Please see the attached image.
In Xfce-4.12.x, under "Panel > Appearance > Background" you will see a setting for "Alpha." By setting that to zero, you can have, as you can see to the bottom right of the image, a transparent panel, but the icons on the left still have their color and brightness (the red dashes disappear when you close the properties box). That might still be possible with 4.14.0, but if so, I couldn't find the setting.
Thanks, again, for all your hard work.
Greatly appreciated.

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And, 4.14.1, has already been released.

The tarball, http://archive.xfce.org/src/xfce/xfd...4.14.1.tar.bz2

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Same here. Sad to say I abandoned Xfce after the port to GTK3 gained traction. I'm using IceWM now, and yes, it's just a window manager, but it does mean I don't have to put up with at least some of the GTK3 elements (panel, title bars). Not that I blame the Xfce team for this regressive move to a barely usable and ugly desktop.

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I do not blame the Xfce team, either. I don't think they had much of a choice and I am grateful to them that they did not jump the GTK3 wagon immediately after the initial GTK3 releases. They did provide a solid, beautiful and very responsive desktop all these years. I wish the project all the best and hopefully the toolkit gets better as well. Backwards compatibility between versions would be a nice feature.

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Hi Guys,
What's the big deal about GTK3?
As certainly you can install a gtk3 theme that is visually appealing, right?

I've not found GTK3 apps (xfce included) any less stable, slower or hungrier for RAM. So what is the argument against them?

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Qury,

I can't find a theme I like that works fine in GTK3. Actually, the only theme that works fine is Adwaita. Old themes, such as Clearlooks, Murrine and Industrial are not supported. There used to be Clearlooks-Phenix, which made GTK2 and GTK3 look uniform, but after whatever GTK3 update it no longer works fine. Same with oxygen-gtk3. You guys remember, when we had oxygen-qt, oxygen-gtk2 and oxygen-gtk3? And a KDE that provided a very consistent look of programs using these three toolkits?

In my experience, GTK3 programs are slower than their GTK2 predecessors. For example Xfce Terminal. Clicking to get to the options suddenly got a bit sluggish when it was mad eto use GTK3.

GTK3 programs seem to provide UI with terrible utilization of space. Enormous tabs (Seamonkey, tabs take up so much space), ridiculous arrangement of some buttons (almost all), the removal of features (file-roller, why do you simplify the navigation buttons, leaving just back and forward), disappearing scroll bars (almost all, i want to see where in a document I am). Gnumeric had terrible problems with buggy scroll bars, but well it was Slackware -current, so I do not complain about this one.

I can go on, but enough rant... Also, this is how things look here. Maybe I am just doing something wrong, I do not ask anyone to agree with me.

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GTK3 and Plasma should be accessible and usable out of the box. It shouldn't be left up to users with impaired mobility and vision to hunt for themes just to make the desktop usable. Scrollbars, menus, taskbar buttons, titlebar buttons -- all should be clearly delineated and immediately distinguishable by default. None of this ridiculous, ugly and accessibility-unfriendly blending of elements into each other and into faint pastel or grey backgrounds.

I am an able-bodied man with perfect sight, but I worked for people whose mobility and vision were severely impaired. Do you think they should have to hunt down after-market themes and add-ons to make the computer usable? Should it not rather be the other way round? If you, the able-bodied user, don't like the Windows 2000 look then you go and hunt down a theme to change it. People who have difficulty moving shouldn't be told they have to position the cursor precisely over that floating scrollbar to make it visible and usable.

Windows 98 and 2000 were immediately usable and intelligible for people from one end of the spectrum to the other. Not so the fabled Linux desktop. How do you change that Plasma taskbar? How do you bring that GTK3 scrollbar into view? Why does that white menu have no borders to distinguish it from the white web page behind it? Why is it so difficult to resize windows, to grab that corner handle, to tell two windows apart without window borders to distinguish them?

The Linux desktop. What a joke. And all because the 20- and 30-somethings insist on doing it their way. Pretty pastel colours and let's try and get material design in there as well. There is no respect, no empathy, no foresight, no wisdom. Just bull ahead with all the stupid ideas you can bundle into one desktop and see what turns up. Accessibility for these people is a set of so-called standards, an afterthought, but let them stand beside someone with accessibility problems and see just how useless the so-called standards are.

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Gerard Lally,

welcome to the flat design trend. I, myself, like to know immediately what is clickable, what is scrollable and what options the interface offers. Not needing to move the mouse cursor in order for some buttons to pop up.

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Try the below themes (available from slackbuilds.org or github)

Arc
Numix
Greybird
Plata https://gitlab.com/tista500/plata-theme
Boomerang themes: https://b00merang.weebly.com/
Also Breeze has a gtk version, which i like too.

As for application startup time, i can only say "it works for me", although i'm cheating as i have preload installed.

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I'm using Robby's build on -current at the moment and I really like it. Smooth, quick, sleek. Xfce looks and feels really modern - for once! I really like the animations too. I can understand why some people would be disappointed with this, esp on a slower computer since Xfce was supposed to be lightweight - it's a little bit less lightweight than it was, but if you're on a slightly faster computer it's great. When this makes it into 15.0 Slackware will feel much more up to date.

EDIT: the only discernible issue I've had to far is with Power Manager. The laptop won't suspend on closing the lid [as it's set to do] and the battery icon in the taskbar doesn't show the status. I'll try and figure out what's going on.

EDIT2: A reboot fixed it. Kind of. I do occasionally get this message attached. This is an interesting take on it though:

https://unix.stackexchange.com/quest...ent-inhibition

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Is there no way to make a modern looking theme for GTK2?

I have been messing around with stylesheets trying to figure out GTK2 and how to make it less eye-jarring. I would like a more material-esque design, but not rely on GTK3 to do it. The problem is, I don't really know why the GNOME team thought we needed a new rendition of GTK? Can't there just be a new style lib for GTK2?

Gaaaah!

Why does it all have to be so complicated? I'm going back to DWM.

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They put the things into GTK3 which they wanted to have supported for Gnome 3, not considering the impact on any other GTK-using application (or DE like XFCE).
Thta's what you get when the toolkit isn't independant of the DE (Gnome) anymore.

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I suspect they do consider the impact but often tag non GNOME related patches and requests as WONTFIX because the code does not satisfy the limited GNOME human interface guidelines.
As the WONTFIX folks would say, "I'm sorry. My responses are limited."

I'm curious if you tried out the new icewm at SBo; I recently cleaned it up and upgraded it to the latest 1.5.x release. I find it to be quite nice for a minimal window manager, but I've not seen any feedback either way, so it's hard to say whether my opinion is substantiated here :-)

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This is a bit off-topic for this thread, but I was wondering how you handle tiling in icewm? So,tile an application to the left-half or right-half ( or bottom and top half).