## page was renamed from Artwork/Specifications/WarningThemes
## page was renamed from Artwork/Specs/WarningThemes
## page was renamed from Artwork/WarningThemes
= Themes to make being root scary =

== Rationale ==

Opening applications with sudo is becoming more common and many quite inexperienced users are finding instructions to do so on forums, etc. 

It should be clear to a user when opening something like a filebrowser as root that they are able to do damage to their system and that it is not the 'normal' way to do things. 

In XFCE, Thunar and Mousepad do a nice trick of having a red box when you're running the app as superuser to warn you that bad things could happen.

It would be ideal if there was a way to implement this in a non-application-specific way. 

== Using different GTK themes with the same name ==

One way to solve this problem is to create or choose a red icon and gtk theme, place those in the .icons
and .themes directory in /root, and then make that theme have the same name as the icon and gtk themes being used by the user - obviously when a user changes their theme this will be lost, but many people don't change their theme (arguable those who do don't need such cues) and there might be a way to adapt it to make it more flexible...

== Problems ==

The above solution is probably unacceptable because /root, like user home directories, is not a valid install directory. 

== Example ==
Here is a screenshot to demonstrate what I'm talking about... Nothing says 'beware' like red folder icons, right? In that screenshot you can also see the way a red bar is used in Thunar.

[[attachment:redisscary.png]]
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CategoryArtwork