Theming, Customizing the (Gnome) Desktop(-Environment)

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My experience with customizing the appearance of my computers' GUI …

For ~ 30 years I’ve customized the OS’s GUI of my computers to fit my personal needs.
Starting by plowing through the windoze’s registry and drawing replacements for some icons till ~turn of the millenium, …
editing the .conf and .css files of ubuntu(-gnome) from the late '90ies on - initially manually until the effort began to become unreasonable and I found oomox in the early '20ies, shortly after I started to use manjaro in parallel and a year later exclusively.
The themix-oomox generated theme (for which I need the AUR in manjaro) worked perfectly for me with gtk2 and did a good job for gtk3 and I carried it over from one machine to the next. Since ~'23 it started to show slight but growing deficiencies in that more and more apps (from gnome itself or those subjecting to gnome knowing the only truth about what all its users have to wish for their DE) ceased to completely follow my theme or, as of recently, ignore it but for some destructive effects (like white text on white background or extra-wide borders covering part of the working area).
The creeping deterioration of my theme has been accelerated by the X to Wayland migration (and perhaps that from GTK to Qt for a growing part of apps?).
… and changing entries in the Themix/Oomox theme designer¹⁾-window trying to fix any of these effects on my current desktop machine ceased to have any effect.
¹) Only after I’d built it new on my newer laptop it showed a message that exporting themes that also include gtk4 and Qt had been moved to its base16-plugin and adding that to the suite, I now see a second export option Base16-Based Templates on top of Export Xresources theme.

So we come to a first summary of the current status:

… have led me to using the Themix/Oomox theme designer for 5+ years which initially worked perfectly for me but began to degrade ~ 2 years ago, recently giving really unsatisfactory results.

4(?) years, until (the day before?) yesterday, I didn’t realize that I only let it export my theme solely based on Xresources, which isn’t exactly what I need after the X to Wayland migration. On this occasion I also found a (for me) new export option Base16-Based Templates which probably could solved all the issues …
… if I only was able to understand the humongous pile of sub-options and how to use the templates it generates.

I don’t really expect that this is the place to find experts who could help me,
but I’d highly appreciate if someone could point me to usable tutorials that cover more than the most basic aspects, and are related to practice.

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The timeline you reference fits into the release of Gnome 40.

A word of caution

A theme for Gnome (or Plasma) is not just a set of colours and window decorations.

It is a small application itself - containing script code that renders the decoration.

Gnome developers has a zen approach to the desktop and their opinion is that it does not need tweaking nor should it be customised.

Thus any customisation you make today, may not work in two or three months time - unless you adapt the customisation.

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No news for me. Nevertheless I like your reaction for caring and being the first and rather prompt!

For me, parts of their styling are stressful, chaotic, distracting, and unnecessarily circuitous … with connotations of a circus or funfair.
One of Gnome’s big assets - that they don’t like and break at any given opportunity - is the extensions building. I don’t perceive Gnome usable without some special extensions.
Until recently I have been able to adapt my customizations albeit becoming more and more complicated.
But now the complications seem to have escalated although solvable if …

  • I only understood themix’s ‘new’ options
  • or found another tool
  • or found a place where theme builders get or exchange their knowledge. (The only sites I found searching for themix and gnome are not helpful. Themix’s (github-)homepage doesn’t hold enough in-depth explanations and Gnome’s discourse is certainly not the place for getting advice for customization (other than: don’t).)

Any help solving one of the '⦁’s (sequence=preference) is highly appreciated!