Ad Terras Per Aspera

Making GTK3 apps try to look more native in XFCE on Debian

XFCE is a GTK2 environment, however a lot can be done to improve GTK3 apps on XFCE.

I prefer to use Clearlooks as my GTK2 theme and use the GNOME icon set. On Debian, apt-get install gnome-icon-theme gnome-icon-theme-extras gnome-icon-theme-symbolic clearlooks-phenix-theme and use the XFCE Appearances to change your theme to Clearlooks-Phenix and your icons to GNOME.

If you’re using an XFCE GTK engine theme instead, install gtk3-engines-xfce instead of clearlooks-phenix-theme, and there also is a gtk3-engines-oxygen which provides a native look-alike of KDE4’s Oxygen theme.

You probably should restart your X session after fiddling around with this to fix apps that don’t change themes at runtime properly.

Fixing overly strong LCD sub-pixel filtering on Debian and Ubuntu

Some people think the sub-pixel color fringing is too strong when they have sub-pixel anti-aliasing on. If your install is old enough, you might not have the correct symlinks in /etc/fonts/conf.d. Do…

sudo ln -s /usr/share/fontconfig/conf.avail/11-lcdfilter-default.conf /etc/fonts/conf.d/

… and restart X. This should fix the problem.