Meet the all-new Feren OS theme — Now Available
It has been months in the making, with lots of annoyances along the way (Firefox’s GTK3 integration, cmake…), but today I’m proud to announce that a new theme has finally landed in Feren OS for everyone on the latest stable version of Feren OS.
This new theme is the accumulation of practically ALL the feedback, bug reports, and more made by users and developers alike that I know of. There is A LOT to cover here, so let’s just cut to the chase.
Colour Palettes
Light/Default Mode
The Feren OS light/default theme colour scheme has seen a noticeable overhaul, now being darkened further than the previous version of the OS’s light theme to make the theme more neutral than before, and easier on the eyes. Even the once white view backgrounds have now been toned down a bit.
Dark Mode
Potentially one of the most important changes in this new theme, and potentially one of the most requested changes in Feren OS — the Feren OS dark theme colour scheme has been entirely redone to brighten up the dark theme, while also refining its colour palette to look more suitable for the new Feren OS theme overall.
No longer shall the dark theme be easily considered ‘too dark’ anymore, now.
Feren OS Classic
Feren OS Classic got a lot of love in this theme update, as well, as while it is destined to death in the future, it doesn’t mean I can’t give it the attention it still deserves.
Cinnamon Theme
The Feren OS Classic Cinnamon Themes have been completely redone from scratch, using Mint-Y-Aqua as a base. The Cinnamon Theme has been designed with a mixture of matching the new GTK3 theme, and matching the updated KDE Plasma Style, in mind.
Throughout all these Cinnamon themes you’ll find little nods to both of these, such as the GTK3 menu background for the background of Cinnamon menus, and more.
As well as this, all non-’feren’ Feren OS Cinnamon Themes have been heavily simplified to make updating all of these themes much easier to do, and to increase design consistency between these themes as well.
Finally, many other tweaks have been made to how these Cinnamon themes behave visually, alongside further theme consistency tweaks.
GTK
GTK2
The GTK2 theme, because of GIMP mainly, has been entirely re-done using Adwaita for consistency reasons, to better match its new GTK3 theme counterpart. It’s available in light and dark, though should not support colour schemes whatsoever as GTK2 should have died years ago if it wasn’t for GIMP still relying on it (and Inkscape did do as well until 1.0).
GTK3
Now for one of the main stars of this show, the GTK3 theme. This GTK3 theme has entirely ditched Arc’s codebase, a first in Feren OS history, and is now based on GNOME’s own Adwaita theme to combat the growing problem of applications breaking on non-Adwaita GTK3 themes.
This definitely took the longest to make out of all of this Theme Redesign, with a last minute change being made to it to be more consistent with the Qt5 Application Style.
Speaking of which…
Feren OS
The Qt5 Application Style
The other main star of the show is definitely the Qt5 Application Style. Gone is the use of Kvantum for the Application Style, and in is a custom-built fork of Fedora’s ‘AdwaitaQt’ designed to provide near-seamless design consistency across Qt5 and GTK3 applications in Feren OS.
This part was definitely one of the most ambitious parts of this update, with a lot of compiler frustration had along the way, and a last minute style-platform shift to KStyle for integration, but it all ultimately paid off with this QStyle as the result.
Other cool and noteworthy changes
There are plenty of other cool changes in this theme update, that I’m sure the customisers among you will really like:
Colour your applications any colour you want — the possibilities are nearly endless
Because of this theme update, you can now use ANY colour scheme in Feren OS (on Plasma) to colour your GTK3 and Qt5 applications with on the default Feren OS styles.
Ever wanted to use Breeze colours on the Feren OS theme? No problem, just apply Breeze via Colors! Ever wanted to see how bad you can make the Feren OS theme look? Uhh… no problem! Ever wanted to use the colour scheme of another Plasma distribution? Go ahead! This update allows you to do all that, and more!
Go crazy, if you’d like, with all your colour schemes and the colour schemes available from the KDE Store, and have colouring fun!
Theme Colouriser updates
Theme Colouriser also received some updates to coincide with the changes made structurally to the GTK3, Cinnamon and Metacity themes in this update.
On Feren OS Classic, theme colourisations finally properly save once more, and the Cinnamon and GTK3 themes now look a lot better when colourised, and on Feren OS GTK3 and Kvantum recolours are no longer attempted as they’re now redundant in this update (GTK3 now supports colour schemes anyway and Kvantum isn’t used anymore) leading to way faster theme colourisations.
Vivaldi, Metacity and KWin tweaks
Another minor change is that Vivaldi, Metacity and KWin have now been tweaked:
- Vivaldi’s titlebar buttons in the Feren OS CSS modification are now exactly the same sizes as the native Feren OS ones and look the part as well
- I heard you, users: Metacity and KWin now sport a whole new restore symbol inspired by Yaru’s one
Old Colour Schemes
Finally, if you preferred the old theme, you can still grab the colour schemes for the old theme at any time from Get New Colour Schemes in Feren OS.
They’re called “Feren OS 2019 Light” and “Feren OS 2019 Dark”.
Conclusion
In conclusion, this theme update addresses the following feedback, and more:
- Dark Mode is too dark — alright, it’s now brightened up slightly to how light most Operating Systems have it these days
- Default/Light Mode is too light — it’s now practically as neutral as the likes of elementary OS
- GTK3 Themes break applications — the GTK3 theme is now based on Adwaita, which means better compatibility with applications
- LightDM Slick Greeter’s password input and Desktop Environments switcher are unreadable — this has been fixed
- The restore symbol looks ugly in titlebars — a new restore symbol has replaced that symbol
- Kvantum is kinda hacky — Kvantum has been replaced with an all-new QStyle forked from ‘AdwaitaQt’ made specifically around Feren OS’s new theme
- People might prefer the old theme — you can use the old colour schemes, and colour schemes in general, just fine in this new Feren OS theme
That being said, this theme is now available, over the current theme, as an update to users of the latest stable Feren OS. 20.04-based Feren OS will get the finished theme pretty soon however once I re-compile stuff for 20.04-based Feren OS builds.
Have fun with this new theme!
How to apply this new theme
To apply this new theme, simply go into Update Manager, hit Refresh, update everything, and then re-apply any Feren OS Global Theme that isn’t one of your own Theme Colourisations to get the new theme. Your Theme Colourisations should be updated to be based on the new theme when you log in next after updating your system to this new theme.
