#453 Use "New Fedora Blue" for accent color
Opened 3 months ago by mattdm. Modified 14 days ago

Now that GNOME upstream allows this, could we use the Fedora blue by default? This is #51a2da in sRGB.

Additionally, it would be nice if the color palette offered in Settings were from the official Fedora design guide color set.

Screenshot_From_2024-11-01_10-52-23.png


Is the palette even customizable? I didn't think it was...

Metadata Update from @ngompa:
- Issue tagged with: experience

3 months ago

Metadata Update from @ngompa:
- Issue tagged with: meeting

3 months ago

Metadata Update from @ngompa:
- Issue untagged with: meeting

3 months ago

Is the palette even customizable? I didn't think it was...

No, I didn't think it was either...

Yeah, it looks like the palette is not customizable, nor can you use direct color values in the GNOME implementation of accent colors. At least that's based on the merge requests I've looked at starting from the gnome-control-center one.

So, unfortunately this is not possible.

Metadata Update from @ngompa:
- Issue close_status updated to: Can't fix
- Issue status updated to: Closed (was: Open)

3 months ago

Ubuntu does patch libadwaita to use their colors instead of the GNOME choices.

This feels like a throwback to 15 years ago, when distro-colored folder icons were all the rage.

Ubuntu does patch libadwaita to use their colors instead of the GNOME choices.

I'm going to re-open based on this. Surely we can use this, and hopefully convince the upstream that ... people really want it.

This feels like a throwback to 15 years ago, when distro-colored folder icons were all the rage.

Eh, maybe? But since there are colors, let's make them on-brand.

Metadata Update from @mattdm:
- Issue status updated to: Open (was: Closed)

3 months ago

I believe the current status is that if you patch libadwaita, Flathub Flatpaks will still use the default GNOME colors.

I remember that allowing distros to tweak colors was a consideration when GNOME's accent colors implementation was being drafted, but it's not really part of the initial GNOME 47 implementation.

I wasn't involved in the accent colors work so don't have a huge amount of insight into the decisions that were made there. That said...

Historically any discussion of colour customisation quickly became a tug of war between distros, app developers and users. I don't think it's possible to have a design which satisfies everyone, at least with the technology we have today. I would check with the upstream developers to see what repercussions there might be when changing the accent downstream.

In terms of the specific colours, I know that the default accent colour palette was selected in order to ensure good legibility when used as a background for white text (an example ). The Fedora blue is lighter than the default and brings the contrast ratio down from 3.8:1 to 2.8:1. The GNOME blue has an A WCAG rating. The Fedora blue fails the WCAG test. My contrast checking app says "This colour combination doesn't have enough contrast to be legible."

Maybe extending the accent option to include one optional distro specific color, ie so that distros can put a file with a color code somewhere that the UI picks up should be a feasible option here I would think, and then distro has a proper way of doing this instead of downstream patching.

Allans point about contrast is a valid one though so maybe even if we got this as an upstream option it wouldn't be a great choice to just pick the standard Fedora color, but we could maybe do a darker tone or maybe Red Hat Red (not sure Red Hat red though is materially different than the current Red)

This would be difficult with the current GNOME color accent architecture though, wouldn't it? As far as I know, even though the APIs technically allow arbitrary color values, GNOME's implementation does not. And it wouldn't work in Flatpak'd applications because of that, since there's no way to propagate and color based on a color code for GNOME apps.

This would be difficult with the current GNOME color accent architecture though, wouldn't it? As far as I know, even though the APIs technically allow arbitrary color values, GNOME's implementation does not. And it wouldn't work in Flatpak'd applications because of that, since there's no way to propagate and color based on a color code for GNOME apps.

I haven't had anyone explain the exact architecture to me, but this seems like something that should be resolvable somehow. I mean obviously it is not doing today with no changes, but I want to understand why/if it would be a major re-architecting to add a feature like this.

It was intentionally designed to prevent distros from customizing the accent colors. This is a social problem, not a technical problem. We will just have to patch it if we want to change the color.

Maybe extending the accent option to include one optional distro specific color

From a UX perspective having two blues or two oranges would be a bit odd.

Fedora should just stick with the upstream colour set, imo.

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