Hi,

I still get and compile the sources from an older Slackware release.
I can live with my own package, but I wonder why it's not included anymore.
I didn't test every themes, but it's ok AFAIK.

I also compile it for me

It seems xfwm4-themes-4.10 was removed back in 2015 during the development of 14.2 when xfce was upgraded from 4.10 to 4.12.

If I had to guess why, I'd say it was because it's tied to the 4.10 release, which means on 4.12+, it is probably outdated (and possibly broken). It was added back in 2012 during the development of 14.0. It was added alongside xfce-4.10, however, they've never released an updated version. xfce is now at 4.16, but xfwm-themes is still at 4.10.

Having used many projects with themes, they rarely survive multiple version upgrades without being at least partially broken and probably needing some form of modification of the themes to fix issues. Robby and Pat might've just been playing it safe by removing it rather than shipping a package that might contain broken themes.

1 members found this post helpful.

Those themes did not include HiDPI variants, and likely no-one wanted to create some.

GTK 3 famously broke all old GTK themes. My guess is that no-one wanted to update the old xfwm4 themes to match the new GTK themes.
Ed

Those window manager themes are just pixmaps to draw the borders and buttons (not related to gtk2 themes) - these didn't need to change for a long time so they didn't need updating. But as .16 added client side decorations to some xfce apps these no longer work for those so it doesn't make sense to include them any more since they would no longer be consistent across xfce. CSD must be themed using gtk3 and its version of css.

The gtk3 CSD stuff has pretty limited themeability and some of the gnome apps are so badly designed with all the junk in the 'title bar' theming runs into more problems. Its also not properly documented and keeps changing which makes the task frustrating and unpleasant (and ongoing!) so the artists just give up. Even within xfce the css classes and ids are an inconsistent mess.

2 members found this post helpful.

notzed, I agree, GTK3 is a mess, one version won't work with another, no compatibility, hard to comprehend, just a mess.
I did find a GUI tool called oomox that makes modifying Numix, Arc, or Materia style themes and saving them to GTK2, GTK3 3.0 to 3.20, Cinnamon, elements from XWFM4, metacity, openbox, unity, changing icon sets, and all sort of things. True you have to start with presets, but that makes it easier. Supposedly you can import a theme to modify, but in the version I have, that's not possible from the program, and you have to sudo paste a theme into a folder in the file system for oomox, which is a minor inconvenience.
Worked for me to get my Xubuntu 20.04 (GTK3 only) looking the same as 16.04 or earlier (which was GTK2) without having to muck about with code in text files or messing with a million pixmaps, doing in minutes what you could take hours doing by hand.
https://github.com/themix-project/oomox/releases
Or read about it here:
https://ostechnix.com/oomox-customiz...%20variants%3A

Yeah, XFCE is currently broken, some of the "goodies" and or even inherent parts that ship with the current version (4.16) aren't compatible with it and don't work! Was the same with 4.14, actually. I don't know if it's a matter of "release BEFORE testing" or what. Crazy, eh?

You are wrong, Xfce isn't "broken".

1 members found this post helpful.

xfce4-notes-plugin - Notes
Please note that this plugin is not currently compatible with the current Xfce 4.16 release. (So why is it there? Current version also doesn't work for 4.14)
Weather plugin: Broken (has to be fixed from another source)
GTK2: Doesn't work. Big bummer, as there are applications that REQUIRE IT that have not (and never will be) updated to GTK3 or 4. OK I'll give you that one, as GTK3 was broken when it first came out, and every release since has broken something. And "broken" is not supporting deprecated parts that are actually REQUIRED still, or providing a migration that works in all the parts, whether it's actually part of your product or is just expected to work with your product. Making your users "fix" something right out of the box means your product is broken.

Maybe the whole thing isn't broken, but I'm saying that shipping a product that doesn't have all its parts working, instead of "oh look new, shiny, so what if it breaks stuff you already had..." or something like, isn't what I would look for in an "improved" product of any sort.
I'm not saying XFCE4 is UNUSABLE because you can plug other parts in from say Gnome instead, but really, why would anyone want to? If I wanted to use Gnome, I would. Having to plug in Gnome parts to get functionality that XFCE previously had = broken.

2 members found this post helpful.

IIRC, GTK2 isn't suppose to work with the Xfce-4.16. The developers moved on to GTK3.
You can find the source tarballs here, https://git.xfce.org/
and build them yourself, if you so desire.