The dark side of Ambiance

Just another drop of artwork I published on GNOME-Look. Well, publish isn’t the right word. It’s just a cherry-pick from the lp:light-themes in which an official dark-variant of Ubuntu’s default theme, Ambiance, was still available. All the work is from Canonical Design Team, this is just me reviving and making a popular theme install easier, again. I leave you…

with the usual testament about my 5min of work to get this done, readable over on GNOME-Look.

This’s Ambiance Maverick Dark variant, released during Maverick cycle as a WIP, made by Canonical Design Team.

I just cherry picked the last bzr commit of lp:light-themes in which this variant is still included and made a package.

The theme, as Canonical’s Otto Greenslade says, is

… work in progress and *at this stage* is not necessarily intended as a full theme but to be used by certain application environments that would benefit from a darker UI, for example: image/photo manipulation and video editing.

Also, GTK is, for a while in fact, capable of loading a dark variant of the current gtk theme to a specific app. Apps like GIMP, Pitivi, OpenShot or Shotwell may probably benefit from this feature in the next Ubuntu releases.

But this dark-variant is also pretty much suitable for daily use to all dark-theme lovers, so I’m posting it here. It has the usual quirks with GNOME dark-themes, mainly with text entry widgets and it hasn’t been updated with the new light-themes changes, such as more contrast in disabled menu items, progress bar improvements, squared windows border, and the fix to menu items slowdown (although I think it’s barely noticeable here). But nothing of this is a big show-stopper to its use in a daily basis, so go ahead and download it!

All credits go to the always superb Canonical Design Team!

Extra: If you want to give your desktop a little icon contrast, this Faenza Dark iconset blends stunningly great with Ambiance Maverick-Dark!

Download @ GNOME-Look.org