Dedicated wallpaper

BonusBrain · 2019-04-30 21:44

I might not be a Linux expert but I do know something about marketing having spent my whole working life within that industry. Branding is a vital ingredient for any product which is why folks choose an iPhone at a hugely inflated price (premium branding) instead of a cheaper Samsung that does the same job.

In the Linux world, looking at the distros I have experience with such as Manjaro, Mint, MX, BunsenLabs, Condres, Neptune, Ubuntu, Kubuntu and a host of others, users can quickly form a brand allegiance simply through their choice of a dedicated wallpaper whereas for Q4OS by default there is nothing.

Now you guys here might think this is not important but I guarantee your user base is only a fraction of what it could be if you provided potential users with the ability to create a brand identity via their desktop presentation.

q4osteam · 2019-05-01 20:03

Yes, we agree absolutely. Creating a good wallpaper set and other branding components for Plasma is one of important tasks to do. Unfortunately, it's not easy to design graphics in sufficient quality, meeting more demanding requirements. As we are a small development team, we are forced to deal with more critical tasks at the moment, for example solving Q4OS Centaurus issues and finishing the final release. In any case, we believe that we can solve the branding later.

Jaerrib · 2019-05-01 22:06

I'm open to contributing to branding in whatever way I can. Q4OS has already started with its Debonaire icon theme but could tweak the color scheme to differ from Breeze somewhat. More OS specific wallpapers would be a good step as well although I recognize that there are more pressing matters as well. That said, it would be awesome to be able to roll out the branding with the release of Centaurus.

jotapesse · 2019-05-01 22:28

I also strongly suggest that Qt/TDE and Q4OS applications should support a dark theme that makes them fit well with Plasma or GTK dark themes. I personally use Xfce with Adapa GTK theme (Nokto variant - dark), from debian repo. It would be nice to have Q4OS native apps or TDE visually better integrated with a dark theme. "Debonaire Dark"?

q4osteam · 2019-05-01 23:00

We might create a new Github project related to Q4OS branding later for all who would want to contribute. We will let to know about that in developers forum section as soon as it's available.

jessexschilling · 2019-05-01 23:57

q4osteam wrote:

We might create a new Github project related to Q4OS branding later for all who would want to contribute. We will let to know about that in developers forum section as soon as it's available.

This would be great. If I have access to an SVG Logo, I could try to spend some time on wallpaper sets. If anyone would want to go through some of my galleries online and see if any of my existing stuff would be good for wallpapers, that would also be quite helpful. (I have a huge backlog of photos and WIPs, but I am unsure of what to choose for dedicated wallpapers). Custom sounds is also something I would be willing to look into. I just need to know what format things need to be in. Anything I contribute to this would be Creative Commons most likely. Just Attribution.

Homepage
Deviantart Galleries
Audio

Jaerrib · 2019-05-02 01:19

jessexschilling wrote:

This would be great. If I have access to an SVG Logo, I could try to spend some time on wallpaper sets. If anyone would want to go through some of my galleries online and see if any of my existing stuff would be good for wallpapers, that would also be quite helpful. (I have a huge backlog of photos and WIPs, but I am unsure of what to choose for dedicated wallpapers). Custom sounds is also something I would be willing to look into. I just need to know what format things need to be in. Anything I contribute to this would be Creative Commons most likely. Just Attribution.
Homepage
Deviantart Galleries
Audio

You can find SVG logos here: https://github.com/q4os/gui-art/tree/ma … /drafts/kd

Thanks for volunteering to help! I'll browse through some of your photos and whatnot, but I can only provide feedback since I'm not a member of the Q4OS team.

Jaerrib · 2019-05-02 01:34

jotapesse wrote:

I also strongly suggest that Qt/TDE and Q4OS applications should support a dark theme that makes them fit well with Plasma or GTK dark themes. I personally use Xfce with Adapa GTK theme (Nokto variant - dark), from debian repo. It would be nice to have Q4OS native apps or TDE visually better integrated with a dark theme. "Debonaire Dark"?

