Sounds good to me!

As the person who originally created the "green" thread, I had no idea who had closed it and why. I was guessing it was closed either due to inactivity or due to some off-the-rails replies that were deleted before I even saw them.

The theming process is documented at https://git.devuan.org/devuan/documenta … t/graphics

And the feedback I received in the thread on specific shades was very helpful. But life is busy, so it will probably be over a month before I have any more carefully-considered shades of green to suggest to anybody.

I got the current darker background shade by smudging a bunch of colors together from the clover.png tile that appears in Fedora's desktop-backgrounds-basic package because this was a background I remembered enjoying years ago on KDE 2 or 3. It's definitely on the bluer end, especially compared to the gnome-wise-icons. I think having some more blue-green and some more yellow-green hues helps prevent everything from blurring together, but there are a lot of different ways to do that. I'll play around when I get time.

I experimented with having the titlebars about midway between the current background and temporary-icon colors, but several family members thought darker was better, so I jumped to the dark green from the Emerald City variant of the Win3x Enhanced GTK theme as a darker starting place.

I believe CachyOS is having big success bringing PC gamers in particular to Linux because

• They know Valve is successfully running major games on a similar operating system. (CachyOS and SteamOS are both based on Arch Linux

• They know the distro is optimized specifically for gaming and has a community of gamers, so when they have problems someone else is probably already working to solve the same problems.

• hey're less afraid of "some assembly required" than other people who use Windows just because it came with their PC because they've been installing game mods for years.

The problem that crowd has historically had with Debian-like distros is that they like to buy the latest hardware to run the latest games and then run into problems when the latest drivers take 2-3 years to get into a stable release. This is less of a problem right now when new hardware has gotten too expensive for everyone, and people should also be more aware that the backports repo exists, but there's also the challenge that I don't see a lot of people making noise about gaming on Devuan or spending time working to improve small details of that experience.

Another class of people trying out Linux are people who maybe have an older computer that isn't their main computer anymore but would still have some life in it except that Windows 11 doesn't support it. These people tend to get directed towards Linux Mint because it functions in fairly simple and unsurprising ways that don't force people to get deep into learning Linux when an they want is a living room media PC or a travel laptop with a web browser and office suite.

Personally, I think Devuan has a fairly strong case to make for itself to this kind of user. People tend to only mention Devuan as an option for people who know enough about Linux already to have opinions about the fork over systemd, but it is also one of the best distros out there at providing a lightweight traditional desktop for people who don't want to have to relearn how UIs work with every new fad and don't want a UI that feels sluggish on old hardware.

I can't offer a grand vision for how Devuan can get *better* at bringing people to the Linux desktop, but if we can

• Use Devuan until we notice it's smallest faults and then fix those faults. Every extra bit of polish and reliability will attract people.

• Talk about what we use Devuan for

• Welcome noobs when they show up here. (Do you really want the Year of the Linux Desktop? It comes with Eternal September. )

By the way, if you you are interested in eventually contributing to the official Devuan wiki, the person working on a new software stack for wiki.devuan.org is onefang. I asked him on IRC what the status of that project was, and he said he was just getting to a season of life where he has more time to work on Devuan stuff but is working on a separate infrastructure project first.

I use XLibre on Excalibur too (but with an NVidia card), and I recall that NexusSFan's instructions for setting it up involve enabling backports. I don't know exactly what went wrong here, but if I had to guess I would guess it has something to do with upgrading to drivers from backports, and I would check if something along the lines of the following helps:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure firmware-amd-graphics
sudo update-initramfs -u
sudo reboot

If that sort of fiddling doesn't solve the issue for you, and you want to continue using XLibre, then you might consider asking over on their Matrix/Telegram if anyone there has insights. I haven't seen anyone else report this exact behaviour there yet.

I'm not really a gamer, but I do have Steam installed on Excalibur. The one game I care about did have have multiplayer mode broken on Excalibur last I checked, but when I Googled people were having the same issue on upstream Debian, so it's not a Devuan issue.

If any more serious gamers chime in, take their advice over mine,  but I suspect both approaches you have outlined will yield very similar levels of success.

Here's the response I got to my ZoiteChat bug report. It gives me slightly more hope that a future version of that fork may play nicer with Linux desktops:

I believe right now they have manual settings to change a bunch of UI colours together with the chat colours, and that overrides system theming in usually-undesired ways, but if they're open to the idea that the current approach may be more a Windows way of doing things and that Linux users expect theming options to be primarily at the desktop level, then things could definitely improve.

Its definitely concerning that the uutils creator thought he could just say, "Debian is also following Ubuntu's path toward making uutils the default" without consulting other Debian maintainers and then dismiss as "harassment" the question of where he got that notion.

That said, I really wish Lunduke (top link in thread) would read a bit more carefully because he gives the impression that "making uutils the default" is current official Deiban policy, which pretty much everyone in the mailing list discussion denied.

Unfortunately none of my programming experience since college is in C -- a matter I should correct -- so I couldn't get up-to-speed as quickly as some on improving it. I also took a look at their old thread about adding GTK3 support and see

https://github.com/hexchat/hexchat/issues/2047

I think where that leaves me is thinking that ZoiteChat clearly isn't ready to replace HexChat and that HexChat should stick around but not ready to invest effort into improving it yet. What I am probably going to do is go back and forth between HexChat and Brocas's suggestion of Pidgin for a bit to gauge which one more properly belongs on the ISO I'm building. If the answer is HexChat, then I might think a little bit more in a few months about what to do with this GTK2 application on my primarily-GTK3 setup.

In the mean time, keeping HexChat available as-is for everyone building GKT2-ng-centric setups is a no-brainer, but I'm not sure that much work is actually required since it presumably works as is. If you run into any issues, feel free to pick my brain as it is something I use and care about.

By my inclination is to wait as HexChat on Excalibur isn't going anywhere.

I went ahead and created a bug report for ZoiteChat https://github.com/ZoiteChat/zoitechat/issues/334
- Maybe they will clean up their act
- Or maybe I'll warm up to Pidgin
- Or maybe in five months I'll be saying, "Well, a few of the other things that have been bugging me are dealt with. How about that HexChat?"

Yikes! This thing apparently hard codes colors and doesn't even honor the dark mode of Adwaita-dark, which even the cultural vandals behind Stop Theming My App would respect. I sure hope the folks behind this consider it an unfinished work-in-progress and not something ready to be compared favorably with HexChat yet.

Creating an IRC client specifically for GTK3 is a great idea for one reason and one reason only, which is that a lot of GTK3 themes these days don't provide an equivalent GTK2 look. But if you aren't even going to work properly with the majority of GTK3 themes, what even is the point?
(Someone might say "Working when GTK2 is removed from Debian", but deliberately breaking GTK2 is silly and moreso now that gtk2-ng exists.)

As of today, if I were to say, "I have a few hours to spare, let's see if I can help transform a package from Debian to Devuan" I couldn't name a single one in need of attention because there isn't written wishlist anywhere. Hopefully that problem will solve itself now that I'm the DNG mailing list and the IRC and checking for new threads here more often, but what I'm saying is feel free to talk about your wishlists in front of me. I'm not looking to be given an assignment by a "Devuan manager", but I'm actively keeping my ears open for things that need doing.