Hi, Everyone, As I have gotten older, reading what’s on my computer screen has become more challenging. I’ve adjusted with a big, high resolution monitor, bigger fonts, better fonts, and ophthalmologists. All helpful steps.
Recently, I’ve been playing with different desktop appearance options. I run xfce, and choose these appearance options in Settings->Appearance. I think I’ve explored everything relevant in /usr/portage/x11-themes but not sure because it’s not clear to me what the various packages do. I’ve tried a number of themes and icon packages. All of them have significant problems. In some combos, I lose functionality. (E.g., the little up-down arrows at the top and bottom of scrollbars that allow you to step up and down disappear on many combinations.) The BlackMATE theme and Adwaita icon set are the most useful I’ve found. But not without problems. Today I was using Gnucash, and the BlackMATE/Adwaita combination presented me with dark gray backgrounds on which to type black numbers. Not the clearest color combination. Another example: black window scroll bars on dark gray backgrounds. Challenging to see. There are other issues, such as websites that like to present medium gray text on light gray backgrounds (sorry, can’t provide a specific example right now). Firefox, in Preferences->Fonts and Colors->Colors, has some limited ability to override website color schemes with other colors, but that hasn’t worked well for me in general, because it often gives many websites a bizarre appearance. I’m guessing this group has a number of folks who’ve encountered similar problems. I have several questions for you. 1) How do you cope with this problem? 2) Is there an xfce theme and icon package you recommend? Or maybe something other than xfce? I like xfce, and have never been attracted to integrated desktops like kde and gnome, but if they’ve got a credible solution, I’m willing to try. 3) Are there lower level ways of tweaking my current desktop? For example, changing colors in the 2 examples I gave above from black on dark gray to black on white? Could that be done with a little judicious editing of color settings somewhere, or adjusting colors on an icon? I don’t know how desktop appearances are programmed, so I don’t know where on the spectrum of trivial->apocalyptic this lies. Thanks for your suggestions! John Blinka
