Modern light themes (white on white) suck. What is your favourite Plasma Theme?

submitted by Pantherina edited

lemmy.kde.social/post/917764

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50 Comments

perishthethought

I just refuse to watch any YT video where they make a face like this in the splash image.

OP, if this video is yours, sorry, but not very.

const_void

Agreed. Most Youtube thumbnails are cancer. Bug eyes with mouth wide open or pointing at something. Enough already.

BossDj

Tom Scott did an episode where he explained that going back and retrofitting old videos with the shock face and click bait titles upped his views by a lot

Auli

And that is what nobody cares to admit. They do those thumbnails cause they work.

perishthethought

Great for Tom Scott and everyone one using this (sincerely) and everyone attracted to videos with images like this.

I am still out.

LeFantome , edited

Good for you? I guess.

I do not really like them either but I am not sure what point you are making. Their point is that these images result in more viewers, even accounting for your absence. What are we meant to do with the information that you are out?

30p87 , edited

And around 70% of titles are replaced by DeArrow for me, and of the other 30% around 80% are probably just too unknown. So in total just 6% are actually not clickbait, and those 6% are basically just dashcam channels with the numbering as title, the largest german channel about Lego-style bricks and media.ccc.de

thingsiplay

I'm subscribed to his channel for years and in my opinion its the best Linux content on YouTube. And its the first time I see this face as a thumbnail, but to be honest, the had a few strange ones too. If I were not subscribed to his channel and would not know that he makes good content, then I would probably come to the same conclusion to not watch the video based off the thumbnail. I sometimes refuse to click a video based on the title too!

But I don't know what it is, but this content from him is the worst in years (in my opinion)! So the thumbnail fits nicely and you don't need to see it anyway. It's not worth watching it. But I'm serious when I say that you should check out his other videos, if you look for Linux content. He does often amazing job of history stuff too, and content that others don't report on.

CatTrickery

De-arrow is a godsend for these thumbnails.

That being said, I set a "Don't recommend channel" on Brodie Robertson because he took part in harassing a developer about some barely nsfw furry art being hidden in some software but refuses to block Nazis from his mastodon profile. It seemed like a double standard that demonstrated tolerance for said Nazis.

TxzK

barely nsfw furry art being hidden in some software

Can you elaborate on what software and developer? That's funny af. Harassing someone for it is really stupid

CatTrickery

Its trickier to piece together what happened now but if you search "thorium browser furry", you'll probably find a few posts about it. There was a hell of a lot of misinfo including about it being CP for some reason when iirc it was just an anthropomorphic dog with the camera facing upwards towards them wearing panties or something like that.

TxzK

So I did some digging, and it actually goes a little deeper than just a furry image. There was some anti-circumcision stuff on the developers site it seems, not in the browser itself. Apparently they weren't even linked. They were all removed with a single commit. I took a look on the commit history, and there were some pictures of circumcised penises. Including some extremely botched ones, some belonging to babies. I didn't take a look at all of them, but once I did are hardly labelable as CP. If anything, they're educational content. Wikipedia contains some similar pictures as well, you can't label Wikipedia as a CP website for those either, can you? They were running a campaign against circumcision, as one should. It's unethical genital mutilation (speaking as someone who was circumcised). Labeling this anti-circumcision stuff as CP is really stupid imo. Fuck circumcision. And imo harassing someone for this is even worse than sneaking a furry pic in a browser.

You can take a look into the commit here if you want too

Pantherina [OP]

Agreed. Circumcision is fucked up.

EveryMuffinIsNowEncrypted

Fuck Nazis. Raw. With a rusty iron cactus. Dry. In the ass.

just another dev

If that's what gets you going :s

perishthethought

Just installed that extension in Firefox and instantly recognized the difference. Thanks so much!

Pantherina [OP]

That techlore guy just confused furry art with CSAM and dropped that in a video as if it was nothing.

Chris Titus did a really stupid video about that too.

I dont remember Brodie actively harassing them. But of course that whole thing was not nice.

Pantherina [OP]

What does "block nazis on his profile" mean, like block comments?

uiiiq

He has a great content though. Some of his takes are a bit strange, but he didnt cross the line yet for me.

halm

refuses to block Nazis from his mastodon profile

This tells me enough about a person to dissociate completely from anything they say or make.

Mactan [he/him]

yt creators really don't have a choice, if they deviate from the stuff that the algorithm likes it kills the channel

magic_lobster_party

Don’t only blame the algorithm. The users are to blame as well. People tend to click on these thumbnails more. It’s a clickbait technique and it works.

Pantherina [OP]

I like Brodie and click on every video lol, the thumbnails are funny

dsemy

There are successful channels which don't do this.

I can't blame a creator for doing this, but I do lose a lot of respect for them when they do.

