Themes and system peformance.

[Moltke]

Hi everyone! Hope you're all having anice life and a wonderful 2020!

I never gave too much thought whether or not a theme was/is still maintained, turns out the one I used, arc theme, hasn't been updated since 2017, just as adapta hasn't been updated since 2018 either, that being said I've never had any kind of issue nor I've noticed any impact in system's peformance, however,  I do wonder what the implications might be, is it really that bad having an "out of date" theme? I guess if it gets 5 years with no updates at all then it might be a good time to change it, but then, how does exactly a theme have influence in systems' performance? I mean, can an "out of date" theme slow down the system?  I guess it affects the looks and probably some buttons like "ok", "cancel", "close", "open" might not work as expected, am I right? Other than that, what are the undesired effects one can expect?

[trinidad]

Historically a lot of themes are designed for or are dependent on specific DEs. This is OK, but different DEs evolve differently. Mate and Cinnamon for example still have a lot of GTK2 dependencies. Other DEs like gnome are GTK3 dependent. Some application developers while not specifying a certain DE may spec GTK3 or GTK2 or QT 4 or 5 dependencies. Using one with the other may cause the GUI to act up with little things, or not work properly at all. Run a non-native application from the terminal some time without /dev/nulling the warnings and read them. DE theming itself, at least the way it is integrated/deployed now, is also changing because of wayland these days. In the future classic methods of deploying themes will change as Xorg becomes less and less important. Themes, like most things Linux, usually deprecate because of the work required to keep pace with development. I too liked the look of the arc theme in Linux Lite, but  if it has ceased development there is no sense in offering it as a default theme option. Also i/e as developers have hardened OSs some themes have become unusable due to data leaks in Xorg. It's a heady but annoying time right now for graphics developers.

TC     

[Moltke]

Historically a lot of themes are designed for or are dependent on specific DEs. This is OK, but different DEs evolve differently. Mate and Cinnamon for example still have a lot of GTK2 dependencies. Other DEs like gnome are GTK3 dependent. Some application developers while not specifying a certain DE may spec GTK3 or GTK2 or QT 4 or 5 dependencies.

Thanks for that answer. I do understand the above, I think. When I visist xfce look I notice there are separated, independent gtk2 and gtk3 sub-categories.

Run a non-native application from the terminal some time without /dev/nulling the warnings and read them. DE theming itself

I have and noticed more often than not a warning messasge which reads something like

Code:

GTK Warning: function deprecated

can't remember the whole thing right now but never really paid much attention since it doesn't seem to affect app's functioning or performance.

If I understand correctly what you're saying, then, outdated/unmaintained themes may or may not have any influence in system's performance? i.e slow down the system and make it a pain to use it. But we cant expect annoyning behaviour like GUIs acting weird, not properly without impacting system performance?