Aaruni's Blog v 3.0

Some time in early September, I came across this tweet by a Michael Dominick, on the Jupiter Broadcasting telegram group.

Now, I’m not generally into visual design. I live my life in boring old cinnamon with a conky on top. And I haven’t changed this in almost half a decade now. But when the incentive is a Lemur Pro, I can be flexible. After double checking that the offer applied to me in Germany as well, I started poking around in gnome-shell theming.

Theming in GNOME3, in basic terms, is not a very complicated affair. If I understand correctly, there’s a JS engine somewhere, which styles elements using plain old CSS files, and other graphical resources you can include via CSS. All I had to do was supply a sufficiently tweaked CSS file, and I was done. This process was harder than it sounds.

Using the gnome-tweaks tool, it is possible to change themes of components of the Gnome shell. To match visuals with Snow Leopard, I had to change the themes of Applications, and the overall Shell. I could also change the Icon theme, but I do not believe the original icons for Snow Leopard are in public domain, even though you can freely find them on the internet archive here. Similarly, I cannot redistribute the default wallpaper for Snow Leopard myself, but an upscaled version is available on the web at 512pixels.net.

As with all hacking-tweaking projects, it is important to start with the right base. For the Applications theme, I had to choose between cameo/Cameo-OSX and B00merang-Project/OS-X-Leopard. While the screenshot of the b00merang edition looks much closer to what I actually want to end up with, in my test run of things, it also had weird stability issues. Thus I decided to start with the more stable of two bases, and adapted and tweaked things from the other as necessary. For the Shell theme, I decided to start with the b00merang project’s files, but ran into some issues there as well. This led me to rebase the Shell theme off the default Pop-shell theme, and then make changes as necessary. The big advantage in this approach, IMO is, nothing breaks. Anything which doesn’t work as intended in the new theme falls back to working as what the system defaults were.

An extremely useful resource I discovered in the last few days of working on the project was the GTK3 Reference Manual. It is of course possible to arrive at the correct meaning of code by just reading, and meaningful variation techniques, and this is what I was doing before I stumbled upon the official development reference material. But it is also a difficult and time-costly process. Another tool I wish I had known of earlier was the GTK Inspector. The tool allows you to inspect elements of the UI of a GTK application, making it convenient to quickly check what CSS rules are applied.

At the end of my work, I finally ended up with the finished theme, Snow Leopard ++, a name suggested by Mr Dominick himself. I think I did a good job of roughly documenting my progress in the git commits, and Micheal was happy enough to ship over the Lemur which started it all.

Stay tuned for unboxing and a review!

Apparently, there are some things called Import Duties. According to German law, any gift above the value of 45 EUR attracts this tax. Because of this, UPS charged me EUR 161.06 as import duties. Asking around, I found out it is expected that the in such cases the receiver of the parcel is expected to deal with any duties and taxes. 100+EUR was a little bit above something I was comfortable parting with, even if it is completely worth the Lemur hanging in the balance. I reached out to Mr Dominick about this, and he was kind enough to cover this cost for me as well! So the giveaway Lemur, even with the surprising import tax is a true giveaway after all!