Considering that the Debonaire color scheme is fairly close to Breeze, I don't think it would be too difficult to tweak it to match Breeze Dark. I'll take a poke around and share what I come up with from the TDE side as that can be done with configuring the appearance from the gui. As far as Plasma goes, sticking to Breeze Dark is an option especially as it already has a GTK version. I'm not sure what it would take to modify Adapta or anything though.

LoneCrusader · 2019-05-02 04:54

BonusBrain wrote:

Branding is a vital ingredient for any product...
In the Linux world, looking at the distros I have experience with such as Manjaro, Mint, MX, BunsenLabs, Condres, Neptune, Ubuntu, Kubuntu and a host of others, users can quickly form a brand allegiance simply through their choice of a dedicated wallpaper whereas for Q4OS by default there is nothing.

I strongly agree with this. Some of the best looking branding IMO was openSUSE's 11.x series with KDE3. Back then I had to make a few tweaks using KBFX in order to get the normal KDE3 menu with the big lizard "Start" button, but beyond that everything was great.

q4osteam wrote:

Yes, we agree absolutely. Creating a good wallpaper set and other branding components for Plasma is one of important tasks to do. Unfortunately, it's not easy to design graphics in sufficient quality, meeting more demanding requirements. As we are a small development team, we are forced to deal with more critical tasks at the moment, for example solving Q4OS Centaurus issues and finishing the final release. In any case, we believe that we can solve the branding later.

I sincerely hope "Plasma" is not going to become the sole desktop concern of Q4OS. I myself found and became a Q4OS user because of it's use of Trinity as the primary DE. If this changes, then Q4OS loses much of that which makes it unique.

q4osteam · 2019-05-02 08:22

A new project on GitHub has been created, please see https://www.q4os.org/forum/viewtopic.php?id=2643

jotapesse · 2019-05-02 09:28

Jaerrib wrote:

Considering that the Debonaire color scheme is fairly close to Breeze, I don't think it would be too difficult to tweak it to match Breeze Dark. I'll take a poke around and share what I come up with from the TDE side as that can be done with configuring the appearance from the gui. As far as Plasma goes, sticking to Breeze Dark is an option especially as it already has a GTK version. I'm not sure what it would take to modify Adapta or anything though.

Thank you! I tried to mess a bit with TDE appearance/theme/color GUI editor but didn't achieve good results. Plasma Breeze Dark is good but if you're interested there's also a port of Adapta for KDE/Plasma, also available from Debian package "adapta-kde".

https://github.com/PapirusDevelopmentTeam/adapta-kde
https://packages.debian.org/buster/adapta-kde

I don't use it myself, but for sake of a better integration effort I mention it. I'm a Xfce/GTK user primarily.

The "papirus-icon-theme" fits very well with Adapta theme. Also on Debian repos.

jotapesse · 2019-05-02 09:34

LoneCrusader wrote:

I sincerely hope "Plasma" is not going to become the sole desktop concern of Q4OS. I myself found and became a Q4OS user because of it's use of Trinity as the primary DE. If this changes, then Q4OS loses much of that which makes it unique.

I agree but I also find that TDE is somewhat limited and it's good for a niche set of users. I understand that Q4OS, besides maintaining TDE, has to keep up with innovation and offer better/functional up to date desktops, such as Plasma. I also would like to see a GTK desktop offered, preferably Xfce (near low resource usage as TDE) with very good customization possibilities.

jessexschilling · 2019-05-03 00:56

Jaerrib wrote:

Thanks for volunteering to help! I'll browse through some of your photos and whatnot, but I can only provide feedback since I'm not a member of the Q4OS team.

Thanks for linking me to the logo components! Feedback is exactly what I am looking for. Just need a nudge in some direction so I don't go overboard with a ton of contributions that no one is interested in.

BonusBrain · 2019-05-07 10:47

It's great to see this topic gaining attention. Alas my own skills do not include design and my efforts at coding were restricted to many (wasted?:D) hours customizing Superkaramba and Rainmeter themes otherwise I would also offer to help here.

