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Simon Steinbeiß released today a new version of Xubuntu’s default Xfce theme Greybird, versioned 3.23.0, which adds initial support for the GTK4 toolkit, paving the way for a more modern look and feel of Xubuntu and the Xfce desktop environment.
Almost six months in development, Greybird 3.23.0 is here to introduce initial support for GTK4 and libhandy in an attempt to make the popular Xfce theme, which is used by default in recent Xubuntu releases, more modern and keep it up with the times. GTK4 support means that Grebird will play nice with recent GTK4 apps.
For those not familiar with libhandy, it’s a library used for creating mobile versions of GTK and GNOME apps, so Greybird getting libhandy support could mean that it might see a version of the Xfce desktop environment on mobile operating systems like ExpidusOS, which is still in very alpha stage.
Apart from that, the Greybird 3.23.0 release brings some changes to the xfwm4 border colors, corrects the gradients for horizontal scrollbars, reduces the size of the message dialog button box, and makes the CSD (Client-side decorations) titlebars slimmer.
In addition, it fixes an issue with the install path of xfwm4-a11y, xfwm4-a11y dark and xfwm4-compact so that they’ll show up in the window manager theme settings, removes the background color for non-bg items, adjusts the selected backdrop fg/bg colors (shades of grey) for GTK3, and addresses a couple of other issues.
For more details on the changes implemented in the Greybird 3.23.0 release, check out the full release notes on the project’s GitHub page, from where you can download the source tarball if you want to compile the theme for your Xfce desktop environment right now.
Xubuntu and Xfce users will have to wait for the Greybird 3.23.0 release to land in the stable repositories. At the moment of writing, the upcoming Xubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellifish) still uses Greybird 3.22.15, but I believe the final release, due out next month on April 21st, will feature the new Greybird version.
Thank you Cristian Nieto for the tip!
Last updated 2 years ago
