NET On GTK 4

Today, we are releasing Netronic Update 1 Revision 4 with changes that may be of your significance.

Handy Dark Scheme Workaround

GTK dark theming was improved with Xfce 4.18. However, Handy applications do not work with Netronic's dark themes, while fine with its light and Win9 themes. Our workaround--titled above--presents the dark themes as otherwise, at the cost of foregoing system-wide dark mode.

Said workaround was included in the release package for Revision 3. Admittedly, we did not consider how much more bloat it added to the themes directory, on top of existing ones that are compromises to the CSS pixel unit issue.

So for Revision 4, we replaced the workaround with instructions to either rename your desired dark theme, or make a symbolic link to it, as long as its name does not end with -dark. The goal is to skirt around GTK's detection of dark themes, so applications work as if using a light theme but only technically and not visually. While this resolves the issue with Handy, it causes GTK to report your system color scheme as light.

By now, it should be obvious that--in addition to being half-baked--this dark theme mechanism is unclever in its design and execution.

Initial GTK 4 Support

With that out of the way, we are happy to announce Netronic's initial, alpha-quality support for GTK 4. Its stylesheets are modified from those for GTK 3, with many parts being somehow forwards-compatible. For now, it aims to retain the functionality of GTK 4 applications, followed by basic visual correctness. Just so you know, a lot of borders are missing.

We hope for Netronic to be an early adopter; if it gets full GTK 4 support before Greybird does, that will be awesome. Likely? Not with a one-man crew, but who knows. Of course, we will look at other GTK 4 themes for technical reference, so thanks to them.

With this announcement, we are not and will not be deprecating our GTK 3 themes, neither can we tell when it will happen.

By the way, congratulations to Katerina Shkel for winning the Xfce 4.18 wallpaper contest.