History

With the move of my [infrastructure] to Debian GNU/Linux (10/02/2019), the then-new [Computing-Machine] was chosen to be its official desktop theme. However, it has not been well-maintained, lacking [user interactions]. With the release of [GNOME 40] (03/24/2021), it became completely unusable with its applications, and clear to me that Computing-Machine is no longer a viable desktop theming solution.

Since then, I have already created NET--what my web projects are built on--and decided to use its resources to craft a desktop theme to my taste.

Starting from scratch would be difficult due to GTK 3's complexity. Instead, I used [Adwaita]--GTK's default theme--as my starting point for its attention to detail. The main advantage lies on its many, many CSS selectors, allowing me to produce such a complex stylesheet if I wanted to, and made experimenting and thus studying a lot quicker than if I were to do the same from scratch. Lastly, its use of [SASS] taught me a bit about the preprocessor language.

The GTK 3 version of Adwaita has over four thousand lines--which have since been splitted by section into files for the GTK 4 version--and many repeated, hard-coded values--resolvable with SASS variables (the CSS equivalent is not supported by GTK 3)--making it difficult to follow for first-timers like myself. As such, it took me about three working days to produce a satisfactory stylesheet, whose complexity is puny compared to the almighty Adwaita.

The Xfce-notifyd, Wine, and Xfwm4 themes followed respectively. Finally, I forwarded all my work to NET to provide a more consistent--and maybe boring--experience across desktop and web applications.

The project was initially labeled NET as a placeholder. Being terrible at names myself, it was given an interim label of NET DD--DD for Desktop Design--which clashes with my NET projects and is also pathetic for a theme. Netronic was chosen for its portmanteau of net, tron, -sonic, and electronic, as an homage to the 1990s, and also aligns with NET's heavy inspirations from personal computers of the era--or at least what I know about them.