My Pi5 arrived today. One happy bunny
THIS ^^^^^^^
As many users wait for their Raspberry Pi 5 units to arrive, a fresh version of the Raspberry Pi OS has just landed, complete with fixes and that most essential of operating system add-ons – dark mode. Dark mode is one of those features that seems to be the first thing many users ask for. While some might regard it as somewhat …
RPi isn't really well known for it's amazing interface so why would Dark Mode be so demanded ?
For me, personally, the UI interface is kind of secondary, I use PIs because of their physical interfaces, digital or analogical. I would have presumed that most users would be the same.
Are there really that many users running the UI full time ? Obviously usage varies ...
You might be surprised. There are people that have been using them as "primary" desktop systems. Some have been doing that as far back as the Pi3B, and it became more common with the Pi4B. That trend will most likely accelerate with the Pi5, as the specs aren't that far off an entry level x86 PC.
Agreed re Dark Mode. Of course it seems to be in demand because no one ever put in a feature quest to NOT have a dark mode. Choice is nice, but personally I don't see the need for dark mode so I wasn't one of those who "demanded" it :-)
And, as per the article, It worked well, at least for those applications that paid attention to it." That's the problem with so many themes and pretty decorations. They rarely are of any real benefit and often don't work well with all apps, if at all. Worse, with Linux, you've got various apps coming from different primary desktop backgrounds that often pay no attention at all to any theme set by whatever the current desktop is, eg running a Gnome app on KDE or vice versa. Most of the time, I just leave the defaults, maybe a few minor tweaks to font size and type, but then GTK apps don't always honour even those changes in my chosen desktop settings menu.
As for reviews of new OS releases, almost without fail, the first comments are about what it looks like, despite the fact that one of the main "selling" points of *nix "distros" is how you can customise the look and feel to be what you want anyway even down to selecting an entirely different desktop, not just theme. I find that quite amusing, if a bit stale considering how often people bemoan the ever diminishing amount of desktop customisation one can do with Windows these days :-)
Some dyslexics find bright text on a dark background easier to read. It was pretty much the standard on terminals because a white background flickered atrociously until monitors could handle a decent refresh rate. LCDs have better persistence so refresh rate is less an an issue. Some people suffer from flickering monitors more than others. I needed at least 85Hz and even then preferred a dark background on large monitors. (Flicker is most annoying in peripheral vision.)
I still find bright text on a dark background easier to read probably because I did a lot of reading that way while young.
I have come across that occasionally. It gets replaced or repaired almost as fast as my pet peeve: translucent windows, tools tips and menus. That stuff may look pretty on a TV show but it is about as functional as a glossy screen in a room with lights in the ceiling.
I go for not just dark mode, but darker mode with proper black backgrounds. I also use the DarkReader plug-in for both Firefox and Chrome/Chromium, whilst by default that will give a mushy grey on grey you can set it to use a brightness of -20 and a contrast of +20 to give nice crisp white on black pages, particularly with The Register.