This bug report proposes a near-perfect solution to the following famous gnome desktop icon text color problem: By default, GNOME desktop icon text color is white, which works well with dark wallpapers but awkwardly with light ones. The solution proposed below guarantees a visually pleasant and highly contrasted icon text appearance, whether the wallpaper is dark or light: Once a new user account is created, the system automatically creates a gtkrc-2.0 file in the new user's home directory, with the following content: style "desktop-icon" { NautilusIconContainer::frame_text = 1 text[NORMAL] = "#000000" NautilusIconContainer::normal_alpha = 128 } class "GtkWidget" style "desktop-icon" (Testers, run "killall nautilus" to see the effect immediately.) This will set your desktop icon text color to black, and add a 50%-translucent, rounded box under icon text so that the icon text is always easily visible whether the wallpaper is light or dark. I recommend Fedora adopt this setting by default.
Created attachment 465141 [details] Effect on a white wallpaper
Created attachment 465142 [details] Effect on a dark wallpaper
Created attachment 465143 [details] Effect on a light/dark-mixed wallpaper
Created attachment 465144 [details] Effect on another dark wallpaper
Created attachment 465145 [details] Effect on another light wallpaper
Created attachment 465146 [details] Effect on another wallpaper
Created attachment 465147 [details] Effect on another wallpaper
Created attachment 465148 [details] Effect on another wallpaper
Created attachment 465149 [details] Effect on another light wallpaper
Created attachment 465150 [details] Effect on another dark wallpaper
Created attachment 465151 [details] Effect on another dark wallpaper
Created attachment 465152 [details] Effect on another wallpaper
Created attachment 465153 [details] Effect on another dark wallpaper
Created attachment 465154 [details] Effect on an ALL BLACK wallpaper
Created attachment 465155 [details] Effect on an ALL WHITE wallpaper
Created attachment 465157 [details] Effect on a white-to-black vertical gradient
Created attachment 465158 [details] Effect on a black-to-white vertical gradient
Created attachment 465159 [details] Effect on another wallpaper
Created attachment 465160 [details] Effect on another wallpaper
Created attachment 465162 [details] Effect on another wallpaper
Wallpapers in all screenshots (except the ALL BLACK, ALL WHITE, black-to-white gradient, white-to-black gradient ones) courtesy of National Geographic Magazine's website.
In a related report (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nautilus/+bug/643836), they say a patch is already under review for GNOME. If approved, GNOME will use the same way as Windows/KDE does to draw desktop icon text (screenshot: http://bugzilla-attachments.gnome.org/attachment.cgi?id=166875).
Update: In the above gtkrc-2.0 file, reducing NautilusIconContainer::normal_alpha from 128 to 96 can improve appearance with dark wallpapers.
This downplays the translucent text background's illumination, making them less outstanding on a dark wallpaper while still reflective of their text.
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