Mac OS X Themes

[Glamtrains]

Regardless of how many themes people develop, there always remains a blandness in Mint imho. Also, a proper desktop clock that always works and is pleasing to the eye, simply doesn't seem to exist. I used to use the KDE Plasma desktop for eye candy but prefer Cinnamon for various reasons.

How to spice it up, give apps the typical Windows decorations with the three coloured dots, perhaps a desktop clock and a system monitor that looks like a high-tech instrument panel with dials and things?

[rossdv8]

sudo apt install cairo-clock gives a nice resizeable clock, albeit simple and only a couple of themes.

I also use cairo-dock at the bottom of the screen (it has a sort of Mac OS looking theme available too, among others) as well as a normal Panel at the top. I use Xfce, but they should work on Mate and Cinnamon.
I've posted far too many of my desktop on here

download/file.php?id=68439&mode=view

[Glamtrains]

Thanks for the heads-up; yet it doesn't work on Cinnamon. Perhaps I can just install Xfce desktop from the regular repositories, using Synaptic? Acting like Count Dracula and creating a Frankenstein brought me what I wanted. I shouldn't have problems as I only ever use my PC to run Firefox, I run no office suite, do no graphic design, etc. Just Firefox.

[rossdv8]

I have had Cinnamon installed in Xfce before, so it should work the other way, and 'should' allow you to choose at the Login Screen, if you disable any automatic login, or just if you log , switch desktop and log back in.

I find Xfce a bit more 'playful', which in itself is not what you want but could be useful for exploring what you might like.

Just remember if you are installing Xfce, use synaptic for preference, and search xfce4
Look for the result xfce4 that says metapackage, and has the information below in the description.

The description gives a pretty good idea of some of the other stuff that will be sensible to select if they are not selected by default.
You WILL need to make sure that xfce-panel is selected. You might want to ensure panle applets and indicator plugins and stuff are included. A couple of other things are needed, but this explains a lot:

Meta-package for the Xfce Lightweight Desktop Environment

Xfce is a lightweight desktop environment for unix-like operating systems.
It aims to be fast and lightweight, while still being visually appealing and
easy to use. Designed for productivity, it loads and executes applications
fast, while conserving system resources.

This package is a metapackage; it depends on the core packages of the Xfce4
desktop environment and recommends some extra Xfce4 packages. If you intend
to use Xfce4 and want the full experience then installing this package and the
packages it Recommends is a great place to start.

If you just want to pick and choose the core components then feel free to
remove this package.

I use Xfce, and when I'm bored (which happens a lot to a retired tech that had several brain injuries and at least one confirmed stroke) I also waffle on far too much these days, for the same reason. . .

[Glamtrains]

Thanks. Somehow, Xfce always seems to bore me very quickly as I don't like its ergonomics. Also, it ate its own .ICE file(s) and booted into a blank screen, leaving me without a computer while I was smack in the middle of a huge commodities transaction and ended up costing a fortune. I live in a country with 93 Mint users and it happened at night.

I did as you said and went via Synaptic early last night (am in Central African time zone GMT+2) but soon purged anything Xfce and installed KDE Plasma.

Sorry to hear about your brain history, knowing from experience how bad that can be. Great to see you're still around.

[rossdv8]

Sorry to hear about your brain history, knowing from experience how bad that can be. Great to see you're still around

We're not quite a dying breed yet.
I wonder what causes your glitches with Xfce. I do horrible things to it. I have it booting plasma inside itself, sort of side loading components into the Xfce desktop, which adds a plasma panel and menu as well as some other theming stuff.

I am already running things like Dolphin and most of my Plasma qt programs with translucency - even without loading plasma desktop. I probably mentioned this before, sorry. The brain thing. I repeat myself a lot.
I still use xwinwrap, so I can click a Panel or Dock icon and run a wallpaper mp4.

The only thing I managed to break in a long time is a repeat of breaking LibreOffice, and that's a LibreOffice thing that has been happening to users in Linux and Windows and I think Mac for many many years. It can sometimes be fixed, but rarely.

I hate that Xfce could break in the middle of a trade

Cheers,
Stay safe

[Glamtrains]

Xfce cost me a few million US$ and, out of the box, it looks like something that had escaped from a 1950's toy store. If you compare it to Cinnamon, Plasma, etc., it is just too immature, rough around the edges, not crisp enough. I never thought of pasting Plasma onto it; I can get that without Xfce and missing .ICE files.

Any OS environment that boots into that dark place, must go. Little boy asked his dad: "can we play that game in the dark place?" Perplexed, the dad ignored the plea. Then, one day, the Dad shelled out to DOS and the little boy quipped: "Daddy!! Daddeeeee...that's the dark place."

