiz/skeuos-gtk
license    :
    - GPL-3.0-or-later
component  :
    - desktop.theme
summary    :
    - Skeuos GTK Theme
description: |
    A clean & classy flat theme.
install    : |
    rm -rf themes/*/{cinnamon}

    install -Ddm00644 themes/Skeuos-Blue-Dark $installdir/usr/share/themes/Skeuos-Blue-Dark/

infinitymdm

Additional information: after reinstalling budgie-desktop-branding-fortitude-plus, the high-contrast theme appears to do something. No colors change, but borders are clearer.

GZGavinZhao

@infinitymdm Change the following part:

If there's a Makefile, usually this implies that you have to build something and install it (using %make and %make_install).

Also, theme builders usually use Sass (ending in .scss or .sass), which needs to be compiled by sassc or dart-sass. From the GitHub language insight, you can see that Skeuos does contain .scss files, so here sassc is needed as a build dependency.

builddeps:
  - sassc
build: |
  %make
install: |
  %make_install
  # Now all the themes are in `$installdir/usr/share/themes/`
  # Do your customization (e.g. deleting cinnamon)

P.S. That is indeed a very nice alternative to Plata. Maybe I should try that someday.

infinitymdm

GZGavinZhao This is helpful. I assumed I didn't need to build because of the writeup on Skeuos's gnome-look page, but perhaps I was incorrect.

Unfortunately, this doesn't fix the slightly larger problem, which is that no matter what theme I apply I don't see any effect (with the exception of clearer borders with HighContrast).

infinitymdm

I've just removed gnome-control-center since we have budgie-control-center, and after restarting lightdm the taskbar/panel is back to the normal dark grey... so maybe that's progress. UPDATE: It appears that this is related to the "Built-in theme" setting in Budgie Desktop Settings. Disabling this turns the panel white again.

Colors, title bars, icons, and window corner roundness all appear to stay the same no matter which theme I select. I still have a problem.

GZGavinZhao

@infinitymdm I believe you have to run ./generate-color-theme.sh: https://github.com/daniruiz/skeuos-gtk/blob/master/generate-color-theme.sh

I'll take a look at this tomorrow because I also want to get it on my system 🙂

infinitymdm

GZGavinZhao I hope you can get it working. My understanding was that this script is for generating custom themes with specified highlight colors (which I will probably play with after I get themes working again in the first place), and that the other themes are provided OOTB.

Unfortunately for me, it doesn't seem like I'll be using any theming for a while...

pomon

More want to create a package or have a theme? You can download from the page you give

git clone https://github.com/daniruiz/Skeuos-gtk.git 
cd skeuos-gtk/themes/
cp -R Skeuos-Blue-Dark ~/.themes    # for the user_
sudo cp -R Skeuos-Blue-Dark /usr/share/themes    # for  the system_

riffer

pomon

That's what I was thinking. I just download and expand the file and put it in the themes folder.

infinitymdm

pomon riffer GZGavinZhao This is good, but this doesn't address the problem I'm having.

My problem is not (primarily) that I can't get Skeuos to work. The issue I'm having is that I can't get any theme to work. Not even officially supported themes like Materia-dark, Arc, Vertex, et cetera. Nothing I do in Budgie Desktop Settings has any effect. This is the problem I'm trying to fix. Can you help me troubleshoot this?

GZGavinZhao

@Infinity Here's my version that worked:

I'm going to add it to my personal repo. As per the forum policy, I can't directly share it with you, but you probably have enough context clues to find it ^_~

name       : skeuos-theme
version    : 20220315
release    : 1
source     :
    - https://github.com/daniruiz/skeuos-gtk/archive/refs/tags/20220315.tar.gz : 078f51f46ee2fb3ea806f5fa49ba323dab96315968c6297e8e2e1a3e43e8a727
homepage   : https://github.com/daniruiz/skeuos-gtk
license    : GPL-3.0-or-later
component  : desktop.theme
summary    : Skeuos GTK Theme
description: |
    A clean & classy flat theme for GTK3 & GTK4.
builddeps  :
    - inkscape
    - sassc
# setup      : |
#     ./generate-color-theme.sh
build      : |
    %make
install    : |
    %make_install

GZGavinZhao

What is the output of:

$ budgie-desktop --version

infinitymdm

GZGavinZhao Here's the output of budgie-desktop --version:

budgie-desktop 10.6
Copyright © 2014-2022 Budgie Desktop Developers

GZGavinZhao

infinitymdm

sudo eopkg check budgie-desktop budgie-control-center budgie-desktop-view
sudo eopkg it --reinstall budgie-desktop budgie-control-center budgie-desktop-view

Then restart your computer and see if it works.

infinitymdm

GZGavinZhao All checks return OK.
I had stopped short of reinstalling budgie-desktop, but after doing so just now, nothing seems to have changed. Themes still aren't working after reinstalling & rebooting.

GZGavinZhao

infinitymdm
The last thing I can think of is to install plata-theme... Since it used to be the default theme for Budgie, I suspect the problem might be that. If you want to switch a theme, I wouldn't recommend removing/uninstalling it. Just switch it (i.e. keep it on your system, but don't use it).

If that still doesn't work, maybe open an issue on https://github.com/BuddiesOfBudgie/budgie-desktop, and also tell them you've already ran eopkg check.

infinitymdm

I've just figured it out. One of my package.ymls I had tried included a line something like this:

install -Ddm00644 themes $installdir/usr/share/themes/

The problem with this line is that it sets the permissions on the themes folder to r--r--r-- instead of r-xr-xr-x. Since Budgie-Desktop-Settings doesn't have execute permissions, it can't apply the themes. And since the permissions got set on the entire themes folder, none of my other installed themes worked either.

The line should have been:

install -Ddm00755 themes $installdir/usr/share/themes/

which would have set the file mode bits correctly for execution. Since I'm using %make_install now, this doesn't matter anyways, but it's good to have figured out the issue.

I fixed this by executing sudo chmod -Rf ugo+x /usr/share/themes in order to correct the file mode bits on the themes directory and its contents.

Thanks to all for your help and suggestions. This issue is now resolved, and I have the themes (including Skeuos) working on my system via my own package.