Basically title, I want this thread to become a place for discussion but also a sort of r/unixporn for ardour: share screenshots of your setup writing the DE/WM you are using, how it is themed, the ardour theme you are using and how you customized the color palette.
Not only making music in a beautiful environment puts you in a good mood but some color schemes can also be easier on the eyes and in a way make you more productive.
I am actually experimenting with WMs and tried weston but I guess Ardour isn’t ready for wayland. I also tried awesome, fluxbox and twm, they are all very lightweight but I didn’t “rice” them so the look of the whole thing was not really beautiful and that’s when I came up with the idea for this thread.
For me, the desktop environment is irrelevant because when using Ardour I maximize it to full screen mode, where the window manager isn’t visible. I do this whether I am using Ardour on Windows or Linux. I use Ardour’s default color scheme while in the program, which I think looks very nice.
I think most of us here are more concerned about getting the job done efficiently then on having eye pleasing screen. I rely more on my ears than eyes when working with Ardour.
But since you mentioned Fluxbox, I have been using it for some ten or so years when working with the audio and I have some good things to say about it.
It boots 3x faster then KDE on the same hardware, it uses around 200mb of RAM on startup, it is as responsive as can get, it has a ton of options and possibilities in terms of keyboard shortcuts and they are easy to add /edit. This helps a lot when moving a dozen or so plugin windows to or from virtual desktops, minimizing, maximizing, toggling… It also has possibility to remember size, placement, layer, decoration… for each app. I find it easier to have the main Ardour window always maximized, without decorations, and layered at the bottom so I don’t have to deal with plugins “disappearing” as soon as I move the playhead. I like to have them on top and minimize them when I want to. In theory, one can add these “window rules” in KDE, too, but I didn’t have much luck with that… apparently KDE has problems discerning Ardour main window from Ardour plugin windows (no such problem with Fluxbox)…besides, KDE swaps way too eagerly.
As for the look, default Fluxbox looks hardly usable, but with little effort it can be “riced” to look at least bearable, all you need to do is to edit a couple of text files. As for themes, there are plenty of those to choose from tenr.de.
And now some pictures:
Fluxbox desktop with native menu and dmenu launcher:
Default Ardour colour scheme has always looked just fine to me, Ardour6 looks even better, so no need to change anything in that field. The most important thing is to use as much of the screen area as possible so I made my toolbar as small as 14px, it is only needed to bring up plugins and minimize them when no longer needed:
Yeah, here too, I’m using awesomewm but the only thing visible is Ardour with its default colour scheme, so there isn’t really much to share. But Ardour does look great in my opinion, so there’s that!
I am courious, how does a tiling WM such as Awesome handle multiple plugin windows? Some of those resist changing geometry and are not suitable for tiling. Do you use floating mode for the plugins? Can you move the plugins to some other tag (desktop, whatever…) for easier access?
awesomewm is a tiling wm, but the default mode is floating. I only enable tiling when I need it. So basically everything in Ardour for me works like a normal floating one. And yes, you can also move plugins to other tags/workspaces if you so wish. (I guess I could see the benefit for having the mixer on another tag for example)
My bad, I should’ve elaborated more and also filed an issue.
I am not sure it’s all Ardour problems either: I had to try many times to get a GUI for plugins, and I couldn’t move or resize them, also the only way to “hide” the plugin GUI was to Alt+Tab. I experienced also a few total Ardour freezes.
I do not have such problems using X.
But Ardour does look great in my opinion, so there’s that!