I’m currently a Mate user planning a switch to Budgie. I like the included selection of themes, but there’s one thing I’m looking for that I’m not seeing.
I much prefer the look of light themes in apps, but I want the application menu (by which I mean the “start” menu in the top left) to be dark.
Is there a theme that’s set up that way, or perhaps is there some way to apply the dark version of a theme to the top panel and the light version to the rest of the system?
Thanks!
Edited to add: I’ll be running the LTS release, 24.04.
Right click on the desktop and choose “Budgie Desktop Settings”. In the “Style” section, pick a theme from the “Widgets” drop-down list — I’ve never understood why it’s called that —, “Pocillo” for example, and enable the “Dark theme” option.
Apart from a few uncoordinated applications you might install later such as “HomeBank”, only the main menu, Raven (i.e. the right-hand pane), “Budgie Desktop Settings” and the title bar of the windows will be dark.
Feel free to experiment with other themes until you find one that suits you.
You can also start “Budgie Welcome” and click on the “Makeovers & Layouts” button at the bottom right to view and/or install the suggested themes. As you can see from the screenshots, it’s possible to do what you want.
But for my part, I prefer to use “Budgie Desktop Settings”: you have complete control over what you do.
Thanks @jlb, appreciate the response. Unfortunately that’s not quite what I’m trying to do.
The screenshot below might articulate it better (the screenshot is of my current Mate desktop - hopefully that won’t get me banished from these parts!).
What I’d really like is light-mode theme for more or less everything (possible exception of the window titlebar) except the top panel and the launcher menu in the top left, which I’d like to be dark.
I’m sure if I scour online I’ll eventually come across a theme that’s set up this way (or maybe not - perhaps the menu background in Budgie is taken from the same variable that sets the background of other windows). Alternatively, can anyone tell me where the global themes are stored? Maybe I’ll take a stab at manually altering the CSS to see what I can achieve.
To attempt to answer some of my own questions - I tried copying my existing Mate theme over to budgie to see what would happen. It worked better than I thought, but it didn’t do what I wanted. The top-left menu (which is themed dark in Mate) is light in Budgie. Seems to me that the top menu in Mate is the same colour as the right-click menu would be, whereas in Budgie it’s the same colour as a general window would be.
I did find where themes are stored though (/usr/share/themes for anyone interested) so I am going to take a stab at copying the Pocillo theme and seeing what happens when I modify the CSS.
It’ll all be trial and error though, so I suspect that even if I am able to achieve what I want it’s going to take me quite some time.