Xfce is my dark place.

[SantaFe]

Xfce cost me a few million US$

Hmmmm....... care to show us any proof you lost a few million US Dollars? Inquiring minds wanna know.

[Glamtrains]

2015 happened long ago. Where were you, then? It was in April, I think.

Things happen, had to wipe my Mint today to install Windows 10, as our tax office had sent me PDF docs that can only be opened with a certain Adobe PDF app for Mac & Windows. PlayonLinux failed.

[Mick-Cork]

Things happen, had to wipe my Mint today to install Windows 10, as our tax office had sent me PDF docs that can only be opened with a certain Adobe PDF app for Mac & Windows. PlayonLinux failed.

I wouldn't have been so soft on the tax office as that, I would have asked them to send a PDF that conformed to the open standard.
That's the norm, and opening such documents is independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems.

[Glamtrains]

I am busy with them on open source. The problem is the young outsourced geeks with more degrees than a thermometer and no real life experiences. They are too smart for their own good.

[rossdv8]

The problem is the young outsourced geeks with more degrees than a thermometer and no real life experiences. They are too smart for their own good.

Which is why I am glad I had the years in IT and business (my own, and managing others) generally, and am well out of it now.
We pioneered web sites in our day. Glamtrains may even have been one of the original members of the HTML Writer's Guild. I was. We learned stuff, and while we may not be quite up to speed on some things these days, we tried to 'do it right' because there were no degrees of college courses in IT back then.
It was like learning to be a mechanic by being given a box of parts and being told 'There might be enough bits there to make a working engine. Do it!'

My legacy websites are designed to work across all devices, and they still do, but recently a very large company, one of the largest in the world whose platform I have to use, decided not to support cross platform devices by default, and want their users to rewrite that company's code so it complies! (Talking about GOOGLE's Blogger platform here).
The opposition, Wordpress still supports cross platform perfectly, by default, but using Google Blogger works better for search engine results (linked to clients' web pages).

A few weeks ago I had to log in to a medical practice website to arrange a Covid vaccination. There was a drop down list I had to choose from. The only item on the list was called something like 'Select and item from the list'. It was not something new written for Covid. It was a standard page for new patients to fill in to select which doctor I wanted to see.
We would never have released something like that into the wild, and if it had managed to escape, it would certainly not have been left inoperable for the year or more this has apparently been inoperable. It works on Windows - just not on Chrome (and derivatives) Firefox, Opera, Mac (incl iphone and ipad), or anything Android.

Who does that commercially these days?

And to top it off, I found the same problem on a government website a couple of days later!

Kiddies with bits of paper saying they are expert programmers, writing garbage and being paid for it. I'm glad I lived through times where if we didn't do it right - we had to fix it on our own watch.

Back to the topic:
I like Mac OS X Themes

[Glamtrains]

They can play Angrybirds and be funny on TikTok, then think they are "computer literate." In 2017, I challenged a little loudmouth on Twitter to tell me what the only three things a computer could do, were. Some answers coming from the public domain were really funny but not a single person out of eight billion on the planet got it right. The answer, of course, being adding 0+0, 0+1 and 1+1. And none ever knew what Boolean Algebra was, so much for Gen Z being computer literate. Don't mention Hex Programming, COBOL, etc. Things I could do before my own BIOS up there got beaten to a pulp by gangsters from the O+ Rebels.

No, I never belonged to any guild yet did develop so many websites in HTML, for clients. The thing is that I also was skilled in financial management, -planning & consulting, general management, and a seasoned administrator with some law training. I could develop apps in DBaseIII+, DbaseIV, QuattroPro, lovely Lotus, and the like; things that worked. Twice I had effected law changes so that the smart guys could amend national tax laws, to program our "IRS" computers, because existing laws had contradictions, meaning that mainframe systems could not be correctly programmed to issue tax assessments. Coming from the country in the world with the most complex tax laws, that maybe is quite something to halt the entire national assessment process to change laws in parliament to properly programme a computer. Yet I have seen it so often at IBM events, these young know-alls who had never done a stitch of real work in their lives and they hold the degrees getting them those tremendous salaries, "pizza cars" (flat Italian ones), nice shoes, and attract the babes. Yet they don't quite understand everyday life paper flow, practicalities and cannot factor that into their work. Great to create web-based interactive PDFs that only ever will work in their own browsers.

[ABitMenthol77]

I thought I would share my Mac-based theme on my Linux Mint Laptop.



Icons - https://www.gnome-look.org/p/1405756/
Cursors - https://www.gnome-look.org/p/1411743/
Theme - https://www.gnome-look.org/p/1403328/