The proposed changes in Adwaita, the default Gnome theme, consist in:
- More vivid colors with a more extensive palette.
- Header bars and buttons have been made lighter and more elegant. Buttons use shadows instead of solid borders, their corners are more rounded, and their background is flatter, while the header bars have been updated to complement these changes, to give buttons sufficient contrast. There's also more contrast between the header bars focused and unfocused states.
- Switches become more rounded and lose their "ON" and "OFF" labels to "bring the theme into line with other platforms and make switches more compact and modern in appearance".
The updated header bars, colors, and switches can be seen below:
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| Old header bars on top / new header bars on the bottom |