Jaerrib · 2019-05-08 02:07

jotapesse wrote:

Thank you! I tried to mess a bit with TDE appearance/theme/color GUI editor but didn't achieve good results. Plasma Breeze Dark is good but if you're interested there's also a port of Adapta for KDE/Plasma, also available from Debian package "adapta-kde".
https://github.com/PapirusDevelopmentTeam/adapta-kde
https://packages.debian.org/buster/adapta-kde
I don't use it myself, but for sake of a better integration effort I mention it. I'm a Xfce/GTK user primarily.
The "papirus-icon-theme" fits very well with Adapta theme. Also on Debian repos.

I was able to get a reasonable facsimile of Breeze Dark using Control Panel>Appearances & Themes>Colors to create a sort of "Debonaire Dark". However, I did some additional adjustments outside of that, including changing the text color in Konqueror. I had some trouble with the Bourbon style menu in TDE though. The text on the right hand portion stayed light and didn't show up properly. I'm going to look into editing $HOME/.trinity/share/config/kickerrc to see if I can fix that. All in all, it seems like a script of some sort might be better suited to doing the various changes rather than expecting a user to do it all manually. Maybe someone from the Q4OS team has some suggestions? I could also check with someone from XPQ4 as they may have some theming insight as well.

q4osteam · 2019-05-08 12:16

Jaerrib wrote:

... it seems like a script of some sort might be better suited to doing the various changes rather than expecting a user to do it all manually. Maybe someone from the Q4OS team has some suggestions?

We would recommend you to go through the Lookswitcher package and see how it defines a theme. You could create your own theme by customizing an existing one. It will appear in the Lookswitcher application or in Control panel > LookNFeel > Theme manager. You can download and extract existing Lookswitcher themes in a directory this way:
$ cd work-directory
$ apt-get download lookswitcher
$ xqtrdebs

See files in "/opt/trinity/share/apps/kthememanager/themes/". The .xml and .gz files defines a theme settings, they are applied as user switches a theme. We are ready to provide a support on this, you are welcome to ask for a specific help here.

Jaerrib · 2019-05-08 22:18

q4osteam wrote:

We would recommend you to go through the Lookswitcher package and see how it defines a theme. You could create your own theme by customizing an existing one. It will appear in the Lookswitcher application or in Control panel > LookNFeel > Theme manager. You can download and extract existing Lookswitcher themes in a directory this way:
$ cd work-directory
$ apt-get download lookswitcher
$ xqtrdebs
See files in "/opt/trinity/share/apps/kthememanager/themes/". The .xml and .gz files defines a theme settings, they are applied as user switches a theme. We are ready to provide a support on this, you are welcome to ask for a specific help here.

Thank you! That definitely provides a good start. I'll look into it a bit more and come back with any questions. In the meantime, do you happen to know where the text color for Konqueror is stored? That was one of the items I needed to adjust when testing out a dark version of Debonaire. I looked at $HOME/.trinity/share/apps/konqueror/konqueror.rc but didn't see anything to do with text color.

q4osteam · 2019-05-08 22:53

Jaerrib wrote:

... where the text color for Konqueror is stored?

config file: $HOME/.trinity/share/config/konquerorrc
group: [FMSettings]
key: NormalTextColor

For example, change text color to red, run in terminal:
$ kwriteconfig --file "konquerorrc" --group "FMSettings" --key "NormalTextColor" "255,0,0"

EDIT: fixed path

Last edited by q4osteam (2019-05-09 07:00)

Jaerrib · 2019-05-08 23:40

q4osteam wrote:

file: $HOME/adminu/.trinity/share/config/konquerorrc
group: [FMSettings]
key: NormalTextColor
For example, change text color to red, run in terminal:
$ kwriteconfig --file "konquerorrc" --group "FMSettings" --key "NormalTextColor" "255,0,0"

Thank you!

Jaerrib · 2019-05-10 02:28

Attached is my initial draft of a dark variation of the Debonaire color scheme for TDE. There are some issues that will need to be worked out before it's ready to roll. Among those are the fact that the Debonaire icon theme is more suited for a light scheme, and the right side of the Bourbon menu needs to change the color of the text or the background in order to be usable.

