Desktop setup: tips and recommendations
Boston offers an extra minimalist style focused on GNOME by default (Adwaita) and simple customizations. Both combined designs can produce very elegant and non-distracting looks, based on visual quality and "less is better" philosophy.
For maximum enjoyment, visualize GNOME Files (a.k.a. Nautilus) content at 100-133%. Boston icons are provided as vectorial files because this format allows better image quality, no color loss and better performance in resize.
For other uses (desktop icons, other file managers, etc), Boston works excellent with the following sizes:
- 256 px
- 128 px
- 64 px
- 48 px
- 16 px
Light themes are preferred to dark ones for better contrast (specially Adwaita). This allows Boston icons to be displayed correctly on file browser and system interfaces. Dark themes can be configured for certain apps, allowing focus on them (for example: console, media players, editors...) and breaking monotony.
Recommended: GNOME's Adwaita (light).
Non distracting wallpapers are perfect to focus (a must be for this project). Boston Backgrounds is the official collection to explore simple and minimalistic forms.
Recommended: Open Sans (regular). Available in a lot of distros thanks to official repositories.
Cantarell (default GNOME font) can provide good results too.
Can be some troubles with Flatpak apps, which sometimes makes it difficult to customize due to its sandbox functionality. Flatpak is an interesting way to share apps, and some distros use it as important software manager for the OS (like Fedora or GNOME project in itself). So, Flatpak limitations for user and interface customization should be considered as external drawbacks, with pros and cons about the homogeneus look. This will always be a little difficulty until a solution is found.
Snap apps could have same troubles.