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Epidermis Theme Manager: Promising for the Future, Problematic for Now
Epidermis is a project that promises to bring together all the aspects of a complete GNOME theme in to a single interface, allowing you to install and apply a completely new theme in a single click.
After installation, Epidermis lets you install a complete theme (including desktop background, GDM theme, splash screen, window theme, etc.) either through a downloadable package or repositories. The purpose of this is to integrate all of the settings available to you through different interfaces and applications into a single theme management window.
If properly implemented, this ability to change the entire theme with one click could be an incredible feature. Unfortunately, the system does not work as well as it claims to, at least not yet. Actually using it on my Hardy Heron resulted in a difficult to fix theme mess, with some things correctly skinned and others apparently only partially themed. In a virtual machine running Intrepid Ibex, however, everything appeared to work perfectly.
Epidermis has a lot of promise as a great way of easily switching themes. Unfortunately, especially if you are still running Hardy Heron, I would not recommend you start using it. At this point it is better to wait for your distribution to integrate Epidermis. At that point, it should be incredible.
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nice and simple, but limited choice of themes/.pigments and given that gnome 2.28 wont allow you to play fully with gdm (no login screen manager) it almost silly, if it cant theme fuly whats the point,
we need our full theming back asap
then this could really get into the top apps lists
where is the screenshot? anyway this is definitely a cool idea, and not suprising that its hard to get themes working. I mean hey even the xbox 360 has issues letting me get rid of those dang green menus
Nice to hear about this kind of tool, as it is stands now, it is a mess. Regarding the article, this is one of those that you should really provide us with a screenshot and definitly a link..
Wow. I knew about Epidermis but when I saw this article on Digg, I thought it had actually improved. No screenshots, the theme applying is still slow and messed up, and it’s basically an alpha software. I see no reason why this should have been posted or been on the page of Digg.
Tried it and it made a glorious mess of my GRUB and kernel splash.
Themes aren’t resolution independent, e.g. the wallpapers doesn’t have different sizes.
Like where it is going, will give it a skip for a few releases..
They really need to make one interface for themes that can also support Compiz featured themes, and simply discriminate between them in an elegant way. For instance, if you’re using Metacity, you could gray out the themes that use Compiz, and/or even make it so when you click on a Compiz theme, it asks if you want to “turn on desktop effects”. Something like that will be needed until Compiz can be a default window manager without causing problems with drivers and such like it does (ahem*ATI*ahem), or without slowing things down (or at least a very very minimal slowdown).
Hello
Just here to answer a few questions.
First of all the following statement is true.
“it’s not hardy heron, but the gnome version. Each new version becomes more easily themable and bugs get sorted..”
I am the main trubleshooter for epidermis running Hardy with gnome Version: 2.22.1, All the uploaded pigments in the repo are all being tested for both Hardy and Intrepid. If you get an error please tell us
for all of those the main site is here : http://epidermis.tuxfamily.org/
and to report a bug here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/epidermis
We are sorry about the screen resolutions, Ill be running a small survey to see what the most common for gnome users. or else if we come up with better idea.
Nice to hear about this kind of tool, as it is stands now, it is a mess. Regarding the article, this is one of those that you should really provide us with a screenshot and definitly a link.
it’s not hardy heron, but the gnome version. Each new version becomes more easily themable and bugs get sorted..
Tried it and it made a glorious mess of my GRUB and kernel splash.
Themes aren’t resolution independent, e.g. the wallpapers doesn’t have different sizes.
Like where it is going, will give it a skip for a few releases.
lol
Guys thanks for the nice review, I am glad that you guys like epidermis. Me and flimm are working ti bring you the very best of it.
Got an Idea or bug please lets know.
Good to hear about Epidermis. The Appearance Control Panel was just added a couple revisions ago, it amalgamated themes, fonts and cursors into one control panel. This though, would really add to Gnome theming as it’s support pretty much just applies to windows. I’d like to see Epidermis apply to the panel too. Hopefully this project continues and we see it integrated into Gnome.
it’s not hardy heron, but the gnome version. Each new version becomes more easily themable and bugs get sorted