Attachments:

Debonaire Dark Theme draft.png, Size: 167.83 KiB, Downloads: 1,409

q4osteam · 2019-05-10 07:14

That looks good. We are able to make Bourbon menu colors configurable, if you would want to work the theme out.

Jaerrib · 2019-05-10 10:29

q4osteam wrote:

That looks good. We are able to make Bourbon menu colors configurable, if you would want to work the theme out.

That would be great. Although it would be an undertaking, I could look at modifying the icon theme to have a version that worked with dark themes or tweak certain colors to work with both light and dark.

Jaerrib · 2019-11-11 03:56

q4osteam wrote:

That looks good. We are able to make Bourbon menu colors configurable, if you would want to work the theme out.

As I was revisiting my attempts at a Debonaire Dark theme, I was reminded of the color issues with the Bourbon menu. Is there any chance of making the colors configurable? Also, where does the Bourbon menu and its config files live in the file system? I was kind of curious about poking around for educational purposes.

q4osteam · 2019-11-12 08:44

Yes, we will check a possible ways to make Bourbon menu colors configurable and post an additional answer as soon as possible. Most probably, we will make colors configuration available in the "$HOME/.trinity/share/config/kickerrc" config file, see below.

The Bourbon, as well as Kickoff, menu is provided by the "kicker-trinity" package, binary files listed:

/opt/trinity/lib/trinity/kicker.so
/opt/trinity/lib/libtdeinit_kicker.so
/opt/trinity/lib/libkickermain.so

Its configuration is stored in the ".trinity/share/config/kickerrc" config file, look at all the entries containing "Bourbon".
Any possible Bourbon specific entries, with example values listed:

BourbonShowExecutables=true
BourbonLeftToRight=true
BourbonBoldFolders=true
BourbonAppsString=Start Menu
BourbonShowSysViewFolders=false
BourbonSysViewCustomItems=krusader.desktop,htop.desktop,konsole.desktop
BourbonShowSysViewApps=false
BourbonMenu=true
BourbonMenuHeightDefault=507
BourbonMenuWidthDefault=414

q4osteam · 2019-11-12 09:06

We have placed a new follow-up topic in the developers section https://www.q4os.org/forum/viewtopic.php?id=2884 , as this has sidetracked from the original topic somewhat.

Q4OS Forum

#1 2019-04-30 21:44

Dedicated wallpaper

#2 2019-05-01 20:03

Re: Dedicated wallpaper

#3 2019-05-01 22:06

Re: Dedicated wallpaper

#4 2019-05-01 22:28

Re: Dedicated wallpaper

#5 2019-05-01 23:00

Re: Dedicated wallpaper

#6 2019-05-01 23:57

Re: Dedicated wallpaper

#7 2019-05-02 01:19

Re: Dedicated wallpaper

#8 2019-05-02 01:34

Re: Dedicated wallpaper

#9 2019-05-02 04:54

Re: Dedicated wallpaper

#10 2019-05-02 08:22

Re: Dedicated wallpaper

#11 2019-05-02 09:28

Re: Dedicated wallpaper

#12 2019-05-02 09:34

Re: Dedicated wallpaper

#13 2019-05-03 00:56

Re: Dedicated wallpaper

#14 2019-05-07 10:47

Re: Dedicated wallpaper

#15 2019-05-08 02:07

Re: Dedicated wallpaper

#16 2019-05-08 12:16

Re: Dedicated wallpaper

#17 2019-05-08 22:18

Re: Dedicated wallpaper

#18 2019-05-08 22:53

Re: Dedicated wallpaper

#19 2019-05-08 23:40

Re: Dedicated wallpaper

#20 2019-05-10 02:28

Re: Dedicated wallpaper

#21 2019-05-10 07:14

Re: Dedicated wallpaper

#22 2019-05-10 10:29

Re: Dedicated wallpaper

#23 2019-11-11 03:56

Re: Dedicated wallpaper

#24 2019-11-12 08:44

Re: Dedicated wallpaper

#25 2019-11-12 09:06

Re: Dedicated wallpaper

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