When people discover Pop!_OS, it's almost inevitable that they'll find their way to the live chat support via Mattermost. It's a great platform for asking questions in real time, but lacks any kind of usable archive - That's where Pop!_Planet comes into the picture. Mattermost is a high trust, open source collaboration platform built for developers. There's a few similar services available, but Mattermost was a fantastic choice for System76. From Mattermost's site;
Mattermost works amazingly well, but many people are disappointed with the theme and color choices. The default is reminiscent of Windows: Blue, bland and basic! However, they do offer some stock theme options and instructions on how to change it in the Mattermost User Guide..

Above picture: The Mattermost default theme.
Some time back when Pop was in it's early days, Pop!_Planet's founder @evertiro, created two Mattermost themes that helped to bring the Pop-live-chat into aesthetic harmony with Pop's own theme and style. They were a timely and welcome addition. However, Pop has changed a little over the last couple of years and those themes could use a tweak. You could do it yourself using the information in the user guide linked above, but some of Pop's community have kindly offered up their versions for you to use - if you like them. Instructions are on the linked pages.
For light theme enthusiasts, I recommend my Derpomattic theme. It's focused on using all of Pop's light theme colors. I've tweaked it to focus a little more on Pop's orange and made the clickable buttons Pop's blue. New message notifications and mentions are a nice magenta. I've customized the sidebar header with a super dark purple and beige grey text, just for a little "pop".
With the popularity of dark themes these days, here's three great examples:
My Derpomattic-Dark theme is easy on the eyes and aesthetically pleasing, but will probably require you to tweak a bit more of your desktop to really blend in with Pop. However, I have supplied information about that on the Gitlab Snippet page.
Graciously provided by Pop community member @MaCroX95, it is a tweaked version of @evertiro's original Pop-dark-theme. I dubbed it Macrox-Dark. It's a simple drop-and-swap which will help blend with Pop's current dark theme if you're happy to leave it stock.
Compliments to Pop aficionado @datapoke, This one is a modified version of Mattermost's Monokai theme. Branded (by me
) as Datapoke-Dark, this one is vibrant with lot's of different color "pops".
Confession time!
I have an ulterior motive for sharing this information with you, but don't worry, it's not nefarious. I want this article to be a "baby-step" into understanding how to tweak Pop's theme without breaking Pop! Having a stable system is important. Having the system crash, freeze or glitch is extremely stressful, and, potentially costly if you lose data. All too often we see support requests from people who have attempted to install half-baked third-party GTK themes, fonts and icons. They're often unstable, incomplete and poorly maintained and will likely cause a black screen at some point. If you don't like Pop's defaults, please learn how to tweak them properly, as opposed to a lazy third party installation. I hope to expand on this idea with a couple of future articles. In the meantime, I've given you enough to get you familiar with a simple theme code and hex color values. The beauty of playing in Mattermost is, you'll be doing it in a place you can't do any damage. Enjoy!
You can read more for yourself here.Mattermost offers the industry’s most private and secure instant messaging capabilities across all devices. Customers using Mattermost increase their agility and efficiency by bringing all team communication into one place—under extreme security. Mattermost addresses the most challenging private messaging security needs by offering the following:
Mattermost works amazingly well, but many people are disappointed with the theme and color choices. The default is reminiscent of Windows: Blue, bland and basic! However, they do offer some stock theme options and instructions on how to change it in the Mattermost User Guide..

Above picture: The Mattermost default theme.
Some time back when Pop was in it's early days, Pop!_Planet's founder @evertiro, created two Mattermost themes that helped to bring the Pop-live-chat into aesthetic harmony with Pop's own theme and style. They were a timely and welcome addition. However, Pop has changed a little over the last couple of years and those themes could use a tweak. You could do it yourself using the information in the user guide linked above, but some of Pop's community have kindly offered up their versions for you to use - if you like them. Instructions are on the linked pages.
For light theme enthusiasts, I recommend my Derpomattic theme. It's focused on using all of Pop's light theme colors. I've tweaked it to focus a little more on Pop's orange and made the clickable buttons Pop's blue. New message notifications and mentions are a nice magenta. I've customized the sidebar header with a super dark purple and beige grey text, just for a little "pop".
With the popularity of dark themes these days, here's three great examples:
My Derpomattic-Dark theme is easy on the eyes and aesthetically pleasing, but will probably require you to tweak a bit more of your desktop to really blend in with Pop. However, I have supplied information about that on the Gitlab Snippet page.
Graciously provided by Pop community member @MaCroX95, it is a tweaked version of @evertiro's original Pop-dark-theme. I dubbed it Macrox-Dark. It's a simple drop-and-swap which will help blend with Pop's current dark theme if you're happy to leave it stock.
Compliments to Pop aficionado @datapoke, This one is a modified version of Mattermost's Monokai theme. Branded (by me
Confession time!
I have an ulterior motive for sharing this information with you, but don't worry, it's not nefarious. I want this article to be a "baby-step" into understanding how to tweak Pop's theme without breaking Pop! Having a stable system is important. Having the system crash, freeze or glitch is extremely stressful, and, potentially costly if you lose data. All too often we see support requests from people who have attempted to install half-baked third-party GTK themes, fonts and icons. They're often unstable, incomplete and poorly maintained and will likely cause a black screen at some point. If you don't like Pop's defaults, please learn how to tweak them properly, as opposed to a lazy third party installation. I hope to expand on this idea with a couple of future articles. In the meantime, I've given you enough to get you familiar with a simple theme code and hex color values. The beauty of playing in Mattermost is, you'll be doing it in a place you can't do any damage. Enjoy!
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