ghost
commented
3 years ago I think the incentive to theme up the desktop with external GTK themes would be much smaller across the community, since everyone could personalize the appearance of Pop!_OS to their liking without messing up with external themes that can often provide various issues to new users...
It's inevitable that people are going to try and make their system look like OS X, Windows, or whatever they're familiar with. Third party themes, icons and fonts are always going to be alluring, despite the fact it increases the risk of the system borking. Maybe they'll learn the value of leaving the system as is. However, I agree with your assessment that simple color adjustments should be easier to accomplish and would lead to a decease in customizing with GTK themes that are likely to break.
Tweaking a few colors, making transparent panel and other minor aesthetic adjustments used to be relatively simple in and before19.04. Changing a color hex value in .css was easy. The upgrade to 19.10 had significant changes and required the creation of a custom copy of .css, tweaked and installed just to change a couple of colors! People who are new to Linux, or not very tech savvy, would have a lot of difficulty working that out, and, probably install a third party theme as the easier option.
I love the stock Pop theme with one small exception - the brown titlebars. Fortunately, there's a brilliant tool to help with the matter of simple color changes in Pop. Having a means of easily changing a couple colors for a few basic items in the settings app would be great. Similar to how Pop-Shell now supports changing the active hint and stacking bar color, a simple color selector for aspects of the current theme would be a timely inclusion.
As the time goes by and Pop!_OS is becoming a real beast in both quality and design, I think that the last part missing is to make the experience a tiny bit more customizable in addition to switching between dark/light themes.
In addition to default theme which already looks incredibly nice and sleek, I propose adding an option to choose accent colors for: 1) the color of X buttons, checkmarks and window borders in overview which are orange by default 2) the color of dragging mouse over desktop, highlighted elements in nautilus and highlighted tabs in firefox which are light blue by default
If we got these 2 additions to already very well designed and modern theme and have them built-in directly in "Appearance" tab in gnome-settings, I think the incentive to theme up the desktop with external GTK themes would be much smaller across the community, since everyone could personalize the appearance of Pop!_OS to their liking without messing up with external themes that can often provide various issues to new users and have problems with theming on snaps/flatpaks etc.