OrangeCorvus

I do the same. I don't care if there is an algorithm or not, I don't care if you get 0,00001% more money. The end doesn't justify the means. I am on a personal vendetta, every time I am on YT and I see a thumbnail like that or one with clickbait text or arrows. It's instant don't recommend channel. I don't care if I am subbed to that channel or not. Stop finding excuses, we need a gram of human decency, stop whoring yourself like that

linuxPIPEpower

I like light themes and agree that they can be done well. Overall my problem with dark themes is they are too low contrast everything melts into everything else. Who doesn't want a distinct border around a window?

thingsiplay , edited

I was a light theme user for very long time, until a few years ago I met Vim with the theme gruvbox (dark). Check out gruvbox, it's my favorite theme of all time. Often there are multiple variants from it, with slight difference in contrast and coloring. For long text reading I prefer black on white, but nowadays I use dark themes for operating system and many other stuff. Especially for programming / scripting its much more readable as dark theme, for whatever reason.

I'm still conflicted, because most dark themes suck, but most light themes are acceptable. Have a look here, gruvbox has a light theme and dark theme: https://github.com/morhetz/gruvbox

Pantherina [OP]

I think what Brodie showed at the end was already really great. I know a graphics designer and number 1 rule is to never use black and white.

But of course this only works if you have full control over all apps, libadwaita? Dont theme my apps? Damn Electron?

Eager Eagle

*looks at the KDE settings with window borders and title bars disabled*

Max-P , edited

Just a friendly reminder that there's accessibility problems with dark themes.

For me dark themes look like this because I have astigmatism:

White on black text with astigmatism

Black on white doesn't have this issue because all the white around it does is slightly blur into the black text and makes it a little grey at worst.

Any dark theme for a longer period of time also causes the white text to burn in my retina for a couple minutes, and I just see lines when I look away, and also makes reading a long article difficult and painful.

Dark themes look so much better, but keep in mind some people have very good reasons to prefer light themes. There's no need for dark theme elitism.

kryllic

Well TIL, thanks for the graphic!

CatTrickery

If you are on Android, repainter can be really nice to find an accessible background/foreground combo using the new Material You theme engine. I get the impression it wasn't designed for that purpose but it does the job if you try to use mostly Material You apps.

BlueÆther

I'm certainly not that bad, but I see where you are coming from. I like a very light grey text on a medium to dark background for this reason that white text on black 'shadows'

Pantherina [OP] , edited

Nobody watched the video lol, dark themes are an easy fix but not the best solution. But very interesting, thanks for sharing

acockworkorange

The point of the video is that current default themes (particularly light themes) are too high contrast and too monochromatic. And in that scenario, a dark theme becomes a necessity because a high contrast dark theme is usually better received than a white one.

Jumuta

dark themes are fine but they're horrible on TN/cheap IPS panels

pewpew

That's why I use light mode, looks miles better in my IPS

acockworkorange

Why is that?

Jumuta

the contrast of black on white isn't uniform because of bad viewing angles

Jegahan

To be honest, this seems to me like a pretty bad take with weird and kind of BS arguments. Why are professional designer, both those working for some of the biggest tech companies and those working in open source project, making these choices? It couldn't be for actual reasons or because they actually prefer it like that. No, they are "afraid of color". Or implying that dark theme exist *because* of these black on white themes, as a mean to escape it. It just weird backwards logic to justify his taste and shouldn't be necessary to just state that he prefer a different kind of themes.

To me, the Windows themes he showed as positive examples look way to cluttered and busy, even though they don't show this much information. I don't need the theme to be "exiting", I need them to display the information in an easily readable way. And dark theme aren't there just for people who dislike the modern light theme. Having a light *and* a dark theme (and ideally having the app follow your system preference) actually serves a purpose. You can actively switch between them depending on the context, the time of day, the brightness of the room or any other reason to make the screen easily readable and comfortable to look at.

Eugenia

I have astigmatism, so I can't work with dark themes. I can't read correctly when everything is black around. For me, the perfect theme is the one that has a black window manager, gray variations on specific widgets, and white windows (the background desktop image I prefer it to be blue-ish). Basically, to work properly, I need a mostly light, but mixed environment that provides contrast. Not all white, and definitely not all black. So far, I haven't found such a theme, because no GUI environment allows for such specificity in theming for the various widgets. Although the default Gnome theme ain't too bad.

Evil_Shrubbery

Huh, I should look into that - I have astigmatism and with LCD & OLED monitors its much easier for me to read light text on dark background.

The font effects the clarity for me much more.

Thrickles

I tried a few themes but always go back to Breeze Twilight (dark bar with light windows).

Fizz

I might consider using a light theme if I had a nicer monitor and a clean desk.

pewpew

Layan with a transparent Kvantum theme

Jumuta

layan looks so nice but it's so slow :(