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Look and feel

Themes for every toolkit, Aurora's icons and window buttons, animations, fonts and artwork made by code.

• GTK 4 / libadwaita apps follow the style and accent through the settings portal.
• GTK 3 and plain GTK 4 apps use adw-gtk3 (libadwaita's look for GTK 3), which isn't in Debian. The build downloads its upstream release, pinned by SHA-256, and the shell switches it between light and dark and writes the accent color.
• Qt apps use QGnomePlatform with Adwaita-Qt, so they follow the same settings.
• Icons: Aurora's own theme (Aurora and Aurora-Dark), generated by branding/icons/generate.py: about 45 app icons (rounded squares with a gradient and a white glyph), folders with emblems, drives, and some 150 file types as pages with a glyph and a colored label. It inherits Papirus for symbolic icons (panel, sidebars, buttons) and for apps it doesn't draw, and leaves brand icons (Firefox, LibreOffice, Steam, VS Code…) to their apps: those are recognized by their logo.
• Window buttons: the round colored buttons always show their symbol (×, −, and two arrows to expand or restore) instead of hiding it until hover as on a Mac, softer until the pointer is over them. The same design is drawn for labwc's fallback borders, GTK 4 and GTK 3 apps; Wayfire prefers client-side decorations.
• Animations: Wayfire's animate plugin handles application windows, including minimize and restore. GTK and Files retain their own content transitions (gtk4-animations.css). The Window animations switch controls both layers.
• Rendering in virtual machines: labwc uses wlroots' pixman renderer and GTK's cairo renderer without a GPU. Wayfire 0.9 requires GLES, so Aurora uses Mesa's software GL in those VMs with wlroots' software-rendering opt-in and retains labwc as a selectable or automatic fallback. On Hyper-V, Wayfire still depends on Mesa's GLES support; if it cannot initialize EGL, choose the labwc session at login.
• Fonts: Inter for the interface (highly legible on screens), JetBrains Mono for code, Noto for every script (CJK, Arabic, Devanagari, emoji) so 20 languages render correctly.
• Artwork is code, except the wallpapers: the logo, boot animation and GRUB theme are generated by branding/ with cairo and Pillow, so any resolution is possible and everything is reproducible. The wallpapers are three painted series of pictures (Starfall, Veil, Horizon), kept as PNG files in branding/wallpapers/.